Maccas - a modern watering hole
The yoghurt paradox
Words by Anekeaini Cheok
In a disconnected world, by a frozen Coke, and an urgent need perhaps one in which you go through to break the seal. entire days speaking only your coffee McDonalds. Maccas. Mickey D’s. Ex-Honourable Scomo’s favourite It is under the (rather unflattering) order and a rushed ‘thank you!’ to the bus driver, there is something public toilet. fluorescent restaurant lights that titillating about the shared experience we rest our throbbing feet, basking No matter what you call it, the of crowding around the pick up in the air-con in the summertime essence ultimately remains the same, while we debrief the events of the counter; receipt clutched in hand and and the gleaming golden arches are a evening. Sometimes tears are shed moaning about the wait. A flustered universal language in their own right. over a 24-piece Chicken McNugget worker calls out numbers in what box, and while one friend bursts into appears to be no particular order — The notion of an empty 117 then 124 and back to 119 — and hysterics, McDonald’s seems just about as every time their mouth opens, the plausible as walking down Eastern crowd lurches forward in unison, Avenue unapproached during the with bated breath, each person dreaded election season. The hoping to be the next. crowd differs throughout the day: from 6am, a smattering of It is a most curious sleep-deprived shift workers sight, and a most doing the breakfast run, curious collection of while 3pm brings along people: at one end of starved and feral highthe counter hunches schoolers. But it’s long after a lanky fellow in the sun has set that Maccas flannel pyjamas, is most abuzz — when it is eyes adorned with most like a watering-hole. the most spectacular purple bags. Beside A late-night Maccas feed him, a gym-bro twice his is an indispensable part of the size clutches the remnants uni experience, a rite of passage of a protein shake, subtly for all: stoned, sober, and everything peering at his flexed reflection in else in-between. The experience the restaurant window, oblivious to of tapping fervently against the snickering observers. And at the back another inevitably fingerprint-smudged self-serve of the growing crowd of UberEats screens, in synchrony with the person brings up that one video of pinkdrivers are girls with glittered slime-meat in a weak attempt to beside you, is just as much a part of cheekbones and feather boas, still the initiation into tertiary education as lighten the mood. It’s a method with riding concert highs and bouncing very little success, and they’re often it is to pull your first all-nighter — a in time to the tune of the beeping fry met with a chorus of groans and high-school habit you half-heartedly machine. But above their differences, gags as green-tinged faces become promised to give up. they are united under the banner of greener. There always seems to be greasy fries and corporate America. an underpaid worker, or a year 10 Too many of my evenings have student working for $16 an hour, ended in a drunken stumble to the Although the crowd eventually nearest Maccas — sometimes alone, hovering beside the bucket and mop dissipates, the camaraderie born at all times. You can almost hear other times linking arms with an of eating defrosted mystery meat equally intoxicated friend, our heads them praying to the venerable Ronald of unclear origin persists for much still pounding with the echoes of bad McDonald that they don’t have to longer. And when one person clean up someone’s midnight Big club music. Momentarily, I’m driven complains about soggy paper straws, Mac chunder. by little more than the most basic of we all nod in agreement. human urges: a thirst, quenched only Long live Ronald McDonald. “What can I get for you today?”
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COMEDY
Words by Asher McTaylor Choosing to suspend my disbelief is constant charity work, indulging the illusory whims of alleged figures around “me”. One must set aside the notion absolutes can be suspended. If belief is a spectrum, then disbelief isn’t. Atheists do not suspend their theism; they don’t have any. For any sense of progression and order, one looks to axioms: Unimpeachable certainties that enable us to develop memes, like language, which are then used to articulate how apocryphal axioms are.
time, like how I’ve hastily folded this debilitating handout?”.
outcome, if I want security in the society I indulge.
The Mothers in my neighbourhood started making their own Yoghurt as a means to brandish their new Thermomixes®.
Is it a Bootstrap Object, a selfreference famous in time travel?
A Yoghurt’s recipe contains infinite, heretofore unfathomable alternate dimensions. My stomach awaited the anxious joy of information only French engineering, mass produced with German engineering, could unlock. The Mothers recited:
The year 51,678 AACE, the last Tub of Yoghurt is preserved in the Chronogerator section of New Scottstralanadan’s local Cowalldis’ CyberFarms. The last QuectoTub of Jersey-Sleeve Bovine+ Yoghurt is transported back in time, approximately 5000 years before the birth of this writer’s suspended messiah, ensuring the founding of their mighty cultured empire.
“The first step in any yoghurt recipe is to go to your grocer, and This restores some security. buy some yoghurt”. My score of It’s a closed loop, thus exists axiom-built experience is eviscerated. independently from our reality. It isn’t Nothing is. a loss of order, it’s another thing, altogether. The idea to send it back in To make yoghurt, one must have time only exists because it was. yoghurt. The Lactobacillus found in The actual final product is Yoghurt — ideal for stimulating the considered a raw ingredient within The first axiom I learnt was serotonin in our gut, and creating itself. Is every batch of Yoghurt in primary school: “The shortest a healthy bowel biome — either distance between any two points is a more Yoghurty than the last, in reverted to its 5000 BCE state, this recursive fractal? How is straight line”. suggesting its competitions and something described and heralded symbiotic partners had all lost by others, my whole life, unprovable, I was offended by this concept: their mutations suited to that state, untraceable to any axiom other than “I live in Sydney. What’s a straight precisely when Yoghurt was sent just “Yoghurt”? line?” back… This is new. In other disbeliefs, “What do you expect me to do? or, Lactobacillus never evolves, Kill myself so I can walk through walls there’s been a chronology; people but refuses to be phased-out. (sentient or not) will attest to as a ghost? As a five year old, I’m Suspended in Time… Suspended in their truths. Yoghurt manifested expected to find means for matter Disbelief. itself; there isn’t even an origin to to occupy the same space as other the façade. There is no less safe matter, or purposefully warp spaceA word’s definition is not adequate if said word is used within. Buried under every Macquarie (meaning: “Son of a Ditch”?) Dictionary is an inevitable nucleus that only exists under the manifestation of a self-referential paradox, an unprovable definition.
PULP
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