A carnival of technology

Lunch today was an odd convergence of synchronicity and annoyance. I rode the bike today despite the rain, because I’m an idiot, and this limits my mobility, making the already difficult decision of where to eat lunch even more of a chore. I’ve become jaded about pretty much everything around the office, so it takes me a good while to decide where to eat. Today I got hungry long before I made this choice, so I suited up and started off on the bike before actually making a decision. I originally intended to get takeout, since I like to avoid riding on a full stomach, but the choice I ended up making was to go to an Italian place, Al Capri, which is in the spot once occupied by Port City Java. Supporting local business gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, and it’s close enough that I could eat in the restaurant without puking on the way back, so I made a slow, casual coast through the parking lot across the street in order to turn around and retrieve that big heavy lock that I left at the office. The shopping center for Al Capri is hard to see from the road, so it’s a little bit low rent. There’s a paint store, a halal meat market (which actually sounds kind of interesting; I should go in there some time), a skate shop and a military recruiting post. The recruiting center, of course, makes me the most wary: one time when passing by the spot on foot on the way back from Roswell Bikes, I was harangued by a young man who basically accused me of being unamerican for not wanting to join up and get shipped off to Iraq. I don’t want to have any part in the military. Regardless of the war going on right now, I have at times a problem with authority, and I doubt I could even pass the physical. The military’s great and all, and I’ll keep supporting our troops by donating to the USO now and then, but I can’t see myself being a part of the military.

As I stopped in front of the office building and started to dismount from the bike, a black sedan with US government plates pulled up into the parking lot and rolled down the windows. I vaguely recall some kind of shouted words just before this, and, though I’m usually able to track the positions of all the cars around me as a part of my goal of not getting run over, I can’t recall if the car pulled in off the street or if it was circling the adjacent parking lot. Anyhow, the car was full of Marines, and one of them in the back, Sergeant Isenhower, wanted to have some words with me. It’s probably worthwhile to note at this point that I don’t think too clearly after getting of the bike. I was already pretty hungry, and there’s no direct metabolic path from fat to glucose, so my brain kind of suffers. The bike makes me dumb. One time that punk at Performance Bicycles decided to quiz me on the amount of change I should receive, and, after hemming and hawing for a good while, I got it wrong by a dime. So there I was, my body searching for the right muscles to destroy in order to think, and Sergeant Isenhower wanted me to join up with the Marines. I told him flat out that I didn’t want to, and he thanked me for my honesty and drove off after handing me a business card. I honestly can’t figure out any reason they chose me as a target other than that recruiting centers are getting desperate and are scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The Marines saw me on the bike, so there are several possibilities that they may have inferred from this. There are several reasons to use a bicycle as transportation, and rainy weekday bikers might fall into one or more of the following groups: the poor, those unable to drive (license suspended due to DUI, maybe), and the pinko commie environmental liberal pigdogs like myself. Poverty is a good target for military recruitment, but a casual look at my bike—skinny tires, prominently displayed logos from fancy parts—should disprove this hypothesis in my case. I’m not obviously a yuppie racer, though, and I don’t know how observant the Marines are with regards to bicycles, so they may have made a mistake on this count. Non-felony criminal records shouldn’t have an effect on recruitment, and environmentalists are probably bad targets. An assumption that I can’t afford a car is, as far as I can tell, is the only good thing for them that can be determined from a bicycle, except perhaps that it also makes me easier to catch. I have a young face, so this could also have been the reason they decided to pursue me. Bicycles also imply physical fitness, but I’m not exactly the paragon of health. I wear baggy clothing, though, so maybe this was also a factor. In all, I found the experience confusing and unnerving. I also found it interesting the Marines apparently don’t have the money to print new business cards. The card I got had whiteout over pretty much everything except “U.S. Marine Corps” and “Sergeant” (the previous cardholder was a Gunner Sergeant, so the spacing didn’t come out too well), and Isenhower’s name was written in by hand. Maybe they’re not out of money and just trying to be thrifty. Maybe we shouldn’t have tried to combine a troop surge with tax cuts.

The thing that upset me the most about this experience is that I didn’t want to change my mind about my lunch location, but I would have to go next to the recruiting center in order to eat by my plan. I’m beginning to strongly dislike those recruiters, and that’s sadly becoming a factor in my lunch decisions. I stuck with it anyways and ended up eating a meatball sub. Those meatballs were seriously the most delicious meatballs I have ever eaten. I’ve seen the recruiters eating here on some occasions, but I’ve still yet to see the restaurant crowded. Al Capri apparently started doing delivery (which was handled by the waiter, leaving the owner to both cook the food and wait tables), so maybe that’ll help them out. I hope that the recruiters at least have enough money left to leave a decent tip.