The other night I went out to eat and ended up going to a coal-fired pizza place that I hadn't gone to before. I'm a pretty big fan of pizza. Well, as big of a fan as anyone else. I'm a bit picky though. I don't really like thin crust, but I don't like super thick crust either. I like a nice crust just thick enough to have some nice crusts on the end to eat after the pizza.
I ordered a nice local beer I'm used to, tried another that I ended up having for my second. Told the waitress multiple times that I was sure that I wanted the local beer. I like good beers, but I also don't necessarily like high costs. Often I can get the local beer for a buck or two on sale in many local places, while others are often $4 or $5, or even as much as $7 or $9. Sometimes, depending on the place, beers can be as high as $13. They just love to gouge prices on alcohol.
I ordered a large 16-inch pizza with kalamata olives and mushrooms, after an overly fancy salad that wasn't even really that good. So many places love to charge so much for "fancy" meals that aren't ever that good. The salad could barely get on my fork, had some kind of dumb soft cheese, and flatbread. The pizza was salty and I'm pretty sure used canned mushrooms. All of this came for way too much money. The pizza was close to $24 and somewhat burned.
The only good thing about the night was the cute waitress that wasn't even supposed to be waiting on me but smiled at me multiple times and ended up bringing me my second beer.
Other than wishing I had a chance to talk to the cute girl that seemed to smile at me for some reason, it all made me just wish I was in another country.
I don't like extravagance when it's not worth it. Like the clear chairs and fancy settings at the steem meetup when I first got here. I don't like that stuff. I prefer a nice mug of beer with a nice pizza for a nice price, served on an unfinished table, shared with a few friends.
Things have gone off the rails in the US. Everything is expensive because the dollar is worthless and everyone earns so much of it they just waste it all the time. Continual inflation and ever increasing wages. We can't just have some guaranteed minimums and work for the rest. Why can't we just have healthcare and enough money for a few nice things and places to go to find jobs that are better for us. Instead we have to magically find the perfect job by applying everywhere that might have a job we might want. It's dumb.
I'm in a country I don't want to be, that killed my ancestors, but I'm told I have to love and it's simply gone off the rails. We pay so much and work so much for shit that's just not worth it. We work our lives away for burned salty pizza.
I wanna live in a place where I can easily find people that need my services and just takes care of me. Why is it so bad to have a country where when you get sick, they take care of you? I don't want to live in communist Russia, just something better than this. A place that makes sense. Somewhere not stuck in the dark ages while they blast you with adverts to buy shit from the 21st century.
In the meantime, I guess I just have to eat burned salty pizza.
By Lotus Head from Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa - (source), CC BY-SA 3.0, via wikipedia
