This Place…What’s up with the Food???

I’m in Missoula Montana at the moment.  Why, you may ask, would I be in Missoula Montana?  Work, of course.  I’ve been temporarily exiled so that I might learn some new material and bring it home to my own people where I might spread it like a disease.  Luckily, it’s a disease worth catching. 

I’m staying in the Hilton Garden Inn.  The Hotel is pretty, but I think there’s a monster up to shenanigans in the elevator shafts and the walls are so thin I had the pleasure of listening to the couple in the room beside mine fight with a screaming passion that I’ve never myself known.  Seriously, that was the kind of fight that, were I back home, would probably end in a few gun shots or multiple stabbings. 

I’ve only had about 4 hours of sleep since I awoke on Saturday and I’m past the stupid, giddy form of sleep deprivation.  I’ve moved on to half catatonic, half pumpkin (a catatonic pumpkin who still has writing skills).  So yeah, I’m horribly tired, which puts me in a mood that’s teeter totting on a fence of apathy with despair on one side and rage on the other.  It’s a bad place to be, especially for a Taurus who cannot find any descent food. 

Oh god the food!  It’s not even food!  It’s a blasphemous bastardization of gruel at best.  I thought McDonalds would be safe, but noooooo.  Chock full of yuck.  The kind of putrid vomit that only humans whose taste buds have been mutated after a lifetime of eating things that starving boars wouldn’t even eat.  So today I decided to try the Ihop (not one of my favorite places in SLC but I was starving).  IT WAS WORSE!!  I shudder and my skin crawls just thinking of it. 

I actually lost my appetite.  “I” actually lost my appetite!  That just doesn’t’ happen.  I LOVE food.  I like the way it smells and the way it tastes and the way it feels between my teeth and on my tongue (most food anyway).  But I’m suddenly in a place where I don’t think I dare eat anything that doesn’t come out of a can that was manufactured in China. 

So I decided to see if I can find a grocery store.  Which is quiet a trek, you see.  As my company didn’t see fit to give me a rental car, even though I’m stuck out in BFE Montana.  So what do I do?  I put on my walking shoes and start hoofing.  I walk and I walk.  And I walk and I walk.  I pass a train yard and a bunch of warehouses.  It’s warm and the air smells like dirt (not as in yuck dirt, I mean the amazing smell of fresh soil and spring flowers).  The sky is a lighter shade of blue here and the big hills that surround Missoula (they call them mountains) are bright green and covered with these patches of little, yellow flowers and are sparsely speckled with evergreens.  Looks like a scene out of a 1920’s painting…I can’t remember what the style is called.  I’ll add it in later if I can find it.  It’s pretty…

The closest store that I could find that sold anything even remotely resembling groceries was Target.  How sad. 

Something else I noticed too, this is a place of many empty sidewalks.  No one walks anywhere.  As I strode proudly along, I noticed that everyone who passed me in their cars stared as though I were some kind of freak doing a jig.  Well, I’ve always been stared at like that.  I guess I kind of stand out.   But it’s different here.  Then I realized that no one was walking.  I’ll bet that if those sidewalks were removed, no one would notice. 

Well, I’m just rambling now.  I need to put this hungry pumpkin to bed.