7/11 at 7-Eleven

MeFi tells me that 7-Eleven is giving away free Slurpees in honor of the day that could be its namesake, 7-11, which happens to be today. However, Small Southern City does not have any 7-Eleven stores, which isn't really a big deal except when it's a hot July day and they're offering free high-fructose corn syrup and food coloring frozen drinks. SSC does have a gas/mini-mart establishment named simply "Joy" on a slightly sketchy semi-urban semi-sprawl road, but I've never been there.

The 7-Eleven figured more prominently into my development as a young adult in West Virginia, but even more important is regional food-and-gas chain Go-Mart. Go-Mart doesn't even have a website, meaning the company doesn't need your freaking internet or that it went bust in the last couple of years. A brief drive into the sparsely populated area outside of You Call This A City?, where I grew up, will get you a gas/snack/self-degratory Appalachian souvenir shop called Pit 'n' Git (Now With 33% More Local Flavor!). I love the name of Pit 'n' Git, for its clarity in describing what one does at the shop, for its use as a guide to the phonetic particulars of the regional accent, and for its pleasant use of the double-contracted "and."

Eat'n Park, a chain of barely mediocre restaurants that breached the wilderness of WV, is guilty of utter contracted "and" abuse. Few people are able to pass its sign without having their lives marred by the unanswerable question: "Does that mean Eat and Park, or Eating Park?" Neither option satisfies me. What the hell is an eating park? Don't you park, and then eat?

Two years after the You Call This A City? Eat'n Park opened, its doors unceremoniously closed. I like to think it was a result of the boycott of a people protesting the bastardization of quaint store names into the meaningless slogans of a greedy corporate world.

Or maybe it was just that the wait staff there was always too high to pour a glass of ice water.