The Wider World

I don’t get out much these days. There are many reasons for this, none of them good.

I have no local friends, my family is generally busy and/or uninterested in many of the things that I would be interested in that would necessitate an outing, and the weather in Uranus these days is more like Mercury.

All that being true (and it is), there just isn’t that much reason for me to go out. Yes, there are other places from where I could do my work, but I have a pretty sweet home-office setup, for one, and for another thing, well, wherever I go, there I am … alone … so why spend the gas money?

There are times, however, I do venture out into the wider world beyond my Uranus retreat. Today has been one of those times. I had a few errands that needed running, so I decided to pack up my work crap and take it to a Panera. There, I was reminded of another reason I don’t go out much: People are fucking crazy.

I noticed the sign on the entrance door from afar, and it came into focus as I drew anear. It read that the only ordering that would be done that lunch hour would be kiosk ordering. This is increasingly a thing in the post-COVID, during-asshole-Trump world. Finding and keeping service workers is much more challenging these days.

Still, this particular societal ill is no issue to me. My Panera routine is to sit my happy ass down, plug in my laptop, and order from there as I start doing whatever it is I need to be doing. Interacting with people these days, I find, is generally disappointing.

I had already done the ordering thing and had been rewarded with the here’s-your-food thing and was commencing the eating thing when two older gentlemen sidled into the restaurant.

“I ain’t orderin’ from now goddamn kiosk, so y’all better get someone the fuck out here,” one declared.

That right there is another reason I don’t go out much these days.

Listen, I get it: Restaurants should have human beings to take your order. This, I believe to be true. This, also, is growing less frequent. People are far less necessary to an eatery these days and growing less necessary by the day, it seems. Still, I understand the desire to deal with a human being instead of a machine when ordering food. It’s what those of us of a certain age and beyond are used to and expect, and I see how it can be mildly irritating to be confronted with a sign saying no human is available.

Of course, humans were available, and one came over to take these two assholes’ orders, informing them much more politely than I would have that they had had a few call-offs today because of illnesses and were short-staffed. So it’s not that humans weren’t available. It’s that sufficient humans that would free up homo sapien power to do what a machine can do weren’t available. Unless you come in cursing like a fucking moron, apparently.

Anyway, the guy took their order, and the assholes ended up happy. I, however, was not.

Because while I understand the general expectation of ordering food via a human, I do not understand the need to announce your profanity-laced displeasure such that all can hear. My virgin ears are awfully tender, ya know.

Furthermore, there are many, many restaurants withing a 20-mile radius. I’m sure some of them have human order-takers. And Panera offers nothing from a culinary standpoint that should ever fall into anyone’s “If I don’t have this today, I’m going to die.” So if you want to order with a human and are so butt-hurt when your first-choice restaurant states that such a thing is going to be challenging, go the fuck somewhere else!

Of course, it wasn’t these two doofuses (doofi?) that were at the core of my irritation. It’s who they represent, which is a growing and disturbingly large percentage of the population I seem to encounter every single goddamn time I exit my property lines. In short, I loathe the crassness of the world today. (Side note: For non-regular readers, it’s why I meet it with such profanity in return.) I believe firmly it is being modeled from the top, and the yahoo idiots who would still vote for that man if he raped their mother on live television while simultaneously drowning a puppy in one hand and a kitten in the other happen to inhabit my ZIP code and surrounding ZIP codes in disturbing numbers.

To put it more mathematically, I have found there is a direct correlation between how you voted in the last three presidential elections and how much of a fucking asshole you happen to be in public.

And want to hear (read) the kicker on this situation? The icing on the motherfucking cake? The Dynamic Duo of Ordering Assholery, having announced their presence with a flurry of profanity, then sat down with their food and opened their Bibles to do the Lord’s work of studying his holy word.

Because of course.

Here’s the truth: I would give up an awful lot to have a friend or two who were interested in experiencing this wider world of constant crassness with me. When I did have such a person, that wider world didn’t seem quite so constantly crass. But I don’t have such a person. Not anymore. And the hole in my heart leaves me vulnerable to experiencing who we seem to be as a people these days and hurting. I feel increasingly lonely and isolated, and what I seem to experience every single time I venture out leaves me feeling like I am alone in thinking we are terminally fucked.

I miss my ride-or-die. I miss the people from long, long ago who made me feel like a member of a tribe instead of a lone wolf. I miss feeling like I belonged somewhere, because I sure as hell don’t feel like I belong here.

And the worst part of all of this? I don’t know how to fix it. I’ve tried. Everything I can think of, I have tried. And yet here I am, in a Panera, listening to two idiot assholes proclaim the love of Jesus after profanely refusing to order at a kiosk.

Welcome to America 2026.

The Wider World

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