Careful: Contents are Caustic and Could Cause Eye Burn and Bloody Stool
Juliet and I have spent exactly 5 nights apart since December 11, 2006. That's right, we are literally inseparable and I am more at ease with her near me than I am alone. Call it co-dependence, habit, or any other form of label you would like. I simply like her more than anyone else I have ever met and prefer to keep her kind of company.
This being said, we dine out as a hobby. We love restaurants and especially the great ones. We enjoy seeing how a great restaurant runs on slow nights as we can often chat with a chef or spend extra moments discussing wine options with the Sommelier.
We rarely dine out on busy nights like Saturdays and we particularly steer clear of the two great amateur nights of the year: New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day. A little bit of insider restaurant insight: chef's hate those nights, servers hate those nights, and you are likely to be treated to a much more innocuous experience dining on these "Special Occasions." Don't blame the restaurants, it is simply an unavoidable circumstance of blatant commercialism and a country full of lemmings and people who buy diamonds at Jared. I avoid dining on any night where a restaurant that does not operate normally with a set seating time employees a set seating time.
In addition to this, I do not wait in lines and especially with the general public. I prefer to eat in a place with a little space so that I can enjoy my meal in a fine establishment without the aroma of Drakkar and Cigarettes from a few tables of people who have pulled an extra shift or two to get the steak and lobster.
All of this being said, Juliet and I have destroyed our mental faculties with some of the most tiresome decisions of our lives in the past 2 weeks and this move has been one logistics fiasco after another. We were not going to join the legions of VD revelers at some place destined to disappoint.
We worked on the house till around 8pm and then headed out for The Hamburger Stand. The Hamburger Stand in Lakewood, CO is a 62 year-old A-Framed building that has been making burgers, hot dogs, Polish sandwiches and Corn Dogs according to family recipes since its inception. This does not mean organic, healthy, or low in calories. It does not even mean it is good. It simply signifies our resignation to exhaustion and our desire for anyplace without a line, a balloon, or especially any fucking roses smelling up the joint.
I will take old grease and seared meat aroma over roses any day. Roses smell like the air-freshener my Grandma used in the bathroom and there is just something so wrong about the olfactory amalgamation of roses and human excrement.
Pardon the digression but roses are for amateurs and women who read 99 cent paperbacks. If I bought my wife roses she would look me square in the face and say, "are you ill? were those free? you could have bought me chocolates from Araya or daisies, or a scarf, but roses...why don't we put those outside?"
The Hamburger Stand has all the basic food groups: hamburgers, corn dogs, fries, and Tastee Freez Shakes. (suckin' on a chili dog outside the Tastee Free-eez...another song for another blog) We had them all. We actually held greasy hands a few times while we inhaled our hydrogenated repast and even walked greasy hand in hand on our way into Target for yet more cleaning supplies.
The Valentine aisle at Target was decimated and all that remained were a few tasteless greeting cards and a crying girl staring at the last vestiges of red M&Ms while her friends brushed her shoulders and whispered things like "he didn't deserve you and your baby WILL have a family"
Happy Valentines Day Blissful Boys and Girls!