junk food portraits

It's getting to be that time of year when I start to wonder what to do with the blog.  What should the blog do?  What should the blog be about?  My garden is dead; I am eating a lot of lentils; I am doing a lot of sitting around in my room.  Does anyone want to see the soup I made yesterday?  How long can one blog live?  I actually think about these things, especially in the winter.  I thought that a week or two of posts about Christmas lights would be seasonal and fun, but it turns out that I live in a pagan town.  Most of the houses are completely without holiday decoration.  They look dark and cold.  I walk around town each night to ward off seasonal depression.  On some streets, like Williams street in Northampton—oh boy is that a crappy street—the shabby old houses are situated right on the road.  They have no front yards.  It's unimproved, New England asphalt, broken sidewalks, and cheerless rental homes.  This town isn't really a pagan town; it's just a rental town that is full of people (like myself) who are too educated for God.  So, to find the holiday decorations, you have to venture into the neighborhoods where the permanent residents live.  So, until then, here are some portraits of junk food.  

    
Those appear to be some french fries.  I am fairly certain this picture was taken at Spare Time, the bowling alley on Pleasant street.  Bowling alleys tend to be good places to go if you want to find artifacts from bygone eras.  There is nothing particularly bygone about the classic red and white checked paper basket liner in this picture, nor is there anything particularly bygone about the plastic ketchup cup, but I will persist with this theory nonetheless because the molded, fiberglass seat that the fries are setting upon is probably older than many of the teenage bowlers who sit on it during late-night sessions of lunar bowling.  As someone onto whom the label "foodie" is often misapplied, I want to say that I like crappy french fries.  I like food in general.  If this current food fanaticism did not exclude all but the most trendy joints, preparations, and styles, and if "foodie" were not synonymous with a certain level of mainly white affluence, I could get behind it more.  I mean, I want "foodie" to include McDonald's and boutique wine n cheese shops such as Provisions on Crafts Ave, Northampton.   

I ate this Big Mac sometime last summer, but it would have been incongruous to post it at that time because I was probably more interested in posting about the organic veggies growing in my garden.  Ah, yes, gardens.  Indeed, there are so few homes in this town that are decked out with cheerful holiday lights, but what I realized after noticing that is that many of those same homes are decked out with raised beds and little veggie patches in the summer; so it isn't a question of God or Godlessness, but a question about which values prevail in a town.  In this town, we like our organic gardens more than we do the baby Jesus.