Disclaimer: this entry was written very, very late at night (or quite early in the morning, depending on how one looks at it), and is therefore most likely jumbled, incoherent, and nonsensical. If so, please disregard this idiocy and prepare to be returned to your regularly scheduled programming. Thank you for your cooperation.

Tonight (actually, this morning — it was about 1:00 a.m.), I was walking my dog (Zeus, a big, red, lovable mixed breed oaf), and saw something that immediately struck me as an excellent photo opportunity.

It was a bag of McDonald's food, in the middle of the street, that had apparently been run over.

The bag itself, of course, had been ripped to shreds, its tatters gliding over the asphalt on light zephyrs. But the contents of said bag were what represented to me a fascinating subject for abstract art. From the looks of it, some sort of burger, and orders of fries and chicken nuggets (McDonald's hasn't caught on that nuggets aren't "in" anymore) had been the unfortunate victims of a brutal hit-and-run.

The nuggets, already rather unrecognizable when first purchased, were now lumps of breaded gray, smashed into the contours of the street. The fries, touting impressive tire marks (which would, no doubt, be analyzed extensively by forensics teams who arrived on the scene), reminded one of deep-fried cadavers, stiff and greasy, their soft, chewy insides spilling out of crisp exteriors. The street had been turned into a mass grave, a hastily dug pit filled with lime-covered bodies that will rot in the sun, permeating the surrounding area with the sickening smell of thawed and processed potatoes gone stale.

But the burger was, without a doubt, the pièce de résistance, at once magnificent, majestic, and stomach-turning. A Big Mac? Quarter Pounder? It was no longer clear, as the cruelly spinning wheels of death had left it so gruesomely deformed that it no longer resembled anything edible. The bloated corpse lay in a pool of its own blood (burst ketchup packets), bun ashy and lifeless, patty oozing fat that would congeal before long, fragile lettuce torn asunder, the whole shebang swimming in an unidentifiable opaque white liquid deemed "secret sauce."

At one time, soon after being perfunctorily assembled by an angry and apathetic teenager (who, stricken with persistent acne and forced to wear a humiliating hairnet, resents not only authority in general, but every single goddamned meal he is obligated to create from heat lamp-warmed ingredients so he can keep this minimum-wage-paying job and make up for the allowance his parents deny him), the burger was complacent, hopeful, and ready to face the world. Some of his compatriots had not been as lucky: they had fallen on the floor by way of some indifferent clumsiness on the part of a dimwitted, underpaid assembler, had plummeted down into that unswept and rat dropping-laden chasm, had been picked up but not brushed off, had been brusquely thrown together, would not satisfy the customer.

But this burger was different. It had been lovingly crafted from only the finest ingredients: the most recently thawed (and least feces-ridden) processed meat product, the most mold-free bread, the least brown lettuce, the least suspicious opaque white liquid. Surely, its future was to be grand. It dreamed of its customer, whose gaping maw and pearly whites would be the Pearly Gates (the uvula acting as St. Peter, who would usher already disintegrating food particles into the abyss), whose stomach would be a dark and acidic Heaven. This burger was destined for great things.

But now, its life had been taken needlessly, yet another casualty of modern times, mere prey to B.F. Goodrich. Its multilayered body, once as glorious as those in the advertisements, was now but a chaos of condiments, a burger befallen by bedlam, a maelstrom of marketing research wrought into an inexpensive, consumer-tested creation that now sprawled on the cold, hard asphalt, its entrails splattered on midnight macadam, smote by some unknown but indisputably powerful forces.

Is life futile? Perhaps it is for those Frankenstein monsters of fast-food, devised in immaculately white, sterile laboratories, mayhap by cackling mad scientists and their hunchbacked assistants named Igor, from data compiled in experiments involving lightning, scavenged from meat product rejects, from bio-engineered vegetables grown in enormous clear plastic domes scattered throughout vast fields, from tripe, tongue, and other creepy uncles of beef, from cube-shaped tomatoes (now easier to stack!) and recycled bread, from thawed, sliced, and diced processed potatoes. Their purpose in life? To satisfy a customer either impatient or indiscriminate enough to be willing to stop (however momentarily) in a drive-through and pick up a cheap and easy meal on the way to work. To fill a niche created by a country obsessed with schedules, a nation whose philosophy is quicker-and-not-necessarily-better. Imagine yourself as a mass-produced hamburger, pitifully unable to hold a candle to the pictures on billboards, existing only to fulfill a shallow and superficial destiny. Would you consider your existence to be pointless? Perhaps.

[Exit Orpheum.]