COLUMN: Take advantage of cheap rebellion

It’s the little acts of rebellion that are the best – staying at Motel 6 and eating at Denny’s in Moab when everyone else is selecting from long, exotic menus and bedding down in rustic bed and breakfast retreats.

It is cheap rebellion and less dangerous than chaining yourself to trees or lying down in front of Israeli tanks.

It’s not that you love Motel 6, but you admire that they are brave enough to actually put their prices up on the sign and you know their TVs and phones work. Also, they don’t bother with that continental breakfast farce that must have everybody who actually lives in Europe laughing, because donuts and bad coffee should really be called a truck stop breakfast rather than a continental breakfast unless the continental you are talking about is the garish car rather than the large area on maps of the Northern hemisphere.

And why not eat at Denny’s? You get the same omelet with good old Holstein derived cheese, instead of organic Buddhist free-range goat cheese and you get coffee without having to play that grande, almond mocha, latte, half-caf game and you get classic rock playing in the background, instead of Enya singing in the original Gallic.

The best part of eating at Denny’s is that tip you give goes to the local single mother trying to get by since the property taxes went through the roof, rather than one of the 20 Heathers who are taking a year off after graduating from Amherst before going to law school because she thought waiting tables at a seasonal absentee landlord-owned Nuevo western café was “getting down with the proletariat” and that all that after-work mountain biking would be good for her quads and she is starting to think that the authentic Indian turquoise jewelry made in Mexico looks really great in the tanned cleavage created by the sports bra that she wears to increase tips.

Besides, if you wouldn’t have eaten there you never would have met the guy carrying his life possessions on his bike with two dogs and a trailer in tow who starts the conversion by asking, “If the Yankees won again …” but within half an omelet’s time has informed you that he not only lived in the same town as William Burroughs, but visited him, and he was also there near the time when some guy came through with Einstein’s missing brain in jar full of formaldehyde and that he also did computer animation for Disney in 1970 and you figure that if even 11 percent of this is true it is better than being at the alternative café listening to the clean-fingernailed, highly coifed elite talk about the peaks they have bagged and how they really wish they could come out to the West more because it is so spiritual and how the Native Americans are really the lucky ones to be living simple lives and being more in touch with nature.

You wonder who is really in touch.

Dennis Hinkamp is a USU employee in the Extension office. Comment can be sent to dennish@ext.usu.edu.