From the Forbes Ave McDonald’s
The ancient Greeks, having nothing better to do with their time, came up with six words for love: agape (unconditional love), eros (sexual love), philia (brotherly love), storge (parental love), philautia (self love), and xenia (hospitable love). Less widely known is that the ancient Greeks also invented six words for hate, which they came up with shortly after inventing trigonometry: arc-agape, arc-eros, arc-philia, arc-storge, arc-philautia, and arc-xenia. One lesser known perk of attending school in the Pittsburgh area is getting to experience all of these sentiments in their natural breeding ground, the McDonald’s on Forbes Avenue. For the cheap price of a 2 for 6 Fillet-o-Fish, you can experience the full spectrum of hatred available to the human soul.
The inverse of agape, called the highest form of love and often described in a religious or charitable context, is a general sense of ill-will towards yourself, your fellow man, and your own existence. It is a more complex concept than arc-philautia, which is the classical sense of self-hate you feel as you eat whatever you ordered. Arc-agape is a more just, higher-minded feeling: everything is awful, not just you. This is something obvious even to PRT route planners; if you ever find yourself taking a bus from campus downtown to jump off a bridge, you are able to stop at the Forbes McDonald’s for a burger first.
Decency to guests and travellers as an obligation is a concept that has developed in many cultures, and one that has successfully been squashed here. The un-American lack of drive-through and the location of the McDonald’s naturally contribute to arc-xenia, or the inverse of hospitable love: during the lunchtime rush, a general sense of animosity comes with the adrenaline of waiting for your order number to be shouted out.
The concepts of arc-eros and arc-storge, the inverses of parental and romantic love, are more subtly demonstrated at the Forbes McDonald’s but manifest there nonetheless. Any connoisseur of the location will notice that, after 11 PM on weekdays, the location is infested with underclassmen in the prime of their youth. The malevolent aura inside the McDonald’s forces one’s mind to drift towards hating the young. Hate in the sexual sense, i.e. arc-eros, can take on a multitude of meetings, but here specifically refers to the disdain one feels towards that same youth engaging in activities as they wait for their order. Get a room, damn.
The inverse of love between friends, arc-philia, is interestingly demonstrated in this location, in the sense that the feeling persists regardless of whether one is dining alone or with friends. The flickering of the lights or chemical composition of the air sends subliminal messages to diners: nobody cares about you, and your jokes aren’t funny.
This begs the question: if the Forbes Ave McDonald’s is so bad, why do I keep coming up? Once again, we return to the Greeks. In addition to coming up with funny-sounding names for emotions, they also also came up with funny-sounding ideas about the afterlife. Plato speculated that souls that are impure return to Earth to suffer, with the worst offenders returning as animals or even women. I propose, then, the obvious conclusion that the Forbes Ave McDonald’s is actually a sort of purgatory from which one may eventually escape after sufficient purification. Until then, it looks like I'll keep going back.