By Manuel Carrillo III

I went to the Olive Garden with my mum and pop the other day. It had been a while since I had eaten in a filthily corporate establishment, so I was appalled in a way I hadn’t been appalled in a long time. In addition to my initial disgust, I was also blindsided by something I hadn’t endured in a while: my hatred for children.

Mega corporate establishments and lame campy families seem to go hand-in-hand. Let’s look at examples of the corporate love affair with lame-ass family culture and how it makes my sphincter cramp up like the Pentagon after a security breach.

1.        Walt Disney World/Disney Land – the “ultimate” family destination.

2.        Other theme parks like SeaWorld – Anheuser-Busch’s perfect crime.

3.        Corporate-Chain Family Restaurants

Disney

I see a lot of girlfriends forcing their guys to buy season passes to the Disney theme parks and it is absolutely terrifying. Once you walk through the Disneyland gates, within seconds you’re seeing children crying, complaining, screaming, and just being little stupid walking, talking diseases that originally festered in the uterus. I haven’t been to Disneyland in 15 years for this exact reason. Why would I want to be reminded of a possible part of my life I’m trying to avoid? Girlfriends usually don’t have a problem with seeing these little catastrophes running amok in corporate-manufactured child heaven because they can fantasize about their little children being this way, and women usually embrace the possibility of having a child … a lot of men too, but not me.

Anheuser-Busch

Anheuser-Busch was smart enough to make money off the disease created by improper penile – vaginal contact; a.k.a. the knock-up. Anheuser-Busch produces a product that leads to the start of families (however inadvertent the start) and by the time the kids are able to really begin sucking every morsel of life from their parents, they start screaming their demands to go to Anheuser-Busch-owned SeaWorld. And the process goes full circle: Anheuser-Busch provides the problem: a wild intoxicating night leading to a catastrophic knock-up, and the solution: SeaWorld to get your little crumb crunchers off your back. It’s a great business model and it really reinforces Homer Simpson’s summary of beer, “The cause of and solution to all of life’s problems”.

Corporate-Chain Family Restaurants

In my Olive Garden episode, I went to sit down while waiting for a table. A little runt was sitting in the bench built comfortably for two people. The boy got up when I sat down. Ah, stranger fear – a fear I love parents instilling in their children. A few minutes later the kid gets up and starts walking around the waiting area with his hands over his eyes. He comes up to me and taps on both my knees. “Hey daddy, look at me,” he says in a weird playful low-tone little kid voice. I wanted to say, “No, I’m the guy you ran away from when I sat down.” But he didn’t stay around long enough for me to say anything. He eventually blindly found his father, and continued acting like a stupid little kid. Luckily my table was called soon after. I’m not sure if it’s Olive Garden’s profit-junkie, cost-cutting business model, or the sight of bitchy kids everywhere with their stupid parents that makes the ingredients in the food taste chemically compromised. Either way, I avoid corporate-chain family restaurants like a night with Leroy in county jail.

Oh, why can’t kids just chill the fuck out? When I was half my current height, at banks, grocery stores or wherever, I would sit quietly and wait when told to do so. When I’d see my peers being little shits running amok, I would just flash a confused and disapproving glare. Kids like that need a belt to the ass, but corporal punishment is soon becoming a thing of the past as more and more parents get thrown in the slammer for it.

To ameliorate this, the next time your kids start pissing me the hell off, I will strongly encourage them to go play in traffic.