The 7-11 Straw Incident
Suddenly, inexplicably, I was in the mood for a Super Big Gulp. I used to have a Super Big Gulp, 48 oz. of pure caffeinated, bubbly sugar water, 5 or 6 times a week, but then I got into the coffee habit to cure my caffeine fix, so now I’m down to only one Super Big Gulp per month. Last Thursday, my time had come.
We were at the Nautilus Diner in Massapequa, and there’s a 7-11 just east of it. I went in expecting the usual assortment of sodas and was sorely disappointed to find that Dr Pepper was not one of the dozen sodas I could choose from. Taco Bell recently changed from Dr Pepper to Wild Cherry Pepsi and have pretty much lost the biggest reason that I ever eat at Taco Bell in the process. I take my soda consumption pretty seriously. I resigned myself to Pepsi, which is my favorite soda bottled or canned, but Dr Pepper is my favorite fountain soda. I take my soda consumption way too seriously.
Anyway, this was also one of the growing 7-11s to decide that straws are their most valuable consumable. I could take all the cups and lids that I wanted, but the straws were only available at the cashier’s counter. Since I have estimated that straws cost 7-11 less than 1/10 of 1 cent, even the admittedly low-profit margin on all convenience store goods led me to believe that the difficult access to straws was a weak kind of anti-theft device. Because you could easily walk out of 7-11 without paying for a Big Gulp or Slurpee, but HOW WOULD YOU DRINK IT without a straw?
Finally paying for my Pepsi Super Big Gulp, an amazing bargain at 99 cents, I noticed that all the straws at the counter were for Slurpees, which, for the uninitiated, meant that the straws were all cut to have little scoopy-spoons at one end. This makes drinking soda with them next to futile, because it severely lowers the vacuum power of the straw. I asked the young, pierced man behind the counter if he had any regular straws that I could have. He took out a Slurpee straw and held it next to the Super Big Gulp container. I wasn’t too sure what he was doing, but I figure he was just going to give me a Slurpee straw and damn the torpedoes. Instead, he went off to the side with the straw. Then he took a pair of scissors — I swear this is true — and cut the scoopy-spoon neatly off the bottom.
Needless to say, I, being the good WASP that I am, took the straw with a thank you. I was going to have my Super Big Gulp, because, after all, I take my soda consumption very seriously.
Posted by Jonathan at 06:22 PM, 22 February 2003
The Trojan President
I am showing my age here, but I remember vividly hating Reagan and his gang of buffoons. He was the Teflon President; nothing the press nor Congress (a Democratic Congress at that — there I go showing my age again) could say or do would diminish Reagan in the eyes of his handlers or the public. Reagan is now treated as a mythic, god-like president, an untouchable, redoubtable, unquestionable presence in the 20th-century world stage. And I miss him.
I haven’t changed my mind about his awful presidency. Nor have I come to believe the pundit-wisdom that he was responsible for the fall of the Evil Empire. He led the nation into an intractable conservative mode of thought that we haven’t been able to shake off, despite all reason and moral clarity otherwise, for nearly 25 years. Yes, he was bad and made my nation poorer in the process, but, Lord, I miss him, because he was original.
Now our puppet president is just a super-condensed rehash of the original. Want moralist Ed Meese? We’ve got fightin’ John Ashcroft. Want a dab of George Schultz, Al Haig, and James Watts? Hey, glom them all together in Dick Cheney. Sure, the cast today is more colorful than the pasty-white team that was the Reagan administration, but pound for pound W’s crew is just as reactionary as Reagan’s. Reagan, too, reduced our rights and invaded our privacy, and set it all to the sweet music of the dawning of a new morality. Reagan, too, blithely ran up deficits while cutting taxes for the wealthy, calling it economic stimulus. Reagan, too, deregulated industry just enough to feed the vultures, but never enough to ensure that trade was fair, nor that prices were truly market driven.
But this is all name-calling. So what? Who cares? The only reason that this is pertinent to me is that we’ve been issued what can only be called a Civil Defense warning, by our Office of Homeland Security, to duct tape our doors in case of terrorist attack. Department stores in Virginia have run out of stock, so if you live in that area, let me know. Long Islanders are apparently more blasé about the warnings. We have plenty in our stores. I’ll send you a roll or two at cost. No need to profit over groundless fears.
Groundless? No, that’s not the right word. Useless. Yeah, that’s the one. See the whole thing reminds me so much of the Civil Defense instructions that we received when we were sure that the end result of Reagan’s arms-buildup was nuclear war, that I just can’t take these warnings seriously. We were actually told, in the event that Soviets launched their arsenal of massive death, to dig shallow trenches in the soft earth and cover ourselves with something sturdy, like a wooden door. Yep. When over 10 feet of the Earth’s crust evaporates into fine dust particles to hasten a nuclear winter, we’ll all be very happy that we dug a shallow trench.
So, I’m thinking that duct tape around our doors won’t keep out the radiation or Anthrax or Smallpox or Halitosis or whatever those sneaky terrorists are going to unleash on us. I’m thinking that this is the media sideshow that takes away from what is really happening, and what really needs to be done. And what really needs to be done is voting these ingrates out of office, but it looks like it will be a long couple of years before we get to do that.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:18 AM, 13 February 2003 | Comments (3)
