Tuesday, February 28, 2006

What's Really Hood?

Why do hood rat teens prefer to stroll slowly around the block as they devour their KFC/Taco Bell/White Castles, instead of sitting somewhere while they eat? Sit near an inner city high school as it lets out for the day, and watch this phenomena unfold sometime. They almost always toss their shit on the ground after they're finished. A garbage can in front of KFC/Taco Bell has remained 2/3 empty for at least two weeks now, while trash is stacking up all around it. Thanks White Castle for insisting to put each little burger in those cardboard containers. It would be an interesting study to see how many of those things actually end up in the garbage.

The experience of getting "food" from these places is genuinely ghetto. The workers are ghetto, the customers are ghetto, the old stinky guy with the raging red eye balls who just wants to use the bathroom (which needs to be buzzed open) is real ghetto. The rats in the dumpster out back are ghetto. The fryer is ghetto. The sticky, filthy floor that gave up the hopes of a thorough mopping a long time ago, is...yep that's right.

The customers are usually loud, dumb sounding young people. Or run down, over worked older Black men. An occasional White drunk dude. Old haggard women without their teeth.

The workers are usually a medley of over-the-hill hapless older folks who missed a lot of trains in life. Or the pregnant, loud talking, gold front wearing, chicken head (White or Black), who is way more concerned with talking to the thugster leaning over the counter trying to swindle some free shit out of her, than ringing up any paying customer. Plus there's the manager who actually has to make this circus operate. They always look like they havn't slept in years, and their will power and/or sanity is on the brink of ruin.

What needs to happen, is they tear down that portal to inner city hell, and a Black entrepreneur open up a market and sell food with some nutitional value. Not malt liquor, not Black and Milds, not fucking donuts, not beef jerkey, not lottery scratch-offs, not Nerd ropes, not porn mags (okay porn mags, but keep them back further behind the counter), and not phone cards.

Preserve inner city architecture. Reinvest in the hood.