It's not just your identity, it's also your burrito

Earlier this week, I found myself hungry and on St. Mark's, and as I often do, I reflexively headed for Chipotle. I ordered my usual - soft chicken tacos, lettuce, cheese, possibly guacomole and no sour cream - and my heart grew with excitement while my stomach expanded in anticipation. The tacos and I would be one in mere minutes.

As the soon-to-be-mine tacos took their place inside the red plastic basket, I realized I had not had enough cash to pay for my non-homoerotic meat injection. So like any good fiscally irresponsible American, I whipped out my American Express Blue Student card and put that summabitch on plastic.

The receipt inched out of the cash register and I held my hand out so the cashier could hand me a pen. Except the pen never came. I stood, confused.

"Where do I sign?" I asked.
"You don't have to sign anything," she responded, "You're good to go (isn't that a Taco Bell slogan?)."
"Are you sure?" I asked again.

Like that, the excitement for the impending arrival of tacos in my stomach dipped not insignificantly.

If the intent was to save me time by skipping a step, then it backfired. Because however many seconds I saved by not signing a receipt was offset by the time I stood there confused and bewildered. Plus, as superfluous a process as Chipotle might consider signing a receipt to be (and to be honest, it's not hard to forge my signature - it's just a scribble and you can hardly read it), it's an important one - it's like you know you and a girl are headed to the bedroom, but you have to at least spend a few token seconds making out in the living room. It's just not right to skip a time honored tradition.

Of course, the more important issue was the security. Someone, anyone could steal my wallet and order burritos, tacos and burrito bols to their heart's content. How could Chipotle, the most heavenly of national fast food chains, allow this?

You might argue that there's only so much money you can spend at Chipotle. One could order a burrito, chips and salsa and a bottle of beer, and still come in under $20, I think. Why not just let some crackhead take his girl on a date? What's the harm, you ask? I could stand a lot worse fate, like someone charging a big screen TV on my card at Best Buy.

But money is not the point. It's about the Chipotle experience. It's the idea that someone could be experiencing la joie de Chipotle on my dime without earning it. To eat at Chipotle with stolen money is to cheapen the experience. It's an experience that should be earned, whether as a reward for a hard day's work or a bright spot in an otherwise bad day. That anyone could march in and eat undeserved Tex-Mex makes my blood boil.

Update:
nycblonde kindly informs us,

It's not a Chipotle policy, it's an AMEX policy. Anything under $25 doesn't need a receipt.

Thanks and boy, do I feel like an idiot for not reading that Terms of Services thing that AmEx sends me every now and then. Still, my outrage remains intract, except it's now directed at AmEx. Though I don't know which is worse, someone getting an undeserved Chipotle fix or a frickin $4 latte going on my credit card bill.

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So last week, our friends over at Slack Lalane posted a delightful mashup of The Big Lebowski and some classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which just about made my day, and then hours later, my friend JR in LA sent me the TMNT teaser, and that point, my nipples were perking up like Summer Sanders on coke. And I was all ready to do an early-90s nostalgia post, but one huge problem - the scarcity of YouTube clips of Parker Lewis Can't Lose.

So I figure I could just put a Parker Lewis DVD on my Netflix queue and rip some footage. But guess what? There is no Parker Lewis DVD. How could this be? Do we, as a nation, no longer care about synchronizing our Swatches and eluding Larry Kubiak?
Gentlemen, coolness has been abandoned.

Though I did find out that Milla Jovovich was on the show once, so my reasearch was not all for naught. And I have to admit, I remember pretty much nothing from that show, or anything else from 1992 for that matter.

Finally, apropos of pretty much nothing, from the people who didn't bring you the Ghostface doll, the Biz Markie doll: