REVIEW: Wingstop

Towards a Greater Taxonomy of Groupmunchery

I’m not above admitting membership to the most sordid of männerbunds. I mulched around the same cul-de-sacs as the rest of you. I knew when to hover and when to scram. I’m not saying I’m some sort of master criminal but I know how it feels when the handle slips out the elastic waistband and onto the linoleum, I know when the cart’s got cat shit in it, all the best toeholds in all the worst fences. Was I a card-carrying Bad Kid? Who’s to say, but everybody knows that when you catch the guerrilla band you hang em all, cooks and quartermasters all. I had a low effort, stress free conception of juvenile delinquency, think of it as shooting a documentary without a camera, gonzo journalism without any kind of silly hat or pen and pad. Sit and observe the male organism for a while, just barely on the periphery of inclusion but close enough to let the campfire lick you and you will see plainly and pathetically the meek, obsessive need for clumping. Male clumping is a reek and monstrous phenomenon. The barbarity of the collective clumpmind scales steeply with additional compute like any of your artificial intelligences, and the emergent behaviors are just as hallucinatory and terrifying. One teenage boy is a skateboard with biological attachment, headphones on, the night is just humming, everything’s alright. Fine. Two teenage boys is a chum session. OK, they’re going to capitalize on some amazing deals at the gas station and kick the cans all the way home. That’s fine. One more and you’re teetering. Heinlein correctly identifies three as the perfect size for a partisan cell. There is an ambiguity here. Three chums on the street corner. What are they up to? Hovering at the edge of vision… what are they up to… Three is specifically dangerous because all you need is one radical, one swing voter. The dissenter will never leave, even if he’s outnumbered. He’ll stick around no matter what because playing the crank and the codger is a fetish object in its own right. What’s the point of being right when you never get to consummate your righteousness, who the hell is anyone to deny you the pleasure of the I-told-you-so? Three pairs of feet allow you to set up the Triangle on some sorry bastard, provided you get him on the floor, three guys allows you to lock the target in a freefire entanglezone of shitkicking as opposed to two which leaves at least one angle open for egress. Four boys and you have enough to “drop in.” You have moved from cell to squadron. You can begin the specialization of labor, the assigning of tasks. In most cases this will happen on its own, according to outsized physical traits, you can imagine the quickest two will form the spear’s head, lookout saved for the lank of limb, the chubbiest for the nasty brutish stuff, although contrary to popular understanding, he requires cajoling, for big kids are very pleasant by nature, generally unwilling to use their bulk for evil. Five boys in a gaggle and you begin to gain special operations capability, splintering, black ops. Six and the Lord of the Flies begins to whisper in their ears. Seven is cursed, seven is the size of a McCarthy posse dragging entrails real or invisible up and down the sidewalk. Eight is similarly terrifying. It is the largest it can get and still have a seatbelt for every man inside a Honda Odyssey. Nine, ten, stick the runts in the trunk. The Carl’s Jr. near my house shut its doors forever and ever because kids were coming after school and dumping water on the floor. Several 32 ounces a time, dumped on the floor. “Sir, your largest soda, please.” Why did they do it? I imagine it had something to do with dumping in unison. Collective splashing, unleashing the fountains of the deep. Watch a toddler mete out justice to his figurines and you will understand why the Old Testament was written. It’s not a simple need to smash & destroy or an automatic compulsion towards delinquency, it’s really the kinetic aspect, the stylistic pyrotechnics of environmental destruction. You begin to understand the popularity of fireworks. A former classmate specialized in sticking in sticking firecrackers in rats