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On car trips growing up, my Dad used to make us sing “Circle of Life” from The Lion King if we wanted McDonald’s. Despite attending church with absolute regularity, we only ever sang with the vigor of patients fresh out of jaw surgery - mouths straining to open, eyes glazed over from the anesthetic sleep of teenagehood and having to wake up for early mass (noon). But for the prospect of chicken nuggets and small Cokes? We sang. We SANG. Even the flute solo at 2:23.
If you think that you don’t like fast food, I’m sorry but you do. You might not like eating it, but you like it. You like it because you’re a human and they engineered it that way. You know when you have that first sip of water after exercising on a hot day, and nothing else in the world matters because you’re satisfying one of the five needs to survive? With fast food, upon that first taste, your body is similarly satisfied, telling you, This is the 6th need. Keep eating. The difference is that when you finish your glass of water, you feel great and more human, and when you finish a Quarter Pounder with cheese, you hate yourself, your life decisions and how your car smells. To disagree with this is to disbelieve science, and who wants to do that? (Uh-oh, so many people). McDonald’s is like Maroon 5 in that everyone likes it, even if they say they don’t.
The trick to eating fast food is to get it over with as quickly as possible. Don’t savor it. Eat it in the parking lot, or better yet, don’t even put your car in park. Eat it while driving so you can just call the activity driving. Inhale it. Try not to look at it. It’s bad. You’re bad. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. And while your body can’t pretend it never happened, as it has to triage the chaos clambering down your insides, you can pretend. You can throw away the bag, chew gum immediately, and wash your hands with the intensity that they wash those ducks with that Dawn.
I never thought I’d want an engagement ring but turns out I wanted something so specific that we had to make multiple trips to the jeweler to get it custom made. (Limit a girl to small drinks her whole childhood and she grows up wanting the world. Classic.) Considering we live in the middle of nowhere, we have to drive a whole hour to get anywhere that’s not a grocery store or the abandoned Kmart that we voted in, so we’re usually bored and snacky on any journey. There’s no better way to combat boredom than to dive headfirst into the exhilaration and unpredictability that is a trip to Taco Bell. Yes, I am a risktaker.
There’s a Taco Bell on the way out of town (a euphemism I’ll use as the title of my forthcoming book) and we found ourselves visiting it before every one of our trips to look at diamonds ☯. A benefit of being married to a man is that they aren’t afraid to order BIG when it comes to fast food. They always get a bunch of different things that you can treat as your own little appetizer sampler. A bite here, a bite there - what’s yours is mine. Hall let me have a bite of his chalupa and because I accidentally didn’t take a holistic bite, I asked to take another one. He reluctantly agreed because vows, but after I happily swallowed the representative sample, he looked over and said, “Sometimes I think you play dumb so you can get more bites.” The honeymoon? Over. I sat there silently and contemplated that my first bite might not have been so accidental after all. He was right. When a person you love points out the flaws that you didn’t know were apparent to the outside world, it feels like getting in a million degree car after a whole day of office A/C. It shouldn’t be comfortable, but it is. Despite being a glutton for ground meat, I am still loved.
Chick-fil-A is incredible. Did you know they’re closed on Sundays because I tried to start going to church there? :( I find myself going long stretches without fast food, often many months, and yes I’m saying this because I’m not strong enough to let people think that maybe I’m obsessed with it, like I eat it constantly. I wish I did. A few months ago, I was in the car a bunch and it just so happened that I had Chick-fil-A three days in a row. Most fast food places feel like frenemies; they show their dark side immediately upon entering your body. Chick-fil-A just feels like a friend.
I miss the McDonald’s of the 90’s. When I picture going to McDonald’s as a kid, it turns all of my other non-McDonald’s memories into black and white. It was just so vivid, so salty. The red ketchup, the yellow M, the pink soap. I salivate thinking about it. Remember the pushy, colorful back of the high chair? It made me want to bite it, still does. My first dream was of Grimace. When we were bad on car trips, we’d be forced to order milk instead of Coke. It was poison. Why can’t restaurants serve milk cold? It’s always warm, still tepid from Bessie. (Growing up, we drank 2% constantly. I didn’t have a glass of water until I went to college.) We had a babysitter once who was a thousand years old and she took us to a McDonald’s PlayPlace when we were way too old to play in it. (Thinking back, I was probably not older than 10 but as an old soul, I was more accustomed to reading the Travel section, listening to Prairie Home Companion, eating Werther’s Originals etc., etc.) My siblings and I ate miserably in front of the ball pit and made fun of the children playing inside. Our babysitter made us order twist cones instead of chocolate because she said the vanilla made it healthier. We had never loved our parents more.
In college I went to a Burger King and a family eating inside looked so sad that I convinced myself that they’d just come from a funeral. I didn’t know what was sadder - the loss of their family member or how they were at Burger King after the loss of their family member. Go big or go home I guess. When I eat fast food I don’t like to eat inside, in case I see something sad like that, and in case when I see something nasty that makes me regret eating there at all. It’s safest to eat in the privacy of the car, where I can house in peace. Fast food in an airport is nicely justifiable because it’s like, “I gotta get something quick so I don’t miss my flight!” even though my flight is in 4 hours. Before they redid the Southwest terminal at LaGuardia, I saw a rat ordering a pretzel dog at Auntie Anne’s. It paid in change.
I’m pretty sure the old adage of a wolf in sheep’s clothing was talking about when a Taco Bell has been repurposed as a different business. It is not uncommon to see the familiar scalloped, stuccoed roof and the three arched windows on a bootleg law office, or a generic cell phone store where the name has a Z in it. “Chicagoland Phonez” or something heartbreaking like that. But we know what it is. What its roots are. The dong of its bell. The souls it has fed. After all,
It's the circle of life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
'Til we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the circle
The circle of life.