I was at Olive Garden the other day, and I coined a new phrase: Mammon’s Corner.
Mammon’s Corner is a part of going out to eat at a restaurant. It’s when you have eaten enough to be full, however, there is still a considerable amount of food left on your plate. But it is too scant to be worth taking home as leftovers. Just about a half of a lunch. But it is also too much to just leave on the plate, because you’d feel like you were wasting food. So you feel an obligation to dutifully shovel those last four or five bites into your mouth, even though you already know you will be drowsy and somewhat uncomfortable from overeating. As you shovel those forkfuls into your mouth, you are rounding Mammon’s Corner.
Mammon’s Corner is very much about trying to extract maximal value out of a consumer experience. You are trying to get your money’s worth, and not waste this exchange. If you are too full, and you leave the excess serving on the plate, you overpaid. If you take the leftovers home and try to make a small meal of them, you are shorting yourself a full consumptive experience.
Somehow, it got me thinking about how we fashion our identities around our consumer choices. We have brand loyalties, imagine ourselves to be this or that kind of shopper. It’s incredible that in every type of commodity, there is a gradient of cost and fanciness. Every modern American has a car, and although all of them just take us from place to place, there is a hierarchy of cheap dirtbag car to sophisticated important car. Less complex things have tiers of value. Toilet paper. Literally the thing you use to scrape fecal matter off of your shitty bunghole. There is single-ply truckstop poor people tier paper, and then there is the cushy, luxurious triple-ply ass paper with aloe vera infused in every wipe. Is there anything you can buy that is just universal? This is the basic thing that people need: Here it is.
No.
It’s incredible how much consumerism shapes our thoughts. We adhere to tiers of value for utterly inconsequential shit. A rug on the floor. A television stand. The brand of beans someone offers for Taco Night. This is the freedom we speak so highly of; to be standing in the toothpaste aisle and to see seventy different tubes of the same shit.
Somehow, I feel like I’d be remiss without talking about the Mormons.
How could there not be a new religion, seeing this vast westward expanse unfurling before you? How could there not be a new dogma of God and Christ, once the telescopes looked out over the planets of Mars and Venus? God is real, yeah, but he lives on another planet. The Garden of Eden exists; it’s in Missouri. What an enchanting time to be alive, what an All-American way to taste the Gospels. What excuse would you have to not be thriving here on planet earth? The project of god is clearly the settlement of this land of plenty. Nevermind the Indians, they are just weird or whatever! But to inherit a new half of the world and to understand that the cosmos contained many more places like our world…man. Mormons just picked up on the vibe of the time.
I’d love to be some kind of ascetic, if only for the cred. I can’t do it. I can’t help it. I’m a consumer piece of shit like everybody else. I love hamburgers too much. I guess I’d just like it if we all understood the commonality that we’ve all got. We’re just here temporarily, we’re dead with the days counting down. If you puff out your chest about being important, you’re a big dumb loser. Our pupils are black and will turn blacker on that big day. Nobody wrote a poem about your money. Nobody wants to remember you. You’re the most common and you’re boring.
Mammon will eat a lot of chicken alfredo.
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