Monday, December 11, 2006

it's two a.m. do you know where your appetite is?

It’s the middle of the night, or sometimes the ass-crack of dawn. You’ve spent the whole night partying, drinking, smoking, snorting, rolling, looting, pillaging, sewing, running, jumping and having sex with various barnyard animals, (is it just me or is bestiality a reoccurring theme in some of these entries?) now you’re hungry.

What do you do hotshot?!

What do you do?!

If you’re from around my way you end up at that beacon of light, that midnight Mecca of munchies, that haven for nighthawks: The Tastee Diner! Tastee for short, to those who know.

The Tastee is a 24-hour eating establishment, (actually, there are two of them) with low, low prices and decent food, (decent in that at two in the morning you’ll shovel it into your face without worrying too much about flavor or taste) and a clientele base that’s either one step above being homeless (in some cases a step below) or refugees from a tear in the space/time continuum who were pulled from the 1930 depression era. That’s just the kind of place it is, you feel that at any moment you could be accosted by somebody asking for spare change or somebody asking if you have any “Bromo” to soothe their upset stomach, (that was a joke about a really old product for those who weren’t really following me there.)

The fun thing about the Tastee is that you often run into somebody you haven’t seen in years. And of course they’re in the same blurry-eyed state you’re in. They stumble into the diner, drag themselves to a booth and wave the menu in front of their face until they can manage to get one eye to focus and make sense of the words on the page.

I don’t know why they bother, at this time of day all people can handle is fried foods. I take a different approach. I burst through the door, point at the nearest employee is if they stole from me and tell them, my loudest and most authoritative voice, to take one of each thing from the menu and throw it in boiling oil. Then I stride over to a table and sit there as regally as possible, waiting to be served on. Once all the oily, greasy food is placed in front of me, I take a deep inhalation and immediately run to the bathroom to puke. This approach has worked well in the past.

I like to fondly recall the time I and some friends of mine, (you know who you are) entered the Tastee, in interesting apparel. You see, prior to going to the diner, we had broken into a local pool to do a little skinny dipping, (there were some cute girls visiting from Jersey, so we had to impress them and get them naked. Skinny dipping accomplished both goals at the same time.) Unfortunately my guy friends decided it would be more interesting to throw each other in the pool fully dressed, much to the dismay of their clothes. So we had no choice but to ransack the lost and found box.

Well, it seems that munchkins are the only people who go to that pool, because all of the clothes were size 0 and smaller. One friend of mine had to wear a tiny Pokemon shirt, intended for an infant, and the other had to wear something similarly hilarious and ill-fitting. They both just wore their boxers as regular shorts and had to share one pair of flip-flops.

Now, imagine these two, grown ass men, dressed like five-year-olds who were just granted their wish to be bigger, walking into a diner in the middle of the night, acting as if wearing a blood flow-constricting shirt, boxers and bare feet is the new hotness, (they actually pre-dated Brittney “My vagina looks like two big pieces of roast beef” Spears by a few years by walking into a gross place that probably hadn’t been cleaned for years in bare feet.)

I crack up every time I think of that.

No matter who you are or where you live, there’s an establishment like the Tastee nearby. Go there at a time when most people are asleep. Order something greasy that’ll probably take five years off your life. Be drunk. Trust me, it’ll be fun, (not as fun as putting lit firecrackers in people’s mail slits on their door, but that’s a story for another time.)

I bet that most of you guys and gals have already been to a Tastee-like diner. Got any interesting stories?

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