“These are the times that try men’s souls,” you whisper as you fight your growing hunger. It has just passed 3 a.m., the portion of the day that food theologians consider “meal purgatory;" it is too late for dinner, yet too early for breakfast. The aching in your stomach worsens, the evolutionary signal to either feed on a weaker being or risk going extinct. But that is where your dilemma lies: you lack the means to track down and ravage a gazelle, but you’re also too smart and sexy to allow your bloodline to die out.
You are suddenly blinded by a flash of bright light. “Is this heaven?” you ask yourself aloud, jumping to the false conclusion that you weren’t enough of an asshole to find yourself in the alternative.
“Yes.”
Did that voice come from God? As if in reply, a small yellow rectangle appears in front of you, engraved with the word ‘Denise.' Once your eyes adjust to the light, the figure attached to the rectangle comes into view: a motherly woman clad in a blue shirt and a warm smile.
Your surroundings become clear, and you begin to realize that Denise’s words were nothing more than mere blasphemy. You aren’t in heaven, not yet, but this was the next best place: Waffle House.The land of drunk kids and greasy food, a microcosm of American young adulthood.
In the corner booth you see a young man in a suit, probably filling up after a long night of dancing with Sorority Sue sitting opposite him. But while their clothes say lobster, their wild eyes say scattered, covered, and chunked.
At the bar, two kids in tank tops fill the room with peals of laughter. No joke was said, no hilarious situation had arisen, nothing was funny at all. But as their laughter echoes through the room, so too does the smell of a certain less-than-legal plant.
In another booth, a couple attempts to stifle laughter of their own. There are no drugs in their system, no alcohol in their blood, just the wide-eyed stare of children in a petting zoo. The giraffe is singing horribly into a mop handle; a bull just strolled into the women’s bathroom; a herd of graceful llamas is throwing llama-punches at the goats, dead set on proving that Beyonce is better than Rhianna.
Before you know it, Denise is bringing your meal. The All-Star Breakfast. The food-to-money ratio is right, and although the grits aren’t real, your sleeping taste buds don’t seem to mind. Your surroundings, bizarre as they may seem, compliment your early morning meal perfectly. The void inside of you is slowly filled, culling your evolutionary instincts and shifting your thoughts to the beautiful world of sleep. There would be no killing of gazelles. There would be no starvation. There was only sleep and the wondrous dreams of waffles, eggs and toast.