canonicity: arby's.

In keeping with yesterday's theme of retroactively altering my life's canon, allow me to spin you a yarn about what inspired me to work for five years at America's favorite cowboy-themed quick-service establishment in my early twenties.

 

Everybody gets asked the question "what do you want to be when you grow up?" at some point or another in their lives. Some kids chose to become marine biologists, others brain surgeons, still others rocket scientists. It seems like children pick the most impossible goals to try to achieve, only to be let down when they learn of all the hard work and impossible odds that go into reaching these goals. It's like god's preparing children early with these little lessons for a life of disappointment. I was no different from the other children, with my wide-eyed idealism and dreams of a lucrative career in the fast food industry as a shift manager.

 

There's one thing that separated me from all the other children though.

 

I ended up living my dream.

 

What led me down this path, you may ask? I remember it just like it was yesterday. It was the summer of my 11th year. I had just graduated from my elementary school, and middle school awaited, promising a plethora of new experiences and opportunities to mature into the young adult that I was becoming. My eyes were opening to the opposite sex (although nothing would be done about that for years and years to come), I was first exposed to the type of rock that I would later become enamored with via MTV... it was an exciting time in my life.

 

That summer was just like any other summer in terms of ways to waste away the day. My friends and I would sit around my room playing two player Double Dragon 2 on Nintendo, we'd have squirt gun fights in the front yard, and we'd go for long walks to the arcade and video store, talking about Saturday morning cartoons and Launchpad McQuack. It was on one such long walk that fate intervened, and changed my life forever.

 

There's a part right next to the arcade, between the wall and the privacy fence, where you're only visible to the road for a split- second as they're driving by, and blocked off from everything else. I had a backpack full of tickets won from Ski-Ball and the Feed Big Bertha game, and two NES games shoved down either pants pocket, newly rented from the Video Giant a couple blocks from my house. When you're eleven, you don't take into consideration that this could be a dangerous scenario: walking down the mean streets of Waterford, Michigan with a pocket full of booty (in the pirate sense of the word). But reality hit hard that day.

 

My friends and I were jumped from behind by two teenagers, one with a peach-fuzz moustache and a rat-tail haircut, the other the shorter version of Marky Mark (of Funky Bunch fame). The details of the encounter are sketchy at best in my mind. I remember the shoves. The spits. The taunts. One of them pulled a butterfly knife, flipped it around in his fingers like some sort of Latino Zorro, then stabbed my friend's hand to the wall behind him, and threatened that if we didn't give up our shit, more harm would come to us.

 

It was then that he came out of the shadows. He moved with the quickness of a man that had spent half his life throwing change out of a drive-thru window at cars needing to get their food within 30 seconds at the window. The way he moved, the way he ducked and dodged and weaved between our assailants... this was obviously a man who was used to sprinting, be it between a fry station and a front counter, or a register and a phone. The vicious judo chops to the throat the man delivered to our two antagonists seemed inspired by fast food culture itself. They were reminiscent of a disgruntled fast food employee scooping fries violently into a fry carton.

 

That man saved our lives that day, and he disappeared just as quickly as he came. My friends, one nursing his hand, looked up in awe at the roof of the building that the man had just jumped with the greatest of ease, but my attention was drawn to the ground below -- to a single name tag laying on the pavement, the words SHIFT MANAGER scrawled ominously on the plain white plastic; the Arby's insignia in the top corner. It was all I could do to finally utter the words, "they must train their men in the ways of the ninja," but I quickly decided it was something more than that.

 

That day, I discovered my fate. There have been times when I've foolishly tried to deny it; working jobs at factories, drug stores, engineering plants, but it's always come back around to me. All the kids that I went to school with no doubt ended up working meaningless, soul-sucking jobs delivering pizza, tearing tickets at the movie theater, maybe even managing other fast food restaurants, such as McDonald's or Burger King. They will never know the true joy, the sheer bliss, of being the leader of a crew at Arby's... and I feel sorry for them.