There was a Chili's across the street from the theater, and because I wanted to grab a smoke somewhere out of the cold, and because I needed a couple of beers to wash out my brain, I thought, "What the hell?" I'd never been to a Chili's before; now I know why. On Sunday afternoon, the place was packed. To the rafters. There were about 300 servers on the floor catering to giant families and what looked like a field trip from the Moose Lodge, avoiding sticky tangles of screeching little hellions with french fries (excuse me, freedom fries) in their hair and shlepping trays of brightly colored food to tables full of gray men in brown suits. I ordered a beer, and I knew then what Hunter Thompson saw in the lobby of the Mint Hotel in Vegas during press check-in. Only I didn't have to spend hours in the desert getting bent on acid and ether to see the dinosaurs humping my leg. All I had to do was order a five-dollar beer and an Awesome Blossom, then sit back and enjoy the show. My visit to Chili's made me realize that there's a second enemy in the struggle for a new-American-food revolution: the American consumer. It sometimes seems that all foods (and I use that term rather loosely here) produced today for the collective American gut -- especially pre-packaged foods, double-especially theme-restaurant foods -- are targeted for consumption by one sugar-mad Midwestern fat kid who'll eat anything so long as it's vividly colorful, cheap, sweet, salty and comes in a portion large enough to choke a water buffalo. Extreme fajitas, blue ketchup, Awesome Blossoms, 99-cent triple cheeseburgers covered with frosting and sparklers, mile-long buffets crammed with a thousand varieties of congealed grease in salt sauce -- they're all designed for this one archetype of the American consumer. In the minds of the food scientists and demographers who daily come up with new ways to amp up the sugar content of, or inject cheez sauce into, everything from omelettes to chicken breasts, the whole purpose of living as an American -- the one surefire way to absolute bliss -- must be to jam as much torturously overwrought, sensuously overloaded pleasure down our throats as possible. And then do it every single day, until the sight of chicken soup without Skittles floating in it is abhorrent, and a slice of cheesecake looks naked until someone comes by, dips it in chocolate, covers it in gummy worms and serves it with a side of flaming strawberries. Faced with this enculturated gustatory extremism, what chance does a simple grilled-cheese sandwich have? Once you've tasted the Awesome Blossom, what thrill is there in a delicate shaving of baby Swiss melted between two slices of marbled rye? For that matter, why in the hell was this place jumping like they were giving away free beer and hand jobs when most independent restaurants have to shut their doors on Sunday just so the employees don't die from boredom? I know owners who would kill for a third of these numbers on a Sunday -- but no. You want to find the American gustatory conscience? It'll be down the road at Chili's, eating the Awesome Blossom and dying slowly of morbid obesity. Me? I had two beers and fled.