Suburbank: Tales of Hooters — Where Can Wisdom Be Found?

Reading Harold Bloom’s new book, “Where Can Wisdom Be Found?”, I decided to take James Gun, the newbie worker from Omnibus, and our twenty-something secretary to The Place for a quick lunch-hour wisdom hunt. My mind was filled with questions. Could wisdom be found in the inanity of struggled actress chatter? Could it be found in booby ogling? What is the direct comparison between Ecclesiastes and skin-tight orange biker shorts? And what can we learn, if anything, from the booby proletariat?

Shakespeare and Plato and Socrates — well, maybe not Plato and Socrates — liked to look at young nymphs in tight frocks for a myriad of reasons. Moreover, a damnable amount of the world’s most capable poetry was created to untangle bodice lacings in an atmosphere of shared passion and excitement. I concur with Bloom that such poetry serves a straight-forward, practical function, and like the Yahwist, the author of Ecclesiastes, and Cervantes, our very own Hooters of Burbank is a form of “poetry”, or “eye poetry”, that scrutinizes our racks in infinitely-recursive, self-referential celebration of the sexual identity.

It is true that Hooters, in stark contrast to Proust or Tolstoy, is a banal fish trap, an idiocy and mind-numbing conversational black-out that can barely be tolerated for one hour. And yet, when one pulls at the bra cups of this eternally unbound and unmasked meat blimp flotilla, delightfully tacky and yet unrefined Orange Pimpernels are these girls! masked by the non-threat of middle class ladder climbing and establishment through marriage to rich computer programmers. And wisdom can be found staring at their tits.

Wisdom also can be found not taking a girl with us when we go. As the Yahwist author of the Septuagint has put forth in omens and portents, girls are jealous creatures by design, and like Ogden Nash has mentioned, we crave the customary feminine attention but our food is late, we seek the close proximity of the D cups but our hostesses remain uninterested in us, we see our kitsch-choked atmosphere no longer mood-changing but imprisoning and unsatisfactory. Hell, indeed, hath no fury like a woman’s scorn.

Wisdom can further be found by not getting a grilled cheese sandwich to go for our prudish human resources officer in a box that says “Hooters” on it.

Now go back and read this article again.