" …reviews prove unreliably subjective …"

The eyeglass fitter at my optometrist recounted how she's worn these contact lenses designed to reshape her eyes while she slept. They worked, eventually reshaping her eyes to 20/30 acuity, which objectively rates as even better than the normal 20/20. Having had glasses since she was a little girl, the fresh correction left her feeling disoriented. She could not imagine how she could drive a car with vision like that. Her eyes finally corrected themselves to something more like 20/20 and she could see just fine again. Her story highlights the difference between the objective and the subjective worlds we simultaneously inhabit. The quants calculate best while the rest of us rely upon fuzzy felt-senses, which might well uniquely interpret for each observer. Perspective matters to us who live in the subjective world. We're extremely context-sensitive in ways the quants could never calculate.

The Style section provides lists enumerating various bests: best movie, best bagel, best baseball player. Your preferences might well vary unless you've figured out how to subjugate your tastes in preference to the popular ones, a slick trick, indeed, and one the media seems determined to help each of us master. Tastes vary widely unless overridden by what passes for civilization. I've passed through periods of my life where, if the shirt didn't have some specific manufacturer's label, it just didn't feel right. I freely admit to being a beer snob for much of my adult life, except the beer I used to snobbishly hold as the very best doesn't quite qualify as the very worst today. We imprint, I guess, which over-rides whatever our senses might unconvincingly argue to the contrary.

The older I get, the less I aspire to what's touted as the high life. Don't get me wrong, I still drive halfway across town to access what I firmly consider to be the very best butcher when I could just hop over to the Walmart, two miles away, and have a field day in their shrink-wrapped meat department, probably doubling my yield per dollar spent, but I won't. I can't. I lack the skills to judge the quality of meat, but not the strength to defend my prejudices. If Walmart was the last grocery store left, I'd forage in the wild before going there. My taste won't allow it. I might not be high bred, but I'm not yet lowly enough to wander a Walmart aisle. (I already forage some, too. Love them country mushrooms!)

In a subjective world, best might be the most useless category. The visitor asks after The Best place for authentic Denver cuisine and my brain throws a rod. Denver's not traditionally a cuisine sort of place. It was first more of a grub kind of stage stop before graduating into the trail-herded rubber beefsteak capitol, before finally matriculating into a one-off copycat sort of dinner destination, somewhere between Kansas and California. The best I can do will probably be to refer you to one of the few remaining diners where quality isn't that wounded by the variety, then suggest that you choose for yourself. You probably would find my best sitting well below your own personal favorite. The reviews prove unreliably subjective and the choices seem nearly infinite as long as you don't go off expecting to find absolute authenticity anywhere near here.

©2018 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #CluelessSummer, #PureSchmaltz