The Heretofor Uncovered Collection Part 1

By my Father

SONNET: TO A FALL

When God his first progenitor did make
To sally forth a seed to live of grace;
No thought could be enough of Woman's sake,
And Man to fall from sense, emotions base.

To tempt a weaker sex by appetite,
Seems now more moot if asked how she could stand;
And by her essence, wanton lovely sight!
Tis no wonder Satan tempted not the Man.

Ah, but Man fell not in ignorance,
Deceived and shorn with others there to blame.
Man fell by love in human Bacchantic dance,
By reason lost his liberty in shame.

And so the grace that Man doth find in love,
In Woman comes, beneath, from not above.





IF WE WERE OVERRUN BY CAMELS

There would be camel dung in the streets
Depriving the cities of their famous clean and neat
The would eat entire lawns for their eats
Everyone knows camels don't eat meat.

Traffic could stop anytime for a crossing
And they have this thing about spitting
What really gets us is their chewing
And they never ever say a damn thing.

So to stop this hullabaloo
We locked them all in a zoo
And now we don't even "phew!"
What would happen if we were overrun with you?





THE BEAUTIFUL MORNING

The mothers licked the sleep from her fawn's eyes,
And smiled to reassure through winter's guise.
The snowy bed whereon they lay was nature's velvet;
Much more beautiful in light than at sunset:
Sun twinkling off iced branches and glittering drops,
Snow was earth's virgin blanket and evergreen's tops.
But this wet and cold dropping served to hide the food
And left peculiar designs on their winter's suit.
Beautiful as it was, this cold white could be bad.
Driving away birds and adding to the air a sad.
To their feet mother and son arose to forage and search
Their morning repast neath umbrellas of fir and birch.
The cross hairs zeroed in and the face smiled
The report boomed into the cold air and echoed for miles.
The mother went to her knees and screamed,
The fawn jumped and stared.
On her side now she gazed up at her son.
The blood gushed from her neck,
Flowed onto the stark white with brilliant crimson.
Terror was in the morning air!
Understanding though not knowing the son fled,
Fled and escaped where his mother bled.
And heard in the distance two more smaller reports.





LEONIDAS' ADDRESS TO HIS SPARTANS AT THERMOPYLAE

"Spartans!
Three days ere we vowed never to cross yon wall;
That we shall not.
Three days ere we vowed to fight here in the pass;
That we shall not.
Xerxes' Immortals are round behind us,
The will soon trap us in this pass;
I have dismissed all Greeks,
But not Spartans.
Spartans will never retreat.
Spartans will be victorious or die.
On you shields you hold the Spartan legacy:
'Victory or Death,'
And in your hearts is the spirit to uphold it.
We stand alone,
One three hundred to one million Persian;
We stand alone, for Sparta and for Greece.
We have no chance to hold the pass;
Therefore
We advance.
We advance onto the plain and into the Persian ranks,
We advance to kill Xerxes.
Advance, Spartans!
On your spears is the fate of Greece
and the honor of Sparta;
When your spears break -- use your swords;
When your swords break -- use your fists;
When you hands break -- use your hearts!
Here is our glory and our victory in death!
Here obedient to Spartan laws, we fall.
Advance!"





UNTITLED

This is a man of questionable and infamous repute,
This is the proverbial story of the Absurd Fool.
A man who believed in right and love incompute,
A man who was used as a disposable tool.
He trusted in men, their nature and their love
For him, he never harbored a thought of deceit,
As if all men were he, to be governed from above
By night - his peers said this of him - conceit.
He took for granted a love and built thereof upon,
He took for granted friendship and borrowed from
It.  Until friendship met love, and behold! Anon
The granted was ungranted - they told him not come.
But come he did and suffer more because
The love and friendship had tricked him again
Into a parley, and laughed while digging their claws
Into his heart, his soul - nevermore to begin.
Cry all you deem, you fool, you imbecile of man!
Cray and bemoan yourself for it was only you
That hurt you and relied upon the whim that love can
Carry all.  Learn your lesson?  I doubt it, you fool.
The world slaps you in the face with blatant pessimism,
And shows you that you yourself are the key;
But you look for more to eat of this cataclysm.
O gods hark this!  The fool is me.

Dear Five Guys

Dear Vice President Matt Murrell,

I would like to start by thanking you for all the hard work you and your family have put in to building a business around such a delicious and wonderful burger.  I can honestly say that Five Guys is top of my list for best burgers and when the mood for a good meal strikes me I seek out the nearest franchise.  And while your burger may not be the best I have ever had, I definitely rank it high on my list and it is most assuredly the best chain burger.  I will go out on a limb and say that I enjoy your burger more than the iconic In-N-Out Burger restaurant; both for its taste and for the fact that unlike In-N-Out, your stores accept American Express credit cards.

Another one of the reasons I really appreciate the Five Guys' burger is that I can get it with fresh jalapeños.  Not the pickled ones, but fresh.  I even go so far as to ask you to grill my jalapeños which brings a nice smoky char to them and perks up the burger without the vinegar taste.  My meal of choice from you is the cheeseburger with grilled jalapeños and barbecue sauce only with a side of peanuts and a cherry Coke.  In fact, I just had that meal only a few hours ago.

Consequently the reason I am writing to you is that I had some interesting thoughts while I was chowing down on my dinner tonight.  I happened to get to the restaurant at a time when I was the only customer there.  As always I ordered my meal, paid, got my peanuts and drink and sat down to crack into as many shells as I could before the burger was delivered.  While eating several more people came in to have the same experience and I starting making some associations to the type of customer that you serve.  I remember remarking in a few cities that I have traveled to in the past that some of the patrons are unpleasant to look at due to their physical compositions.  (I want to be careful here and note that I am not mocking, degrading, or being rude; I simply want to point out an observation that I think may hold some value to you and your company.)  I personally do not find it pleasant to watch obese people eat, especially such high calorie foods.  As a person who shades to the quite corpulent side myself, I can relate to the unattractive and unappealing scenes that someone like me sets when waddling through a restaurant and scarfing down large quantities of food.

While eating I starting feeling really bad about myself.  I starting to feel guilty for coming in to your restaurant and ordering the big instead of the small burger.  I doubted whether I should have went with the high calorie soda instead of the diet.  Watching the other customers elicited feelings of shame and guilt which I doubt are the feelings you want your customers to have.  The worst part is that while examining my feelings I began to remember I have felt that same way before when eating at your restaurant and that it has affected my decision to patronize your establishment in the past.  I remember thinking how disgusting some of the guests had been and that I did not want to enter that particular establishment again, (or at least not as often).

And that got me thinking, I cannot be the only person to have these feelings and maybe there is an opportunity here.

Recently I read a study about mayonnaise bottles.  Some company had tested two new squeeze bottles on supermarket shelves.  One squeeze bottle had convex sides and the other concave.  They both held the same amount of mayonnaise and the only difference was the shapes.  The company found that the concave bottles were selling better and upon further testing discovered that subconsciously people associated the bottles with body shape and they felt better about themselves buying an unhealthy product if the bottle appeared slimmer; concave, instead of the plumper convex ones.  It may be the case that I am alone on this one but I think I would feel better about dining with Five Guys if I was not reminded of my bad choices when looking at the other guests.  As the vice president in charge of store development I think you are in a unique position to address this issue.  If people feel better about their decisions to eat with you they will be more likely to come back more often and spend more money.

People need a distraction.  I think this is best achieved through physical alteration of the premises.  Currently, the only action in the Five Guys restaurant is the patrons.  If people had something else to look at; for example a television, they could forget about their weight or the calories and simply enjoy their meal.  However that might not be the atmosphere your company is trying to establish.  Last year I went to visit the much hyped Heart Attack Grill in Arizona were they celebrate obesity.  However people there do not have time to dwell on themselves as they offer sexy female servers dressed as naughty nurses, tilted mirrors behind the counter so you can peek up their skirts, mandatory scrubs for the guests that serve to equalize everybody's appearance, TVs with music videos, constant attention, and interesting artistic pieces almost to the point of sensory overload.  It was quite the experience.  But even though I probably ate worse there than I ever would at Five Guys, I never once felt self-conscious.  Alternatively your layout is simple, clean, and certainly less stimulating.  There is something to be said for a churn and burn atmosphere.  Playing up-tempo music such as you do gets people to conduct their activities faster; and without distractions like TVs people will complete their visit faster clearing room for more guests, increasing throughput and ultimately revenue.  As a former restaurant manager I can appreciate increased turnover.

So if visual stimulus is not the right suggestion I would like to suggest concealment.  I recently visited a Smash Burger and noted that their store layout is different in that they have booths, large plants, and physical barriers to divide people.  Even the registers where somewhat segregated from the customers.  Retrospectively this might be a brilliant move that as a customer I would feel less guilty ordering a large meal because I would not feel as through the sitting guests were watching and judging me.  Think about other franchises: McDonald's, Wendy's, or Johnny Rockets; they all use dividers.  And I do not think that is by accident.  The only chain I can think of with an open floor-plan is Subway, but their stores are quite small and they have successfully marketed their product as healthy and a good decision so patrons can feel better about eating there; subconsciously or not.

Therefore I feel that making alterations to the physical layout of a typical Five Guys establishment will help increase sales by making your customers feel more comfortable patronizing your business.  By either adding visual distractions or obscuring sight-lines I believe people will enjoy their experience more and would be more inclined to return and spend more money.  I understand that as a franchise company this idea will be difficult to implement or even test but I encourage you to at least consider it.  Remember we come to Five Guys for the burgers, not the atmosphere.

Thank you for your consideration,

The Impudent Iconoclast

Why Are You Driving So Angry?

A few weeks ago we wrote about ignorance.  At II we feel it is important to address popular arguments and strip them of their fallacies in order to educate and help tone down the rhetoric.  It seems that anymore American political discourse has devolved into insult laden, ignorant filled shouting matches that are as helpful to solving the issues as they are enjoyable to listen to.  People remark, "It's nastier than ever," and "I don't even listen anymore."  Corporate human resource department managers struggle to write policies banning political discussions at work.  Social etiquette now dictates that political alignment is private information and disclosing one's views is the equivalent of telling a racist joke in public: a political anathema.  Those brave enough to openly share their opinions risk long lasting social stigma and judgment.  The fact that sharing one's views shows the very real effects and damage that fallacies elicit.  The consequence of ignorance is tangible and is called injustice.  As we wrote in Don't Drive Angry, "there is a mechanism in the human psyche that immediately recognizes and disdains injustice."
Injustice triggers that fight or flight response in our brains.  The Supreme Court today ruled that the family of slain soldiers who were protested against and maliciously maligned could not sue the church organizing and leading the protests.  When one reads the placards or hears the chants of that church calling the soldiers gay and declaring pleasure in their deaths it is difficult, nigh impossible to not feel a sense of injustice.  When one hears of the Libyan leader hiring mercenaries to slaughter his own countrymen it is hard to not feel the injustice.  When one sees a man let a door close on a woman, when one sees a child ignoring their parent's instructions, when one gets cut off in traffic, or when  gets a Coke when they clearly ordered a Diet Coke it is a struggle to fight off the sense of injustice.  Which begs the question: Are people becoming too sensitive?
We touched on this a few weeks ago, "The human mind was not built for nor can handle the massive amount of information we receive."  People are so interconnected now within their own lives, their community, work, and the prevalence of news from around the world it is sometimes overwhelming and potentially maddening.  The first ten minutes of a local newscast presents us with a staggering amount of bad news which feeds one's sense of injustice.  "An apartment building burned down."  "A local official is corrupt."  "A family was murdered."  The human brain is amazingly adaptable but it is hard to imagine that it has developed the physical coping mechanisms needed to keep pace with the exponentially rapid evolution of information flow in today's society.  Not being experts on the subject we at II cannot conclude that the mind potentially struggles from injustice overload but it can help us understand the motivations of people who are either ultra-sensitive or non-empathetic.
And understanding is the key to fighting the ignorance which leads to the feeling of injustice.
Are people becoming too sensitive to injustice?  Working under the assumption that injustice is a natural response in the human psyche we can examine other natural responses.  Does increased frequency to pain make one more or less sensitive?  Certainly people can become calloused to pain and rewire their brains to ignore, divert, or misinterpret those signals.  Conversely those who have known joy find it easier to make their experiences in life more joyous than those perpetually miserable.  It seems that we can hardwire our brains to produce favorable responses more efficiently as we age.  So thereby the ease at which one can produce an emotion speaks to one's motivation.  A simple and perhaps obvious statement, but in the context of injustice one can begin to understand and answer the question on the table.  As we stated earlier the feeling of injustice triggers that fight or flight response in our heads.  Fear and anger are a result of that feeling of injustice.
Here we would like to make a contextual distinction between feelings and emotions here for the purposes of this essay: feelings are natural and brief responses in the human body that lead to emotions which help us frame and determine a situation in order to make decisions.  Fear and anger are emotions with a similar cause much like hunger, lust, or loneliness are emotions caused by feelings in the body.
Understanding that feelings are involuntary and it is the emotions that develop from those feelings that can be managed is the key to wisdom.  It becomes simple cause and effect.  If we hardwire our brains to always react a certain way given a certain input we dehumanize the spirit and puts on exhibit the ignorance that motivated that decision process.  Everyone hates that certain friend whose first reaction to every proposal is "no."  We call singularly emotional people robots.  We euthanize animals whose response to injustice is to always fight.  Being able to manage one's emotions is not only distinctive to humans, but mastery is sagacious.
So, are people becoming too sensitive to their feelings of injustice?  Certainly we are overloaded with information and these feelings are instigated more often now that in human past, however while the frequency by which those feelings are instigated has increased it is the mechanisms by which we develop our emotions that have evolved and all too often over simplified.  If we are to properly address the ignorance in our lives we must learn to properly balance our fear and anger.  Our humanity is exemplified in our ability to do so.
Rarely is the sense of injustice more powerful than when one is confronted with a child molester.  And a shift has occurred in society's reaction to these people from fear to anger.  We have developed lists for post-detained sexual offenders.  We ban them from our society.  We rejoice when they are rounded up and forced to live in inhumane conditions.  We take solace in our imbalanced schadenfreude.  By dehumanizing them we justify ourselves.  Throughout human history people have endeavored to elevate themselves by casting out or relegating the undesirables.  The problem occurs when, in the process of working out our emotions, we create a new injustice.  It is enough in today's society that just an accusation is enough to ruin a life.  It is remarkably dehumanizing for both the victim and those passing judgement.  We should recognize that the method used to form these emotions are likely based on ignorance.  People make poor decisions everyday.  Fortunately the vast majority come with little ramifications.  But we all possess the ability to make that one mistake with profound and overwhelming consequences; and to forget that is disturbingly foolish.
Remember that our fear and anger are the result of our natural response to injustice and that which makes us wise is our ability to manage those emotions.  We are so quick to seek retribution from those who have offended us.  It has led America to become a litigious society.  The politically correct reside in the fear that their emotions will reveal their ignorance.  And the internet has enabled the angry to virulently lash out at those who have offended them either directly or indirectly.  These emotions often signal the ignorance that led to the injustice in the first place.  And the quicker one is able to deduce that the more efficient one becomes in their ability to prevent further injustice.