Snow-Globe Chicken — IFSF PUBLISHING

Some days, everything on the menu is chicken.

This notion occurred while dining the other day at Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, a chain with restaurants nationwide, in which you enter through a well-stocked gift shop, then turn left and Please Wait to be Seated. Once seated, you open the menu to find a variety of chicken dishes. Chicken this and chicken that, chicken as just plain chicken and chicken dressed up in its Sunday best. I ordered the cheeseburger instead, as I’m a contrarian, though it tasted more or less like chicken or as if it had been made inside one of the snow-globes on sale in the gift shop for $39.95.

I was on the road, stopping to meet a friend who lived nearby a location appropriate interstate exit in Tualatin, Oregon.

We ate and talked and said goodbye. I headed south. Mile after mile went by on Interstate 5 as I passed supertanker truck after supertanker truck, several of which might have been bound for other Cracker Barrel Old Country Store’s.

With a long stretch of highway before me, it was a good time to muse. I mused about The Supreme Court and how difficult it is now to keep a straight face while musing about the Supreme Court. And yet now, with not just one but with two black justices on the court, I mused, would the direction of the court change? And had a person of color ever appeared on “The Andy Griffith Show”, a show I enjoy watching re-runs of on the network, TV LAND? I then asked myself, am I still capable of a sustained period of thinking as I used to think I was capable of and, if I was, was I capable of devoting some serious hang-time time thinking about the subject, “The Abstract Gesture” and write a little something about it.

Mile after mile after mile passed beneath my Continental tires, the miles piling up like musings. One final musing before finding a place to sleep for the night: at this point it seems capitalism can only create critics (like me) as it seems to have run out of or to be running out of creation, though perhaps this way of thinking is itself a myth, like the myths that created and continue to sustain late-stage capitalism…

Having eaten a cheeseburger at Cracker Barrel in Tualatin my stomach had rumbled all the south way to Medford, where I stopped for the night at a Hampton Inn near a Red Lobster restaurant. I ordered the Grilled Salmon, and slept soundly.