Word Soup

Though I'm not proud of it, I found myself at AppleBees this week with the goal of inhaling a Margarita before a movie.

Somewhere across the tchotchke-riddled promenade, some middle-aged man's heart simply stopped beating in his chest.

I assume the last thing he ever saw was the pseudo-vintage prop of a non-existent airplane hung on the wall, shipped from Taiwan to give the restaurant its carefully manufactured all-American rustic appeal.

I'm not sure what I expected to happen then. Maybe the radio would stop. Maybe customers would stop shoveling chicken fried chicken into their heads to momentarily acknowledge another human in mortal crisis. An announcement? Something. What would a tribe have done? What would you have wanted to be done to you?

A handful of diners offered sidelong glances as the EMTs arrived; the professionals quietly and quickly failed to revive the man, and then carted him off to be officially pronounced dead outside in the ambulance (the waitress told the next table) so customers would not be bothered.

The staff then buzzed about the aortic crime seen like silent insects, prepping his table for new customers in sixty seconds. The entire episode couldn't have taken more than five minutes total. Half the restaurant patrons had absolutely no idea that a human being had died just ten yards from their Weight Watchers Tortilla Chicken Melt.

It was an efficient and perfect disposal in every way. My dining experience remained enjoyable throughout, my consumer satisfaction was not disrupted in the slightest, and the ambiance at no time shifted out of the realm of 'pleasant'.

I find that ant-like efficiency a little depressing some two-days later, in part because I sat there like a slack-jawed idiot myself. I don't know what the alternative communal reaction could or should have been. I just know the passing of a man or woman from this world should not reside on the same emotional plane as the cleaning of toddler vomit.

update: Note below that the first response to this blog post is "fuck you" from a random passerby on a Verizon IP address, which somehow feels thematically and culturally appropriate in context. An all-American Internet idiot makes my point as if in punctuation.