Let's do something different... or at least the same as it used to be.

     As many of you -or so I'd like to imagine- noticed, it has once again been a while since last I arranged a selection of somewhat carefully chosen words to properly convey some not at all requested opinion of mine. This is because I have been thinking about the way we do things here, talking about the news and making fun of it and so on. I had a lengthy and rather verbose meeting with St. John The Amenable (patron saint of "Must you persist?") and our proud sponsor, JohnCo. (motto: We just want you to be better than you are!) and we have come to an agreement, which is as follows:
     There is, at this moment, an overabundance of news sources, and also plenty of sources one can go to see those sources mocked. This stuff is already on everyone's TV screen, computer monitor, and phone as it is, and one more, even if it's mine, isn't really what anyone needs. So, while I will still retain the services of St. John, and JohnCo. will continue to lend it's support, I'm going to leave the news stuff alone for a little while, and focus more on what brought me to this dance in the first place, which is, well, things like this:
     Can we please stop making everything bacon themed already? Look, I like bacon, okay? As a breakfast food, it goes with pretty much every other breakfast food. Put it on a burger? Excellent. Pizza? Oh, yes. Crumble it up into bits and mix it into a salad? Stop talking about it and get it done, will you?!
     Those things are all great, no doubt about it, and every red-blooded, problem solving American knows it. The problem is that bacon has, for whatever reason, been sucked up by our great and unrelenting need for some stupid trend we can all involve ourselves in so we can come together in our pretentiously cutesy little way. Like we did with mustaches. And irony.
     And it all leads to ruin, people, don't you see? Look at ranch dressing.
     Juuuuuuuuussst look at it.
     A lot of you may remember a time when ranch was not used on french fries instead of ketchup. A time when this terrible abomination was considered merely a salad dressing for people who don't like salad. Then, sometime in the nineties, I think, everything changed. Ranch was everywhere. And we all know how that ended, don't we? Don't we? Let me tell you how it ended; let me tell you what you did.
     It ended with me not being able to get gravy for my chicken strips, that's how it ended! Let me tell you, friends and neighbors, there was a time when I could walk into a restaurant and order myself a meal of chicken strips, or tenders, or fingers, secure in the knowledge that on that plate, or in that plastic basket, along with my deep fried strips of chicken and a pile of french fries, would be a small bowl or plastic container of white cream gravy, the one true and perfect dip for any chicken strip.
     Now? Oh no, sonny boy, you've got to ask for that, and there's a good chance they won't even have it, but sure as the book is better than the movie, you'll get either ranch dressing, that ridiculous and useless (USE! LESS! IT HAS NO USE!) excuse for a condiment known as honey mustard, or some attack on barbecue sauce from a bottle that tastes like ketchup and Red Vines.
     All because of what you (and I mean it when I say 'you', because for once, I had nothing to do with this) did with ranch dressing! And don't you, even for a minute, try and tell me something equally terrible won't happen with happen with bacon, because it will. We already have bacon flavored vodka, whipped cream, mayonnaise, and toothpaste. There are dresses and scarves and wallets and purses and who knows what else made to look as though they're made out of bacon. The Ranch plague never even made it this far, and it still killed something beautiful. The possibilities of terror here are unimaginable.
     Still unconvinced, are you? Then you try explaining to me how the flavors of maple and bacon have been combined and stuffed into a perfectly innocent doughnut without making it sound as though it is the End of Days. Don't tell me it tastes good, either. That's not food you're tasting, it's collective silliness. And it kills.
   It's a lot like what we did to vampires, a once proud monster of literature and film, now reduced to just being a plot device plugged by hack writers into whatever garbage thing they want. There aren't even any rules to it anymore, like, for example, zombies. Zombies can be fast, they can be slow. It can be a disease, it can be a curse, it can be caused by toxic chemicals. But the general rules still usually apply. They were once living people, they rose from the dead, their bite turns people into zombies, and killing the brain generally takes care of them.
     Not so for vampires, not anymore. They just are whatever people want them to be. Need them to function in the sunlight, once fatal to them? Just make it so they shine like a disco ball instead. Garlic and crosses, once powerful repellents? Nah, forget it. How would they coo sweet sounding but meaningless words to each other over pasta while nothing that could be mistaken for a story happens ever? Or maybe there is a story, but it's just a trashy and unoriginal love story? Make one of those trashy lovers a vampire. Who cares? All the rules are gone, which means people don't write vampire stories anymore, they just write whatever they want and throw vampires into it in the hopes that it will distract people from realizing how terrible and pointless the characters and plot are.
     The one red thread that many of these stories have in common is that vampires are especially prone to falling love with - or at least becoming sexually attracted to- their food. Which is all kinds of creepy, but somehow has managed to capture the libido of many a reader or viewer. This I simply cannot condone, anymore than I could condone a person trying to have sex with a bucket of fried chicken. That is just not what one does with a bucket of  fried chicken. The burns alone are reason enough, really.
     Now, don't get me wrong. I understand the need for our culture to continuously make things extremely popular for a period of time before forgetting about it completely. It's largely what fuels our economy. I know that, just as well as I know that shifting to a more worthwhile economy, one founded on actually making useful and necessary things is hard and thus unlikely. I just think that, eventually, these things need to be released from the spotlight before they die off due to our smothering obsession with them, like Beanie Babies, or the popularity of Meg Ryan. They need to be allowed to return to what they were originally meant to be.
     Thus, I say it's time we moved on to whatever the next thing is going to be, because not only can I not wait to see teenagers and lonely adults fall in love with, say, a mummy who can fly, or an abominable snowman that can hold it's breath for ten years at a time, thus permitting it to be with its one true mermaid love that is decades younger than the snowman, but also because I really don't want to lose bacon. Oh, and ranch dressing is the worst.
     The. Worst.
-John