Sunday, January 23, 2011

In Trexlertown, some people are still stuffing their faces, but I don't think the economy is doing all that well.

    I have had a problem lately posting. I write every day, and the ideas always seem brilliant and funny when they are flowing from my fingertips to the keyboard. I have a rule about waiting a day to post, and nothing seems to pass muster when I come back to it. I have started wondering if maybe I am being too critical of my own work. Am I self conscious about my vision issues? Spell check doesn't always catch everything, and I hate it when I come back to a post a couple of days later and see a glaring mistake in syntax or spelling.
    Anyway, yesterday my wife and I went out to lunch, and three of the largest people I have ever seen weight wise were seated nearby. I have had my own weight issues in life, so I don't offer criticism easily. We can't really afford to eat out all the time, but we try to budget an occasional nice meal for ourselves, and this was a nice place that had reasonably priced steak.

     My question is, am I wrong to think that you shouldn't demand that a restaurant serve you another meal if you already ate the one you were given? These folks cleared off several appetizers and entrees, literally licking the plates clean. Then when the waitress asked them if their food was acceptable, they said no, and wanted it redone.
    In my opinion they had no shame, but a manager came to their table and they were eventually fed again. In contrast. my wife and I took much of our meal home to have later for dinner. There's no way we could have forced ourselves to indulge in the amount of food our neighbors at the other table consumed. To be honest, I thought they were downright gluttonous.
   
   I guess the manager felt it was better to keep them fat and happy than endure a possible scene if he had denied their demands.

   And that got me to thinking about how those gluttonous people truly represented what is wrong with a segment of American culture. There are people who just don't realize when they are indulging in too much of a good thing, and that it is really bad for them.

   Whether it is real estate speculators, Wall Street Greed whores, or Banks playing fast and lose with financial regulations, there are plain old Americans living on Main Street who don't know when enough is enough. They just gotta have more. And to keep the system going, someone enabled them and gave them what they wanted.

    One of these days the system is going to run out of fuel. In some cases it is Government printed Money. In other cases it is questionable loans made on overvalued real estate, but it all boils down to people spending money they truly don't have to have things they don't need, like too big of a house, or more food than they should rationally consume.
    Eventually the appetite of the greedy insatiable pigs at all levels is going to get introduced to the stringent diet of Macaroni and cheese that many of us regularly deal with.
    And you know what?
   They will probably demand that the Government make MORE available for them.

   We really need to start considering how to live within our means. I am fortunate that I am working, but from what I am seeing in the warehouse district, with many companies not even offering full time hours, I don't think the recovery is all it is cracked up to be. I don't think people are getting the message of what has happened in the last 3 years, and they haven't really felt the pain yet.

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