Tie a Day (Year 2), Number 118

The tie I wore today is from the Save the Children collection. The design is titled, “Busy City,” by Josh, age 6 . Yellow is not a color I normally wear so I had to find dark colors to tone it down. A grey shirt and pants combined with the brown of my shoes and belt, just to offset the yellow in the tie, seemed to do the trick.

The tie reminded me of the family road trips that we took this summer, especially the one we took to the Eastern Shore. On this one trip my wife and I noticed something that was very peculiar. While traveling down the highway, we found that the roadside advertisements took a strange turn.

When I am traveling in a car on long trips, I tend to think like this, “Where is the next bathroom,” or maybe, “I could use some food and something to drink,” but I never really picture specific things. For example, bacon; I have never really given it much thought because bacon is available everywhere around my house. Bacon is an awesome food. But driving down the road I see that bacon is available at a little convenience shop in the middle of nowhere and the store advertises with huge billboards. Bacon just strikes me as an odd thing to put on 20 ft by 40 ft sign just to get people to stop at your store, even if it is crazy good. But it is never alone on the signs… and this is the bizarre part.

The following items are advertised together along the highway on house sized boards; Peanuts, Bacon, Cigarettes, and Fireworks. By themselves, each one is not so bad, but together they seem truly odd. If these products were only advertised by one store, maybe we never would have noticed as we tried to keep to the speed limit to avoid a speeding ticket in the middle of nowhere-ville, Virginia. But this was not an isolated observance.

Does anyone travel down the road and think, “I am out of cigarettes. Oh look, there is a place right up the road that has Bacon, too! Man, I am hungry… and what goes good with bacon? Peanuts! Yes! Just 5 miles up the road. And it has fireworks? That is awesome. Junior still has eight fingers. He’ll love some M-80’s!”

Maybe I am just out of touch with the rest of the world.