Accounting For Taste

Each person is basically an incomprehensible, impenetrable being where most things are concerned. I know I am. To think that anyone could be understood to any useful degree seems like folly to me. I'll admit that I have my impressions of people that lead me to think sometimes that I know them well enough to predict thoughts, inclinations and future behaviour, or to determine their reasons for doing or saying things after the fact. I'm sensible enough to know that most of that is incorrect, though. I don't place any particular weight on most of that stuff, and don't act on its basis. If more people held that attitude, we just might be a little better off collectively. The primary thing that got me on this track is taste in restaurants.

I've written about the yogurt place my improv class goes to. Now, I'm in no position to chastise others for sticking to one thing exclusively, so I won't be critical of those who steer us to that place over and over again. I do feel I have room to say something about the undue passion and enthusiasm for the place. It's good yogurt, sure. It's affordable by comparison with competing places, but the staff is somewhat insensitive- why grant fealty to a place that opens up all the doors late at night in the winter? I guess not everyone asks that question. Is the place worthy of reverence and blind loyalty? I don't know. It may be so. It isn't from my perspective, but that's just why I say that people are far too complicated and unresponsive to any system of rules to be understood. Restaurants may just be the perfectly emblematic illustration of that.

There's another place which elicits even more love from patrons, and for even less reason from my point of view. It's a chicken restaurant. Locations are plentiful elsewhere in the country, but have been less so in southern California for some time. That's changing now, but a segment of the population which includes plenty of people I know didn't wait for that to slavishly patronize it. Again, I don't feel there's sufficient grounds to judge, because I don't think I understand. We had this same chain in Arizona, and I'll say that while it was good, it didn't stand out from the other restaurants in the mall food court. I would personally never drive well out of town to visit it. There are many good chicken restaurants in LA. This place is ascendant, and Pioneer Chicken is dying. Where is the justice in that? Of course, I don't expect the people aligned with the other place to understand my taste for Pioneer.

When I'm fully moved into my new place, there's a different chicken place entirely that my new roommate and his fiance just love. I don't understand it. It's all right. Worth going a lot? Not to me, but maybe to some. As is so often and so correctly stated, there's no accounting for taste. It's developed into quite an industry to try, but in my mind that's wasted money. I guess dispensing with that business would be yet another terrible blow to the economy, so I guess we'd better stick with it, however haphard the process and unreliable the results.