fragment of a journal entry from god knows when...
...It is Two AM here in Colorado and I have just come from a disappointingly dense and strange family reunion, that when compared with what I have formerly known about family reunions on my mother's side was what an isolated abandoned college freshman dorm meal is to a fully laid home cooked table. There were no games, no organized activities. We ate in the groups we had arrived with, in the large and nearly vacant commuter college cafeteria. The food was furnished by Sodexo, who my brother was familiar with from his years in the food business and concert promotion.
“They do a lot of prisons, and colleges, for that same reason. They run everything. From the food carts to the cafeterias to the vending machines.”
I remembered a company like that. When myself and my ex-wife traveled to the Grand Canyon for the last appending comma of our distinctly unimpressive honeymoon. The company in that instance was called Xantara and they owned everything on the South Rim, as far as we could see without exiting the long dark park road back out to the state highway.
And it was not just that they had built this gaudy, garish tourist outpost upon the site of one of the more beautiful (and traditionally sacred) sites of majestic mother nature, but that they thought it gave them the right to charge me $4 for a bottle of water, and to only serve the Sudexo Greatest Hits at their cafeteria — hotdog in plain bun: $8, hamburger: $14, hamburger with soda: $16 — as if the menu itself was some sort of entrenchment against an invading army of cultural alternatives of alien sauces and flavor.