Missing McDonaldland

The average person has lost the ability to have any type of conversation that doesn’t make me want to kill myself.

Try this next time you’re in any circle of people, having a chat: Say ANYTHING with an ounce of strange substance. Anything out of left-field. Dare to drag a chuckle from the weirder side of these fine folks.

A dark joke. A dick joke.

You will get these people’s stares like you just shot four puppies because it was a nice Saturday.

And as time drags on and on and on in this God-forsaken conversation, your voice will quietly settle into a place of “Yeah’s” and “That’s crazy’s” until you keep fully quiet while they dive deeper into their unexplored conversational realms.

“Have you ever been to a place? I like places.”

“I have been to some places too. I like them.”

“I agree. Have you ever seen a movie?”

Real sexy stuff that makes anyone blessed to be within earshot hot and bothered, sweaty with gratitude for life itself.

Conversation built like a longcase clock with a thousand moving parts all ticking in perfect rhythm, vibrating in harmony with the finer fibers of the universe to pinpoint exactly where meaning lies and exactly which sentence from a French child’s English textbook to say next.

As you stare at the blank pale faces around you and shift your gaze to your lap where you hope to find some moral redemption in the algorithm, the urge to relapse intensifies and stops sounding like a bad idea and more like a genuine solution.

You drop an audible “That’s crazy” at this thought, but nobody at the table has said anything for 12 seconds.

Look, it’s not that I don’t love people. Ask anyone, I love y’all to death. Honest.

But like a dog who pisses on the floor, it gets frustrating dealing with y’all sometime.

Actually, I would rather you piss on the floor than tell me what you thought about the new burger joint that opened in an old service station downtown.

Just bark while you do it and clean it up after, give us all a laugh.

Play some weird verbal ping-pong. Let’s dance with the words that spill out of our mouth.

Let’s not ostracize and forget about the absurd origins of how we’ve been led to this conversation.

Everyone’s seen the pictures of the fun, whimsical McDonald’s building of the ‘90s with the playpit outside and the Hamburglar painted on the side of the building, right?

The everyday task of grabbing a bite to eat, and all of its colorful splendor and imagination…

Then you juxtapose that fun against the cold, gray, hideous office building of a modern day McDonald’s.

Where has McDonaldland gone?

In a world where Ronald McDonald himself has washed off his makeup, ditched the joyous outfit, and dropped everything for a 9-5 data entry job:

Be the Hamburglar.

Steal back the joyburgers.

Let’s break our McDonaldland buddies out of that gray fucking box.

Dark jokes. Dick jokes. Questions about the universe. Looking at someone and singing a song they remind you of. Explaining to someone why orange is your favorite color.

We’re stardust talking to each other, and the absurdity of that is rock n roll, man.

Behind each pair of our eyes is a cosmic miracle with zillions of connections happening in inexplicable, miraculous ways.

Let’s make love to that when we’re having a chat. Let’s have a raucous laugh.

You’ll get those puppy-shooter stares as soon as you talk like this, of course, but fuck what Tim Leary called these club passwords:

“How are you?”

“Have a good day!”

Get strange. Find the others.

If people are not looking at you sideways on a pretty regular basis, you’re doing something wrong.

You’re fitting in in a world where fitting in is a pretty bad idea actually.

You should be collecting weird looks like Pokémon.

Well, maybe it’s not a bad idea for just getting by.

But fitting in is a pretty bad idea if you want to live an actual life.

“And those seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music.”

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

I’m not saying you gotta rant and rave and be a lunatic at every dinner you have.

Don’t shit in the potato salad, man.

But for the love of God, crack a joke. Steer the conversation somewhere weird. Put the phone away and dip your toes into the absurdity of carrying a joke with someone you barely know.

You’ll make the world a better place.

Together, we can save McDonaldland.