Quick Service or Fast Food?

So today I was in town, and I stopped to eat at the fast food joint. You know, burger, fries, Coke. Must be about the only fast food joint within 60 miles of my home.

Sitting at a table and eating, I noticed a little postcard sized survey had been slipped in between the salt and pepper shakers. "How often do you eat at a quick service restaurant?" Ummmm, say what?!

"How would you compare this quick service restaurant to other quick service restaurants?" Hold on, hold on, what in the world is a quick service restaurant?

Oh, okay, I get it... "quick service" restaurant is a euphemism for "fast food" restaurant. See, if we say "fast food," that conjures up connotations of fast, greasy, low budget, nasty, plasticized food.

Whereas if we say "quick service"... well, "quick service" is surrounded by no such malodiferous cloud of connotations. Mainly for the reason that, before this poll was concocted, nobody in the history of the English language had ever heard the term quick service restaurant before.

Euphemism: a change in words, neologistic, like pulling the carpet out from beneath the other person's feet.

Headache

Oh, glory! Another one of my wondrous migraines. I took today off from work, just glad I work a job with a flexible and rearrangeable schedule. Spent much of the day in bed. Slept half the afternoon.

Now I'm sitting here wrapped in a wool blanket (yes, it really is that cool in these parts this summer). Headache has passed over, leaving me feeling (as usual post-headache) dreamy and drifting and lassid. The nausea that often accompanies my headaches has also passed over, so if I know what's good for me I'd better concoct a solid and filling supper.

Oddly Enough

The other day I had occasion to spend some time in the company of a fellow I'm loosely acquainted with. And he was behaving very oddly.

Talking, talking, talking, like a compulsive motormouth. One contrived joke after another. Jokes, observations, remarks, anything to avoid a moment's silence. Sort of like a running-off-at-the-mouth stand-up comedian, you know?

And the strangest part of it was, he was talking as if he were black. I don't think he was even consciously aware of it, but his pronunciation, his dialect, his wording, his elocution, were all thoroughly African-American. A fellow in his thirties, blond, Germanic, a lifelong Northerner. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was going on with him.

Then I realized, oh yeah, he went through a divorce within the past year. That explains it. That usually explains a lot. Like the old friend of mine, about as straitlaced as a fellow can be without being in the least a bluenose, and he got divorced and spent the next six months falling into bed with unknown women he met at parties.

Nonstop jokey babbling, in a novel accent that just doesn't fit the speaker. Chalk it up to divorce. It makes sense, which is to say it doesn't make sense, but for precisely that reason it does make sense.

Cool

The unseasonably cool summer continues. Usually by this time of the year we're into highs up in the 90's almost every day. This year it's been mostly highs in the 70's -- a July with highs mostly in the 70's, sometimes only in the 60's -- so that yesterday when it got up into the low 80's it seemed like a heat wave.

In fact it's looking as though we may finish out the month of July without it ever once getting up to 90. Unseasonably cool.

Parade

I had the fun today of riding on a float in a parade in town. The float belongs to a community service club I'm a member of. Four of us sat up on the float and waved to the crowd, countless hundreds, as our fifth sat in a pickup and towed our float down the main drag. Huge crowd this year. Sunny out (yes, I was careful to use sunscreen) but unseasonably cool, as our entire summer has been.

Afterwards we pulled a tarp over the float, and the pickup driver and I stopped off at a tavern for lunch before dropping off the float in its shed. Then back out into the remote countryside where I live (the pickup driver lives about another two miles over beyond me) and I sacked out and took a nap the rest of this afternoon. Beneath a wool blanket, thank you, yes it is that cold in these parts.

Now I'm eating supper, and looking forward to a leisurely evening. This really is the way to spend a Saturday, and as my schedule often runs it's all too seldom that I get to spend a Saturday this way.

Birds Singing

Woke up this morning, windows open, house cool, and from outside I could hear the birds singing. Twit twit, twit twit, twit twit CHEE chee tooo! Twit twit, twit twit, twit twit CHEE chee tooo!

Except for a few obvious ones like the owl, I can't tell you which bird song goes with which bird. But it's imprinted on my memory, many of those songs I hear today are identical to the bird songs I used to hear out the window when I was visiting my grandparents, back when I was a kid. Back when I was a kid who lived in town, visiting my grandparents out in the countryside at their farmhouse.

Now here I am, grown up, and living far, far out into the countryside, living on a gravel road miles from the nearest small town. And I wake up in the dawn on a cool summer morning, and out the window I hear those very same bird songs that are imprinted on my memory from so long ago.

Slow in the Morning

I've had the past two days off. Now it's back to work, and I find as usual that I'm very slow to get going in the morning. Stumbling around, a cup of coffee, two cups of coffee. I just don't feel like I'm in motion.

And I've been this way most of my life, about as far back as I can remember.

I'm most definitely not a morning person. And, in recent years, not so much of an evening person either. More like a forenoon and afternoon person.

It strikes me that our society is not structured to accommodate the fact that many of us work better at one time of the day, and not so well at other hours. Clockwork punctuality, and one time of day same as another, befit a machine-driven society. I've always felt that a culture of siesta and mañana was more built to a human scale.