True Story About American Culture

Imagine walking into a big-box-mart with your mom and sister when they suddenly start talking to their phones. "Siri, arrival" says mom. "Cortana, check in" says your sister. As you look around the entryway you see others doing similar things. So to fit in you start talking out loud to someone who isn't there because you don't have a mobile phone with an artificial intelligence assistant. "Oracle, what is wrong with these people?", which raises a few brows but is swiftly forgotten.

Once inside the store, to your bewilderment, you find it has all been rearranged. That old trick of walking around the edges of the store to find the meat, dairy, produce, etc has now been thwarted by an intertwining of processed and unprocessed foods in such a way that instead of lettuce, you find salad pre-mixes... instead of watermelons you find pre-cut fruit mix cups. You've tried those before and know how they use unripened fruit and add sugar to compensate. As an employee walks by you voice your disgruntlement, "These GMO oranges taste like cardboard, I miss the ones we had in Asia". When you go to check-out, you are greeted with 20 check-out lanes but only 2 are open and the lines are long, the employees harried. You overhear a worker complaining to their manager about not getting their break. As you look into the baskets of other people you notice they have hardly any raw food, mostly just boxes of prepared food loaded with sugar and salt. This puts you off to the point that you just leave your cart and tell your family "I don't want this after all. I think I'll spend my money elsewhere. I'll be over looking at plants while you check out. " When you get to the plants, there is a dizzying odor of pesticides, so you go back to your family. They're still in line and you have to wait for the super-sized obese people to move before you can get your cart to the check-out, and then play "dodge" all the way to your car while swerving to avoid hitting people that are six feet wide walking alongside someone else who is 5 feet wide.

The cheap plastic bags they put your groceries in fall apart when you pick them up to put them into your car and so all your groceries roll around in the back of the car as you narrowly escape the parking lot with it's tiny parking spaces, sharp corners and heavy mix of pedestrian and automobile traffic. After you get home, you check your news feed and see that Walmart is closing hundreds of stores nationwide. "Thank God" you think to yourself. Your mom and sister hold up their plastic items and say "Look what I got!", followed by filling the trash can with plastic bags and packaging.

Next, you decide to take your kids to the park. It's covered in trash from processed food packaging: coke cans, snickers wrappers, starbucks cups, McDonalds bags, etc. Nobody speaks English there so you start teaching your kids Spanish, "Hola pendejo, limpia tu basura". As you put sunscreen on your kids, you see people floating around on inflatable plastic objects trying to get a tan so you say "Hey the UV index today is 9.6, anything above 6 means high risk of harm from unprotected sun exposure" but they just look at you like you're some kind of idiot.

The park installed a new, fashionable playset for the kids so you take them over to play on it. You have to scream as loud as you can to call your kids so they can hear you over the boom boxes people brought to the park to play faux-popular music interlaced with advertisements. The slides are made of some high-friction material so you just kind of scoot your way down and jump off the end while receiving an electric shock, trying to avoid stepping in the dog feces. The playset is located in a sunny area so you and your kids leave, bored and burned, but hey, it looks very fashionable. You go back to the water and look for interesting rocks and clam shells while dodging retriever dogs, broken glass, people floating/tanning, and unsupervised children chasing down fish and killing them for fun. When the fun is all over, you head home with your kids and put the broken glass in one of the 20 trash cans the park has, while wafting a silent-but-deadly fart on the woman with 4 yapping chihuahuas tied to a tree next to her boom box.

As you near your house, you wave to your neighbor that you haven't talked to in 5 years. When you get home your mom asks you to help her turn on a live football game and then she cranks the volume up and leaves it on for the next 3 hours. The majority of the time it is just playing advertisements. After that nasty affair, you try to cook some dinner but your mom says "Oh I bought a roast chicken at walmart, and I got the kids popcorn chicken". So you just shut up and eat it while trying not to choke on the cold, dry meat. The MSG in the food makes everyone hungry an hour later so your mom gives your obese children frozen sugar+water Otter-pops. This leads to an argument about giving sugar to obese children, followed by your mom going into her bedroom and eating a gallon of ice cream. Later that night, as you're getting ready for bed, your mom complains about her legs hurting due to her sugar-induced diabetes and asks you to massage them to increase the blood circulation. So you just shut up and do it.

The next day, your mom tells you what she wants for her birthday, which is tomorrow. She wants each of her 3 kids to pay $3,000 to buy her a $9,000 can-am trike so she can go for a ride once a year with the "freedom riders". You tell her "I'm not doing that" and she asks "why not?" and you answer "You wouldn't understand, you make $10,000/month". So she buys it anyway.

This was just one day...