Dear McDonald's

Dear McDonald's:

We've been through a lot together. You were my first fast-food love. All I had to do was walk down to the corner, and you were there to provide me with Quarter Pounders and Mr. Pibb. My first sweet taste of ordering food by myself occurred in your welcoming confines, and I didn't hold it against you that your shake machine was out of order.

Then you started to change. More accurately, I grew old enough to notice that your meat had the appealing color and texture of freshly-poured highway slurry. Your fries, too, began to look more and more like they had been left out in the rain for a week. Come to think of it, I don't remember your shake machine EVER being in order.

Then you eliminated Grimace, Mayor McCheese, and, most grievously, the Hamburglar from your ad campaigns as if they had never even existed. I didn't need to see Ronald McDonald's Pennywise-from-"It"-lookalike big-shoed ass smeared all over your products, but I soldiered on. Really, it was the McNuggets that kept me coming back - until you started charging for extra dipping sauce. Strangely, I never realized it before, but compressed and bleached chicken colons, eyes, gizzards, and anuses just don't taste the same when the last couple have to be eaten without their customary sheen of mesquite BBQ sauce.

You claim to be more "adult" now. More "grown-up." More "health-conscious." You pimp your Fruit & Walnut Salad like it was better for me than a six-mile run and a high colonic. All the while, you appeal to my witty, urbane sensibilities with advertising catchphrases like "i'm lovin' it." It's true, I am lovin' "it" - "it," of course, being my ability to do the following:
-Walk into one of your fine establishments in the middle of the night.
-Drag the illiterate counterperson's attention from the contents of his inner ear.
-Negotiate an order via hand signals to the counterperson, who doubtless only has that job because he was just released either from a special education program or Mexico.
-Take two bites of a cheeseburger and then realize that it fails to meet even the most basic requirements for food: soaking up alcohol and not causing me to vomit.

I won't get started on the fat people, because it's their prerogative to eat there, God bless 'em. Maybe a round of midnight street golf with their friends of every possible racial permutation will help them run off that burger-induced spare tire. Still, as for me, you could be serving a Value Meal of beluga caviar and Grey Goose for 99 cents, and I would still go to Taco Bell instead. Let me make this abundantly clear, in case it's not already: Like myself, NOBODY I have EVER met will eat at a McDonald's given any other food option. If a starving man stumbled forth from a Soviet gulag into one of your restaurants, within a week he would be begging for the maggot-infested bread and melted snow they were feeding him in Siberia.

Don't do it for me; I'm already gone. But for your own good, clean up your act, before even rural Arkansas and Louisiana towns forsake you.

P.S. As I write this letter, I am full of burgers from In-N-Out. How does that make you feel?