The Decompression of a Boomer

I don’t go to McDonald’s much. The only time I go is with my daughter, usually for lunch. We used to go there regularly, on Saturdays or when she had a day off school. She graduated from High School in 2008. I noticed we had stopped going to McDonald’s after she graduated. When given a choice she would likely choose Burger King or Subway. I asked her about that the other day. She said, “I stopped going after I saw Supersize Me five times in High School.” (The documentary by Morgan Spurlock, who ate nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days and gained 30 pounds.) “How is it you saw it five times?” I inquired. She explained that she had seen it in her Health class, P.E. class, the Cooking class, her Language Arts class, and then once more, maybe again in P.E. Well they surely got the message across, didn’t they! Maybe the school administrators or teachers figured if they showed it that many times they could eventually reach every student with the message, including all the incessantly truant kids, likely hanging out at McDonald’s.

Well anyway, this past Saturday we ended up at McDonald’s ordering lunch – my daughter, her girlfriend, and I. They both knew what they wanted. I gazed up at the colorful, neon-lit menu sprawled along the ceiling behind the cashier and was first thinking I could pass on food, but no, I was pretty hungry, maybe I could find a hamburger equivalent to a Burger King ‘Whopper.’ I was craning my neck, scanning the menu – I didn’t want a ‘meal’, where WERE the plain hamburgers? Oh, there’s something new… a ‘Big ‘N’ – What?’ I heard the girls order – “I’ll have a chicken ranch salad, with water, oh, and I want to buy a Happy Meal toy” said one. “I’ll have a hamburger, ketchup only, and a coke, make that a small coke!” said the other. The shy, handsome, dark-haired, strapping male taking our order looked to be about 20, the same age as my daughter. He turned and looked at me to take my order. Pressure! What to get? “There!” I declared, doing a little sword-dance in the air around his head with my index finger, “I’ll take a ‘Big ‘N” Nasty!'”

Now I knew that didn’t sound right, and I noticed the cashier was standing there expressionless as a post. My daughter was tapping me on my upper arm, saying, “Mom!”

“Oh my!” I corrected myself, my eyes still groping at the menu. “I mean, uh, I’ll have a ‘Big ‘N’ Tasty!'”

I’ve also had a problem lately with newspaper headlines. Well, more of a problem than usual. Of course, some days it’s just better not to look at the headlines, read the news, it’s so bleak. So maybe my brain just wants me to lighten up with my worries over the near-sunk economy, greedy and crooked CEO’s, two seemingly hopeless wars, volcanic eruptions and other random catastrophic acts of nature, and the fact that seven states have now seen the topless rate jump above ten per cent. Oh, wait a minute – topless? No … jobless!

The other morning, while reading the paper at the kitchen table, I had a particularly difficult time getting the headlines straight. Maybe I was overly-distracted by the glob of hardened jam I had run into with my left elbow, which, if I didn’t rise immediately to wipe up, would undoubtedly end up trapping the paper and, with any subsequent move, ripping a strip out of a back page feature article. Or maybe I just wanted to ‘throw a goat’s eye’ (a Swedish expression) on the headlines, so to speak, so I could imagine “Thousands Freeing Fargo Floods.” (Hey, that would be their prerogative given all those strident miles-long sandbagging efforts to trap the flood in the first place.) I found myself pondering the headline, “Japan Prepares for Rocket Lunch,” and the positive possibilities this could hold for the fast food industry. Another headline resonated, “FAA Aims to Keep Mom on Bird Strikes.” Excellent strategy!

I discovered later, watching the evening news with my husband, that trying to comprehend all that stuff coming out of Charlie Gibson’s mouth interferes with my thinking about things – like the rising topless rate and the flood in Fargo being set free. Wouldn’t that be great to order lunch at your favorite restaurant to be launched by rocket to your office or front door? I’m a mom. I bet I could help the FAA solve their problems with bird strikes – or are they really just going to keep mum about it?

And I’m also wondering if I should tell the folks at McDonald’s that the only thing they could truly offer for lunch that might possibly satisfy me is a ‘Big ‘N’ Nasty.’ Hey! I’m 55. I’m a mom. And I know my shit.

Tags: 'Supersize Me', Headlines, McDonald's

This entry was posted on April 1, 2009 at 1:51 am and is filed under Big 'N' Nasty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.