Hi Fi Parasol

Possibly the best thing about our nation’s current festival of pecuniary insolvency — other than getting to watch elected officials sweat through their suit jackets as they try to explain why we may soon need to offer corporate naming rights to national parks and, eventually, individual constitutional amendments — is that all of the big chain restaurants are trying their damnedest to keep us all coming back for more servings of beef tallow and corn syrup. Mostly, they’re doing this by plying our mailboxes with coupons.

Sadly, I’ve given the bastards exactly what they want. I have used these coupons, in bulk. In the past few weeks, I have eaten at Denny’s, El Pollo Loco, and Arby’s, and I’m seriously considering an inaugural trip to Ono Hawaiian Barbecue. If Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen were a big pile of semidigested stomach contents, it would be mine. It’s disgusting.

I’d like to say that I’ll try harder not to be taken in by such deals in the future, but of course I will. And I use the word “deals” with the most athletic of eye-rolls, since I know I’ll be paying an even greater price for these meals ten or twenty years from now, when I shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to my neighborhood bypass surgeon or oncologist, who very likely won’t offer coupons. I mean, those guys have boat payments to make!

Anyway, the coupons have their hold on me. I’ll let you know when my heart explodes.

True confession: I find Twitter to be kind of a pain in th’ butt sometimes. Particularly when it comes to getting news from specific sources that update with relative infrequency — like food trucks. See, all the best food trucks advertise their schedules via Twitter, but for those of us with demanding stomachs and hefty tweet-feeds, it’s been hard to keep up. But now there’s an easier way for us to plan out those times during the week when we’ll throw dietetic caution to the wind and scarf down cheesesteaks, pancakes and kimchi tacos en masse.

Check it: Find LA Food Trucks allows the discerning consumer of mobile comestibles to learn, from a single page, where all his favorite food trucks will be at a given time. All the trucks’ Twitter feeds are updated here, from perennial favorite Kogi BBQ to my hometown representatives on the South Philly Experience to the relative newcomer Buttermilk Truck. No more scrolling through feeds! No more multiple tabs hanging open! There’s even a contact form so you can suggest a truck whose tweets aren’t represented. So get eating. Now you have no excuse.

I suspect “supermarket public-address system music” is probably one of those problems that only I think is a problem, like comma underuse and my girlfriend’s tendency to wipe her mouth after I kiss her. But no, seriously: It’s a big deal. It’s ruining America. It’s turning us into sodden, fish-mouthed lumps of intellectually sessile mystery meat. Or, you know, more so.

Think about it. When was the last time you heard a song in a supermarket that wasn’t an adult-contemporary song from at least 15 years ago? When was the last time you were shopping in a big chain supermarket and even heard a song that you liked? Probably never, unless you happen to be a fan of Quebecois Provincial Embarrassment Celine Dion, in which case it’s too late for you, and you should go look at Precious Moments figures on eBay or whatever the hell it is you people do when you’re online.

The rest of us have to stand there and endure, our lower jaws bunched in defiant Churchill crumples, as we try our best to decide between Wheat Thins and Tomato Basil Wheat Thins. Most of us wisely choose to ignore it, or, more likely, have completely lost the capacity to notice all of the little things that go on in the backgrounds of our personal dramas — things like television commercials and institutional racism. I used to hold people like this in contempt, wondering what purposeless baubles they traded their souls in for, until I realized they were simply stunned into vapidity by the endless whistling void of adult contemporary music, which pervades nearly everything we do.

And this is the problem. Years and years of listening to “What a Fool Believes” and the Peabo Bryson/Regina Belle version of “A Whole New World” have rendered us unable to even care about the myriad of tiny things that happen in our personal atmospheres each day, and whatever hunk of brain-meat our all-knowing Intelligent Designer has seen fit to charge with Observation and Attention to Detail has crusted away into a dry and scabrous nub, like the bit of desiccated mustard you pluck from the nozzle before dressing your hot dog.

(And I defy you to tell me what in the holy name of Freya’s twat Michael McDonald is singing in “What a Fool Believes.” You can’t tell me, and you’ve heard the song thirty thousand times. You may have heard “What a Fool Believes” more often than you’ve heard your mother tell you she loves you, and other than the actual name of the song you cannot repeat any of the lyrics. Nor, I suspect, can Michael McDonald; he sings like a gelded howler monkey in hopes of masking this. But we are on to you, Michael. We are on to your trickster’s ways.)

And it’s easy to know where to point society’s collective accusatory finger: Square at the sunken, man-boobed chests of the supermarket industry’s masters. As if it’s not bad enough that they ply us with nothing but factory-farmed, corn-based impersonations of actual food, they further weaken us by offering our ears an equivalent contranutritive slurry, this time not in the form of Archer Daniels Midland Simulated Comestibles but post-Miami-Sound-Machine Gloria Estefan.

“But Kevin,” you’re saying. “They need to play bland and inoffensive music because every other kind of music is too polarizing. What do you expect them to play? Hip-Hop? 80s New Wave? Juno-Award-winning supergroup Broken Social Scene? Adult contemporary music is something we’ve all sort of generally agreed fits the basic definition of music, and, while boring as hell, isn’t really difficult to listen to.” This is what you’re saying, right? In your head? Right?

Well, first of all, stop defending these bastards. They’re raking in the billions and still charging four dollars a jar for salsa that probably isn’t as organic as its label claims, so you don’t need to do their dirty work for them. You wouldn’t defend Dick Cheney, would you? Unless you would, in which case, brother, are you in the wrong corner of the Internet.

But more importantly, the supermarkets don’t need to play this music. We assume they do this because everyone can pretty much accept that it’s basically OK. The only thing everyone agrees on is that adult contemporary music is like getting stuck in a traffic jam: Not good by any stretch of the imagination, but not really terrible. Not like the apocalypse or something. Right? It’s just a traffic jam! It’ll be over in a few minutes! It’s just “Sussudio!” It’ll be done with soon enough!

And that’s where you’re wrong. WRONG. Ha! There’s ANOTHER type of music everyone likes. Are you ready to hear what it is? Are you sitting down? Because it’s going to change everything about the way you see the world. It’s going to uplift you to a higher plane of intelligence, like at the end of your more nakedly intellectual science fiction films. You’re looking for music everyone can enjoy while they load up their carts with bleached paper products and ethnic foods deemed suitable for consumption by suburbanites? Well here it is, Sucka:

Wedding music. You know, the kind of music the DJ plays at the wedding.

Seriously. With the exception of your Arcade-Fire-listening hipster friends, who are assholes anyway, everybody loves wedding music. What troglodytic fun-phobe can’t get down to the Isley Brothers’ “Shout?” Who, other than deeply closeted Republican legislators and megachurch moralizers, can’t shake at least a portion of his ass to “YMCA?” What heartless terrorist motherfucker doesn’t like “Love Shack?” Tell me where he lives.

Think about this. Think about it the next time you’re in Ralph’s or Kroger or Giant or Shaw’s or Food Mammoth or whatever regional grocery chain exerts its chokehold on the local economy even as it sponsors its pee wee football teams. Think about what the greatest number of people would rather be listening to: The O’Jays’ “Love Train?” Or some post-”Summer of ‘69″ Bryan Adams song? Which will it be, sir? “Benny and the Jets?” Or Benny Mardones? “Lady Marmalade?” Or “Lady In Red?”

So I encourage you to call the site manager of your local corporate grocer, and demand that he pass your suggestion on to the regional manager. And demand that he inscribe this suggestion in his very day planner, until such time as he has the opportunity to bring it to the attention of whoever he reports to, I don’t know, maybe some kind of vice president or commissar or something. Demand that your voice be heard, lest you choose to relocate your food-gathering efforts to a competing big-box grocer, who will no doubt take your suggestion under advisement and perhaps forward a condensed version of your concerns on to someone with the power to maybe write a memo or something. Go! Go! Sally forth, my fawn-eyed apostles, and carry like a blinding torch that with which we will change this world! Go! Go! You have nothing to lose but the hopelessness that binds your wrists and your souls! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Tear down this world, that we may build a new one!

Also get me some Hot Pockets. I prefer the ham and cheese but if they’re all out I also like the pepperoni pizza.