MTSA: Movie Theater Security Administration

The last time I took the daughter to a movie I forgot to stop at the local dollar-or-less store and buy candy to smuggle inside the pockets of my maybe a little too heavy for the weather hoodie.  This resulted in a payoff to the vendor of overpriced popped corn and liquid buttery sludge that left my wallet lighter than air. As long as I can remember, the prices for concessions at the theater have always been outrageous and it was accepted as the way theaters could make an actual profit because the fees associated with that blockbuster that brought in the customers left only a small percentage of the money made from ticket sales for the theater.  While I have my doubts about that, I wonder why there isn’t more security at the theater checking for food.

The last time I rode inside a tin can with wings I thought I could sneak through security with an unopened bottle of water in my backpack.  Didn’t work.  The unopened bottle of water got me taken to a separate screening area where every part of my backpack was emptied, searched, and swabbed to ensure it wasn’t coated in some sort of questionable substance.  Seemed to be a bit overkill, but on the plane I had an epiphany.  After I paid for an undersized bag of Chex Mix and a drink I was overcome with the astounding depth of this money making machine.  Airlines, like movie theaters, charge too much for tickets and then charge for bags as well with claims of how profit has to be made but most of the money goes to things like fuel and such…but now the food.  An elaborate security system that makes sure you can’t avoid the prices on their food.  You’re trapped in a box and can’t fulfill basic needs of your body (food and water) without their help – and oh you’re gonna pay for that.  It was genius!!  More and more security as a way to psychologically squeeze your pockets.  Take off your shoes – nope, no food in there.  Belt?  Not made of candy.  Pat down, no pocket canteen, you’re free to board the plane.  This clearly has to be the purpose of these stringent checks, stopping people from packing lunch, because it’s track record on stopping terrorists is so spotless and all, not to mention their 5% success rate at stopping weapons and bombs from being passed through when the Department of Homeland Security decided to conduct a test last year.

(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

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Movie theater employees know you’re sneaking in food.  Even though it supposedly hurts their profit to not sell concessions, they turn a blind eye.  I’m sure it stands to reason there’s probably enough people that have a moral quandary  in regards to playing Han Solo with candy into a private business that can sell you food you don’t want at prices you can’t afford, but think of the increase in profits if you stopped it altogether.  Pat downs and security terminals with shoeless people shuffled from entrance to food service counter.  More jobs, more profit…it may not stop terrorism but it does protect capitalism.

 

I’ll Have the Wrap with a Side of Salmonella

I am obsessed with street vendors.   Seemingly the ultimate expression of commercial freedom.  Setup shop right there on the street, every passerby a potential customer because they can browse your wares just by walking to their destination.  For food this is a no-lose situation, right?  Hard to pass up food you can see and, more importantly, smell.  I eat from a street cart at least once a week.  Asian, Greek, American – type of food does not matter.

image from http://blogs.reed.edu/reedreslife/2013/06/07/portland-on-a-budget-food-carts/

Richmond (where I currently live) has a growing number of homeless citizens asking for money on street corners.  Sadly standing around with cardboard signs, wrapped in far too many layers of clothing for the current weather (though I imagine leaving something lying around is a good way to lose it).  Usually in return for your donation you can get a blessing, a handshake, or at least a thank you which seems fair for the dollar or less that’s typically ending up in their paper cup.  This exchange doesn’t seem to be of enough value to most though.  People are hard pressed to give someone else their hard-earned currency for a mere handshake or blessing.  All I get is well wishes and appreciation for the share of water, food, alcohol, whatever that I contributed to acquiring?  Fuuuuuuuck you, no deal.  Maybe if the homeless were performing they could generate more income.  I pay every month to seemingly unlimited supply of entertainment that I can stream to my senses at a moments notice, but what if I could just access that entertainment at the intersection of two major roadways?  That’s surely worth a dollar.  Even if someone is awful at singing or dancing, the trainwreck is still worth the spectator’s fee.  I can see it now, cardboard boxes cut and stood up for puppet shows which I would guess were mostly sock puppet shows, soap boxes make their big return as impromptu stages for monologues and readings of Shakespeare by olive field jacket wearing bearded veterans of wars they are too young to have participated in.  A massive cultural revolution spurred by the forgotten masses left to starve and freeze, unwelcome in the capitalist society that says pull yourself up by your bootstraps or learn to make soup from them.

image from https://www.emaze.com/@AIWOORCO/Homeless-Character-Traits

But with this growing homeless-to-entertainer fast track industry, it’s only natural to require more street sustenance.  Is being a street vendor that much different from being homeless?   Somewhere there’s a gypsy camp of food carts and trucks circled around a campfire; clotheslines strung between vehicles hanging the grease stained t-shirts that were recently washed in the nearby creek.  Every morning they shut down the camp leaving only the traces of their mobile lifestyle – loose napkins, plastic silverware, and miles of plastic wrap floating in the breeze.

image from http://www.ramblingtart.com/2013/07/09/wandering-through-a-medieval-gypsy-camp/

Out to the corners where shop is setup.  Money generated purchases more food to be heated and kept in containers to be handed out to hungry pedestrians by hands with no sinks to be washed in, screens to keep out bugs, or ways to ensure that foods maintain safe temperatures.  Basically, every person willing to exchange their same income for this food are willing to eat the same way a homeless person would – from slightly less than healthy places regardless of what it is as long as it fuels the rat race running.

Every time I eat a box of mystery meat on a bed of plain white rice I think about how few steps it would take to be right alongside my scruffy faced fellow human with a scrap piece of box instead of a nametag, making my money singing and dancing or simply begging for enough to get me back onto that street surviving another day.  We eat the same and breathe the same, but I don’t need his dance or song, soliloquy or prose.  I appreciate his struggle, no pride – just survival.  Thanks for the handshake, brother, hope this helps.

Sylvester and Tweety

Listening to someone talk about the nature of their cats and their unchangeable desire to hunt and kill it occurred to me how incredibly cruel we must seem to animals in a house with multiple types of pets.

I’ve lived in a home shared with (at one point) 2 turtles, several goldfish, 2 cats, 3 dogs, a ferret, and another human being.  So many natural enemies in one home, I mean the two humans alone were dangerous enough to each other (one did eventually kill the other, but very slowly through financial and emotional draining – a sort of fiscal vampire). Surprisingly the animals all managed to get along and not kill each other (except the turtles and goldfish but the goldfish were only there to be eaten by the turtles).  The cats would sometimes fight each other or the dogs, dogs with each other or the cats, but never more than growling and swatting. And like a parent, I’d bark at the kids and order was restored.  Like they were actually human kids.  But they weren’t, they were monsters.

At this point I lived about two blocks from a  7-11 where I regularly walked to grab a soda or snack before work, especially if the weather was nice.  I put the dogs in the backyard which was surrounded by a chain-link fence, shut the latch, said hello to the men that had shown up to do some work on the side of the house (it was a rental, this was pretty common), and hit the road to go to 7-11. When I got back, things seemed normal, dogs waiting at the gate for me, guys working, so I started up the stairs back to my half of the duplex.
“Hey! These your dogs?”
“Uh…yeah.”
“They just killed my mom’s fuckin’ cat!”
“What are you talking about? They’re in my yard.  I see no cat, good sir.” (I speak like I work at Medieval Times in my memory)
“They killed my mom’s fuckin’ cat and you’re gonna come down here and apologize to her.”  I could smell the cholesterol dripping off his breath as he started walking closer.  It may have been seeping out from the sweaty pits he left exposed from underneath his hairy ape-like arms hanging out of his sleeveless denim vest.  Yes, that’s the kind of neighborhood I lived in.
“I must bid the well, good sir, as I must now journey to my place of labour.” (Even spelled it with the ‘u’, classy).
“Do you know who I am, boy?!”
Silence.
This continued for another minute or two until I walked into my house with him still outside.  He eventually drove away or he had an invisible truck because when I changed and came out to go to work he was gone.

As I sauntered down the stairs, most likely imagining exactly how I was going to spend the next eight hours at work avoiding doing any actual work, the guys working on the house called out to me.
“Hey man, forgot to tell you earlier, when you were gone to the store the dogs got out and when they came back they were each holding the end of this cat and pulling at it.  We took it from ’em and threw it under the porch.”
This is one of those moments where a new piece of information suddenly gets inserted into a puzzle in your mind and stops you in your tracks making you reevaluate your previous notions.  Or, more simply, you realize you were an asshole (I did go and apologize).

These dogs were still dogs. Not children. Monsters. Killers.  Beasts.  I loved them the same but their understanding of the world was never going to be human.  Their respect of the other animals in that house, specifically the cats, was based on how they viewed the house in dog terms.  Sure, this means they probably thought of our cats as just other dogs in the pack, part of the house, but what if they didn’t?  Every time I scolded them for nipping at Herman, that fat, fluffy bastard, I was just a bigger dog protecting my food.  Stay the hell away from that cat, he’s mine and I’ll eat him when I’m ready, you little shit. For years, I was growing my food.  Dogs have no sense of time.  When you go to work and leave a dog at home it thinks you’ve been gone for an eternity.  Dogs don’t know how to ration food.  And there I was, keeping a piece of food alive that they couldn’t eat and just letting it wander around and drive them crazy with its fat, tasty body just laying in the sun staying warm all day.  Then I’d come home and pour some sawdust and meat juice pressed into pellet balls into a bowl for them out of the crinkly bag that alerted them to “food products” while I toyed with my food that even seemed to have a name.  For years.  What a dick.  Why did these animals listen to me?

It has to be worse in a house with cats and birds or cats and fish.  There’s Tweety, just hanging out in the cage, singing his lonely little heart out day after day.  Oh, what life must be like when you have skies to roam in, trees to perch in, nests to make.  Day in, day out, the time passes so regularly.  Some days seem shorter, the blanket seems to drop onto the cage a little earlier, some a little later.  One day, sweet Lord, freedom will come.
Sylvester watches, drooling feverishly as the lonely song sends a tingling sensation starting in the ears and moving into his soul.  Beautiful song to begin a dinner.  As Sylvester creeps slyly around the wall the way a shadow moves and stretches with the changing of the daylight, ever closer to his prey, in comes the sadistic old woman with her stick that fans out at the end which she uses as discipline for the mistake of attempting to eat the meal she has suspended in the cage.  Since a mere kitten this routine has repeated daily, punished for hunger and then held and cuddled.  The mind games.  I’m pretty positive that would almost count as psychological abuse.

And then we NEVER eat them!  When one of these animals watches the other die then we just bury it in the ground or flush it down the toilet we must seem insane.  Perfectly good rotting meat and there we are just tossing it into a hole for no one to enjoy.  Wow, jerks.  It has to be a lot like it feels if you moved from a place where you watched people starve to death and you catch your first glimpse of The Food Network.  Or you see a trashcan outside of any restaurant in America.  You know, it’s gotta be appetizing…I mean appalling…appalling.  Yeah…that’s it.

I’m so hungry.