. . . BUFFET ETERNAL . . .
. . . this is from that era when I was a teenager bad at parking-maybe it was more like I just felt insecure, beat myself up about my parking skills-I hated having to park close to other vehicles or structures, I wanted all the clearance, infinite clearance if possible-and so instead of parking in the official country buffet parking area, I parked in the adjacent K-Mart parking lot, and walked across asphalt and desolate weeds to eat inside the country buffet, which was all nacho cheese, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, shredded cheese, little tomatoes, broccoli, three refills of Cherry Coke, and a saucer of soft serve vanilla ice cream armored in sprinkles-well, post-gorge, I ambled back across desolate weeds and asphalt and inside the K-Mart-this was a particularly lonely K-Mart which I preferred to haunt because although there were quite a few employees-this being in a boom time at the End of History-this was prior to the advent of ubiquitous mobile devices constantly receiving Internet, and so people had not lost the Fine Art of Retreat Into Self-which therefore meant that an abundance of employees meant necessarily an abundance of people keeping the fuck to themselves-like I said I preferred this specific K-Mart for its air of loneliness, isolation, desperation, and perverse elation-the numbing emptiness of unwearable anti-fashions and stupid outdoor barbecue bullshit and folding chairs worse than sitting upon the actual ground or pro-hemorrhoidal concrete I interweaved with an eccentric selection of VHS tapes-I bought an English dub of Godzilla vs. Biollante for $8.99+applicable sales tax here-this was the place to go to deny the empty chatter of church, state, fake friends, false teachers, and unsatisfiable parents, an anti-hangout zone pristine in its sacred vacuity, I could brain-screen my own combo fanfic of Final Fantasy VII/Dawn of the Dead '78 with my own custom black leather getup topped with a helmet with glowing red eyes, katana in one hand, .44 Bulldog in the other-no pretense of salvation or damnation or shame or glory-well, sad to say I brought a fantastical, drastical desecration into the Temple of Truth, even as I approached the motion sensor door, I felt the upchuck aborning, unusually rapid, usually I get plenty of warning, but this one had an Icarus urgency, I applied my willpower, I can keep my feast in its proper place, but at the slightest touch of my Intestinal Containment Doctrine, the puke did rise up, my lips sputtered, a perfectly pink splash upon the nuclear white tiles, I beat feet to the restrooms, splish-splash, I did not vomit It vomited all by itself, splorsh-splursh, I'm pinking all over my pants legs, stumbling forward, a bad zombie movie routine, pinking from above, some kind of punk anti-nuke gesture against the obliterative tiles, of a sudden I'm in the bathroom and well surprised that I have anything left to deposit into an actual damn toilet bowl . . . needless to say, I did not return to that K-Mart for several months. And when I did, of course, there was no trace of my pollution. No one accosted me, "Hey! You're that vomit asshole! I had to clean up your sick! Fuck you forever!" For all I know, I was part of a semi-regular to regular stream of food poisoned losers staggering in from the country buffet next door. Maybe I was just a vehicle for some disgruntled former Big K team member who got hired on to the backline of the country buffet. Poison a few gluttons, send 'em off to pink up the pristine (not so) big box store. That could've been it. Yeah. I was an unwitting conscript of a forgotten, unknowable puke war, just one in a million petty power plays to fill the all-too-Floridian vigilante void of a vicious false prosperity at the End of History . . . the malice runs even deeper . . . no one accosted me because even confrontation is a kind of affirmation . . . best just to ignore the existence of the person, whilst venerating the puke . . . heh, heh, heh, I kinda like that . . . they probably built little shrines to the pinksplatters as counter-fuckyous to their poisoner nemesis next door . . . contemptuous silence for mere pawns like myself . . . you just don't get that kind of sublime meanness anymore. People just spell out their hate on social media, all text, nothing undercurrent, all slogan, all thesis, no nagging mysteries allowed, just false certainties all the way 'round . . . and, no, I never ate at that particular poison buffet ever again. Even for a clandestine conflict junkie like myself being a pink puke fountain was the limit. Just the once was enough. The memory has endured just fine sans re-up.
