Pretty good today.

I don't eat at Subway. It's one of the food joints I just can't stomach. It somehow falls into the "fast food" category for me and I basically avoid those places for reasons of health and discordant marketing imagery (the colors green and yellow accompanied by underground train iconography do not help my appetite.) And I'm not sure what it is, but I'm standing there watching them make the Subway sandwich -everything seems fine- and then I bite into it and it just tastes a gooey, greasy pile of fast food. Do they still offer "oil" on your sandwich? This always cracked me up. They toss together a whole, healthy deli-fresh submarine and then turn to you with the bottle: "Oil?" And, God bless him, I know it really helped Jared lose all that weight (and gave him a lucrative career.) Nowadays, just the smell of a Subway sandwich place helps me lose weight, too.

I am turned off by sandwich joints were the food preparers wear plastic baggies on their hands like old schoolhouse cafeteria marms. I mean, is the food they're making that disgusting that they don't even want to touch it? Okay, so they're wearing the plastic gloves so that they don't get your food dirty. Well, why is Subway tolerating such filthy employees? Don't tell them the vegetables all grow out of the dirt in some old field and then are machine-loaded into large trucks and driven down the freeway for hundreds of miles. Yes, but it's washed and covered in plastic. Fine. Interestingly, after your order is prepared they put it in another plastic bag. Don't touch it!

How did Subway make 'the sandwich' a fast food? It's brilliant, really. Despite my non-participation, Subway has nearly 30,000 shops in 87 countries, including Saudi Arabia (but I'll bet you can't order ham.) It's true, I read it on Wikipedia. There are three Subway stores in the Pentagon, over 200 on U.S. military bases, a couple in Iraq, and 900 inside of WalMart, so I suppose it's just a matter of time before the far-left demonizes them.

At one point, I patronized Quizno's in defiance of the plastic glove syndrome that spooks me. Their sandwiches were nice and toasty and their hands were clean and manicured and the color scheme of the store I found much more appealing. But then I noticed that their sandwiches started getting smaller while their prices crept up, and then one day I got a Quizno that had a half a gallon of some orange sauce swathed on it and I never went back. Today I just go into the grocery store and bother the people in the deli to make me one. They always seem annoyed, having been bothered to stop whatever it was they were doing, and they wipe their brow and glare at you over the counter like all you want is a freaking sandwich? Anything else? I know. They work so hard on all those salads, and they're presented so well there under the glass next to the melon balls and stuffed and sauteed mushroom caps. Anyway, it's just a sandwich. I had one yesterday. It didn't blow me away. I'm not sure what it would take to. I need help.


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