One Way Out

Life is a curious adventure. For me, it is made even more exciting by the lack of adventure that will follow it. As you all know, I believe that once this life is over, there is nothing else. There is no after life, no second chance, nor any reincarnation as an African Warrior Ant. This is it, from beginning to end, this is it.

A lot of people ask me how I can live like that, believing that this is all we get. To me, it's not a matter of planning for the future, or hoping that something will continue on just to avoid the nothing that is inevitably before me. It is simply a matter of truth.

We go through this life making decisions that effect not only ourselves, but countless hundreds of others also. We may not realize we are doing it at the time, but every single action has a consequence. The simple act of purchasing a chicken from the grocery store means that there is one less chicken in the world for someone else. That single purchase may have influenced the market so that more chickens were sold to stores rather than sold/given to charities to feed the starving. In that sense, your purchase shifted food away from the starving and fed your already healthy body inevitably killing a starving man, woman, or child elsewhere in the world.

We cannot function focusing only on consequence. We must live to provide the best possible lives for ourselves, and those we know and love. It is impossible to think for everyone, or hurt no one. Everything will cause someone pain or grief, and give someone else joy and hope.

The truth of the matter is this: Life is here, and no matter what you believe will happen once it is over, there is one thing you can be certain about. You can fight against hurting people, you can fight to achieve your every goal, and you can even fight to survive. But no matter how hard you try, in the end, life its self is the one fight that you will never come out of alive.

100% Genuine!

As I've aged, I have been noticing a large number of changes in the fast food industry. They have really been taking steps in the more recent years to make their food more marketable to the non-grossly obese, so that they too can join the ranks of rapidly fattening individuals. The only problem is, to rope in the health nuts, fast food and microwave food has had to start changing up their ingredients to make them more marketable. Don't get me wrong, it's not that they are good for you, but rather that they aren't quite as bad for you as they once were. I'm fine with all of this, but today I opened up a box of Hot Pockets to find the box reading as follows:

"Now with REAL Cheese!"

What was I eating before?! I have been buying Ham and Cheese hot pockets for years now, and you mean to tell me that up until this box, that yellow delicious inside the bread coating wasn't cheese? What the hell was it then?!

Wendy's did something similar to me also. It was around 2003-2004 when they started to advertise their dollar menu, as did most fast food chains. Honestly, I never had much faith that the quality or grade of meat is high when I'm eating at a fast food chain, but I like to know that what I'm eating is actually the meat I'm ordering. For example, Hong Kong had to close down one of its KFC's because the KFC was substituting its chicken meat for rat meat. I ate there a couple times before they closed it down. So obviously, since then, I have always enjoyed knowing my beef is beef, my chicken is chicken, and my fish is fish. Well, when Wendy's started advertising their 5 chicken nuggets for a dollar, it ran with this slogan:

"Now with all genuine chicken meat!"

Again, what the hell?! What was I eating before? It is called a chicken nugget, so I expect it to be a CHICKEN nugget. Why are you telling me now that all the chicken nuggets I had in the past from you, Wendy, are really just anything nuggets. What meat was in there before it was chicken?!

Stupid world and its crazy food groups.