Light it. Live it. Love it.

Waiting diligently atop a mountain of disrespect and reprehensible behavior, lay a big brown turd dropped by the twisted patrons of my particular establishment.

As if the huff and guff of everyday life weren’t enough, I was unceremoniously greeted with the foul stench of humanity’s depths each time I planted my grease-stained boot upon the trail of tears.

During this unforgettable couple of years in the restaurant business, I learned two universal truths about humans in general:

1) Most people are unhappy.

Everyone has it in their heads that there exists a large segment of society that wears an almost constant smile bent upwards by both self-fulfillment and personal achievement.

This just isn’t so. I know that getting married and having kids is supposed to make everyone magically satiated, but the majority of families I saw were loud, combative, and inevitably disrespectful to my server staff. It was as if their server was to be blamed for every weed of frustration that had marred their imaginary landscape of joy. However, I really think it was the inability to indulge in the free flowing alcohol around them that really sent them over the edge and made for a truly horrible dining experience. After all, most of these “families” wouldn’t even have existed without the soft whispers of desire being amplified into the megaphone-fueled screams of lust by the unmitigated indulgence of booze.

Just dealing with a group like this is enough to send many people into a destructive frenzy worthy of a John Woo film – but the servers march on. They march on because they have to. They need that tip. And herein lies the greatest of tragedies. Without a built-in gratuity, the server is usually at the mercy of a maddened matriarch and prostrated patriarch who are two payments behind on a car they can’t afford, buying designer label clothes that no one notices, and paying for a shrink to “get to the bottom” of the behavioral issue surrounding the kids that they never pay attention to.

You can usually find them in the school supplies section of Wal-Mart stocking up on scissors. They haven’t found a pair yet that can withstand the daily abuse of cutting out coupons.

The server can usually expect a paltry 10% at best and then they get to clean up the ungodly mess of straw wrappers and filthy napkins that surround their table.

 2) There is no such thing as an “adult”.

Look no further than the very spirit of competition itself. Because our particular establishment revolved around sports, we would get large groups of fans surrounding our televisions every game day to cheer on their favorite team.

The best part of the day would come around when a couple of assholes would get a few too many beers in their system and start to heckle the fans of the losing team. There would then be the occasional exchange of words in which John Smith the accountant and John Doe the architect would exchange a few colorful expletives and then inevitably come chest to chest like they:

a.) Were actually participating in the particular game they were watching

b.) Were actually not going to cry when aggression reached a boiling point and one of them got their nose broken.

c.) Actually had a dick bigger than a thimble.

It is this kind of childlike behavior that isn’t the exception so much as it is the rule.

I suppose it’s just a microcosm of our society as whole. Whether it’s swallowing pride or a mouthful of food, we have become the ultimate consumers. We eat, use and destroy virtually everything around us, leaving little more than a pile of shit to remind the universe we were even here.

It is as if billions of graffiti artists have taken to the streets to tag and defame every societal structure in their path.

If only we could just paint over it.

Operating in Life’s Trivial Pursuit,

Ronald Cherry