The ebb and flow of the Jesus crowd washed nostalgic candies into the streets of LipLock, Tejas on a sweltering Sunday school day gone mad. The bacon was loaded. Mosaic scrawlings of jelly looked like sparkling guts on the sourdough. Coffee was but swirling blood fueled by cream and sugar. The roar of the hungry throng was like Madagascar jungle traffic. Everyone was full of the holy spearmint, and everyone was hungry for a hot breakfast at the very same time.

So, we swirled through the stuffed parking lot looking for a space and I just knew it was going to be bad. The porch swings out front cradled the starved corpses of those who had to wait too long. The list of names at the front podium was a mile high and the hostess chick was losing her mind as people moaned and bitched. We held our ground in the lobby, but it was tough. I tried to examine a sack of maple nut goodies but dames and dudes with urinary urges kept bumping into me.

“Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me …”

How it dinged and donged in my throbbing head. It was like riding a stream train by clinging to the under belly. Too many people. Not enough space.

And that is what it is like down here in LipLock, Tejas. The infrastructure is flawed. The streets are designed to encourage collisions. It’s a great bulging bubble all steaming and hot and there’s nothing to do but eat, eat, eat … at Cracker Barrel, on a Sunday morn after worshipping super fresh Bog and all his hip angels. I had never seen a crowd like that squeezed into such a mediocre joint. How could anyone expect a fine dining experience amid so much chaos? Shove them in. Take their money. Clear them out.

Our one-star waiter was a lanky and shaky fellow who could barely keep up with the maddening buzz all around him. He managed to pour a few cups of decent joe but brought us limp bacon and not enough coffee cream and no jelly for the biscuits and I felt bad for the dude as we piled more and more demands upon him, but hell, it was his job. But did he deserve to have to eke out some paltry living this way? Does anyone? It all seems so futile and petty and yet Big Biz tries to fake us out with the corporate propaganda and the sterile smiles of robotic clerkies in glossy advertisements. It’s not real. None of it’s real. Yet we buy it, and we pay for it time and time and time again until our lives are completely absorbed and then wrung out by the pretty-polly machine. And it’s accepted as the social norm by the big bugged-out mass audience riding around in bumper cars, staring at smart phones, listening to factory-farmed crap music. It’s brain stew with no meat and no hearty gravy. We live in a watered-down world where the stooges flock like fire ants to pay for the privilege of emptiness in a vacuum of noise.

The pumping, screaming arteries of the static cling are unnatural. I think I would prefer to dine in the pines with only the sounds of the wind and the water and the wine, sans the flaring of the human crack pipe. And so, it goes no matter where one goes – east, west, north or south – the same strip mall mentality all lined up for the gibbons to feed. It’s all so lacking character, so lacking old-world charm, this architecture of capitalism, boxes stuffed with crap that we just can’t live without. We work all week to spend the weekends spending wages on Chinese goods packed into big metal boxes with drab neon signs and bullshit slogans – the flame thrower fluorescents sunburning us with sacrificial radiation, to crack our knees and send us down to bow to the almighty escapade of enslavement.

They advertise perfection but deliver the exact opposite.

“Fast, friendly service!”

Bullshit.

That’s all it is. Don’t believe the truth.