FINE DINING

We've all been to those fancy restaurants haven't we? You know, the ones where they want you to smell the cork from the wine bottle, a guy walks around the place playing a violin, or Flamenco guitar, candles on the table, dim lighting. Well the place I'm going to talk about ain't that kind of a place. In fact it's very far away from being that kind of a place. It was a total hole in the wall. Now, first off let me say that I don't have any problem with places that are dives. If the food is good and the plate and utensils are clean then I'm sure I could be spotted throwing down food at some mighty unsavory places, and in fact have. After all, a dive can have a certain sense of trashy charm. I like to think that I can put up with a lot, but no matter what, there does have to be a level of hygiene. That level may not be all that high to some folks, but I do have my standards.
So anyway, I've been on the road for a couple of hours now, and I start to get a hankering for some chicken egg foo yung. Maybe not so much a hankering as it was an enslaving compulsion. As luck would have it I came upon a take out Chinese food place. I walk in and go up to the counter. I start to look over the menu that is scotch taped to the counter and I come upon a dish that seems like it will fill the bill. The problem is that there is nobody there to take my order. I know that there are people in the back because I can hear them. They are making no efforts to be discreet in as far as volume goes, but then it really doesn't matter because I don't know the language they were speaking in and thusly, had no clue as to what they were talking about, so their secrets are safe with me. At this time a lady and an older teenage guy have come in together and they get behind me at the counter.

After a few seconds of all of us clearing our throats, or coughing, a young girl appears behind the counter and takes my order. I pay for it, grab my ticket and take a seat at a table. The same thing goes down for the other customers. We all look each other over a little cautiously, maybe even suspiciously, due to the fact that we've all reached the same assumption about the kind of people that would eat from a place like this, and figure that it is probably best not to turn your back on such a person.

After a few minutes of waiting I decide to grab a magazine from the pile that are on the table next to mine. And I do mean pile. I thought they were maybe having a recycling drive or something. Anyway after going through the several old issues of Sports Illustrated, which I had mostly already read from visits to the doctors offices, and all of the issues of People (man Brittney Spears has gotten a lot of face time from that mag) I settle upon an old copy of Time. I'm flipping through the thing trying to see anything that would interest me for what I was hoping would be only a few minutes wait. I read that Bill Gates and his wife are giving a bajillion dollars to some cause or other and quickly turn the page. A two pager on Hillary Clinton and the prospective candidacy of the Alpha Bitch,turn the page again. It is now that I come upon the horror. It has nothing to do with the content of the printed words on those pages, but rather it came from the fact that those pages were relatively stuck together by some slimy kind of substance that I was extremely afraid to begin to identify.. I mean this was Time magazine. Had it been a porn mag I could have understood, I still would have been repulsed, but at least it would have made sense. I don't believe that it could have been physically possible for the magazine to leave my hands and the table any faster than it did. As I walked to the bathroom I was seriously hoping that my feet wouldn't stick to the floor in there. I scrubbed like a doctor prepping for surgery, and after I got out my food was ready. I know that it could have been anything on those pages, but I ain't gonna take chances like that. I drove off and my food and subsequently, six bucks were jettisoned to the nearest garbage can.
LET THE BUYER BEWARE!