I remember eating much crap at KFC many years ago, and probably shortening my lifespan considerably. I have not eaten there in, it must be years. You see, we didn’t know better back then. They used to sell corn on a stick.
You see, they used to sell corn on a stick at KFC. It came in a yellow plastic bag filled with some liquid butter-like substance and it was impossible to eat it without creating a mess. They stopped selling the corn years ago. They sold macaroni with cheese-like sauce, beans that weren’t half bad, corn bread that was usually cooked like a stone, and mashed potatoes in an extruded plastic foam container. I’m not sure they were actually made from potatoes, but they came with or without gravy. You had to ask to get without gravy, since the gravy was the spiciest thing you had ever eaten, and half the time they gave you gravy anyway and you had to yell at them. And they had potato salad (which doesn’t have salad in it, at all, but they call it salad anyway for some reason), and coleslaw. You could buy a bucket of coleslaw without any meat if you wanted, just the coleslaw. They would give you a two or three pound bucket of the stuff.
KFC also sold chicken with batter and without batter. Now most people eat one of three cuts of chicken: the breast, the thigh, and the leg (wings were not in fashion at the time, until Domino’s Pizza invented “Buffalo Wings”, which they served with white stuff and celery. Got a funny story about Domino’s. Well, it’s not so much as funny as it is long, but I’ll save it for later.). What everyone in the entire universe called the breast, KFC called it a “keel”. If you asked for a breast they gave you some unidentified cut of meat that was entirely made from bones. You had to ask for a keel if you wanted a chicken breast.
Some years later they invented a chicken sandwich with imitation barbeque sauce. It was made from the garbage cuts of the chicken, and sometimes you would find gristle and sinew in it, but they put cocaine in the sauce so you would eat fifteen of them and not care (no fooling, I once ate fifteen White Castle hamburgers, but those things are only like three ounces, so it’s no big deal, AND I also ate an entire cake from a buffet, one piece at a time, going back again and again until it was all gone).
One thing I remember about KFC, I think, was that they never gave away toys like the other stores. McDonald’s and Burger King gave away toys. (Burger King food SUCKED and still sucks, except the Western Whopper, which had onion rings on it, but they only had that for a month or something and then canceled it. And the best item McDonald’s ever had was the Arch Deluxe, which cost the company fifty billion dollars or something because they had a huge marketing campaign and I was one of only six people who actually at the things.) Hell, even Taco Bell gave toys (I also got food poisoning once, but that’s another story). But KFC never did.
A while later KFC introduced a ring cake. It was fake chocolate with this white glaze or something on top that was pure sugar. You could buy a whole cake and a whole big thing of soda, but it wasn’t that great.
Somehow I was always able to eat and eat and never gain a single pound. I weigh the same as I did when I was 13, which is good because most of my clothes from high school haven’t fallen apart totally yet so I still wear them. It saves a ton of money, and since pretty much everything is black I never go out of style, not that I ever was in style to begin with. It’s easier when I don’t have to make decisions about this stuff.
I think I was talking about chicken. Yeah, if KFC goes out of business I would not really care, I don’t think. I haven’t eaten there in years and years, and have no desire to go back. Still, it does remind me of simpler times, and I will miss that. I don’t know if I will ever regale anyone with reminiscences of halcyon days of my youth at KFC or Taco Bell, being an exile. If any of the natives here decide to take me in, maybe, but until then I have y’all to listen to an old man’s stories about nothing.