I admire psychopaths… And if you say you don’t, then you’re a filthy liar… maybe someone will garrote your sorry ass. But seriously, these people don’t take shit from anybody. Next time some prick totally fucks you over, wouldn’t it be nice to just let go and brain the fucker with a rock? I think so. Or when some puke cuts you off on the inter-state… wouldn’t you love to just give in to that urge to follow them to wherever they’re going and beat the shit out of them with the crowbar I keep behind my seat…

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…….I rarely patronize a franchised establishment when I can avoid it. I try to find the “Ma & Pa” places to do my business. Wherever you go these days, every town feels the same as the last one. The same businesses, the same restaurants turning this whole damn country this big fucking homogenized… STERILE place.
…….But there are a few exceptions that I’ll make, and when I’m on the road, Waffle House is one of them. Yes, yes, I know there’s like a million of them scattered about our great land, but one thing about this venerable establishment: there’s nothing STERILE about a Waffle House.

…….Firstly, if you have a morbid curiosity to view the very dregs of mankind, this is the place for you. Allot of people talk about the freak show over at IHOP… well, let me tell you brother: the IHOP weirdos can’t hold a candle to the nut-jobs encountered at Waffle House. On Sunday mornings you’ll find the church crowd in an IHOP. Sunday morning at the Waffle House finds it populated with alcoholic traveling salesmen who just blew their last sale, somber truckers crying into there coffee, and a spectrum of washouts that you’d swear were just released from prison, or turned out from the methadone clinic that day.
…….I had a waitress once, who had prison tattoos all over her arms. She was smoking a cigarette while she took my order (and another, while she prepared it) and her name tag clearly read “Granny”. Have I got your attention now?
…….Once while dining with friends at a Waffle House on a Wednesday night, I looked up from our conversation, and discovered we were the only people in the restaurant. There were no other customers, and the three women working when we arrived momentarily vanished. Try to imagine that. It makes one immediately suspect zombies (or worse yet CHUDS) just outside the window glass. Apparently they all went on break at the same time. Presumably after looking at my group and judging that we weren’t menacing enough to require supervision. Who would rob a Waffle House anyway?

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…….Ironically
, the service and the food is top-notch. At certain hours of the day, your waitress may also be the one cooking your meal, and they want that tip. They’ll call you “cutie” or “hon” or “sweethart” and, to be frank, those words make me blush regardless of Granny’s shade of blue hair.

  • Not on the menu? No worry, most Waffle Houses will fix you ANYTHING you ask for.
  • Had to wait along time to get a your order taken? Hey, sorry about that, heres a free bowl of Bert’s Chilli.
  • Would you like a slice of pie? Its on the house.

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…….Every Waffle House has a jukebox, and along with a few pop standards those jukeboxes all come loaded with a selection of Waffle House specific music. Including such timeless favorites as “Waffle Do Wop” and “There are Raisins in my Toast”. Honest to God!
…….Interestingly, Waffle House doesn’t try to downplay their inherent weirdness, if anything they embrace it. Every restaurant feels strangely misplaced in time. The genuine hospitality, the colorful menus filled with fun-facts, the option of getting cherry or vanilla syrup in your Coke. These are things we’ve come to not expect anymore and they add a bit of gonzo nostalgia. Waffle House, I salute you.

You smell that? Thats the smell of cigarette smoke and auto exhaust. Of Waffle House coffee and burnt oil. Thats the smell of the open road my friends. Do you have the grit to endure the white line fever? Can you stomach greasy spoon fare for weeks on end? Will you shy away from a flea infested roadside motel positioned directly over a dive bar? Does your bladder live up to the hype? Saddle up hombres! Because its time to hit the road…

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Step inside my ramblin’ shoes and be magically whisked away to the following location(s)…

Also, heres some road food for thought (do’s & don’ts)

Z

Anorexia
…I know many of you out there have nothing but contempt for anyone suffering from this “illness” and I empathize with you. Only in a nation boasting of the highest quality of life could we expect such a ridiculous ailment. The inability to eat. Amazing. What a message to send to other, less-fortunate peoples, who actually have to face Mr.Death every day. What stupid, decadent, weak-minded people we must be to them.
…But like any other form of madness, it’s a compulsive behavior that the sufferer does not actually recognize as a problem. Lack of will power? Don’t tell me someone who can starve themselves to death doesn’t have will power. Its more like a glitch, a rogue pattern of thought, that once cemented-in by time, becomes increasingly difficult to correct. This doesn’t mean they’re entitled to our pity; no one in this world should expect to receive guidance or help, but in a better world we all would have had a little more.

…One of my great personal tragedies is, I once dated a girl who became severely anorexic. I’d had this huge crush on her all through my Junior year in high school, but she was involved with someone. It was one of those deals where I just sort of adored everything about her. The color of her hair, her posture. The holes in her socks. A totally innocent thing where I only wanted to live within the warmth of her smile.
…When school started up the next year she was fair game. I’d noticed she was a little thinner but, when you’re young, you half expect the people you know to look slightly different after a summer break. She wore baggy skater clothes so I didn’t realize just how thin she’d become. I started dating her and thats when I realized there was something very wrong.
…She constantly read these damn nutrition magazines. Nutrition magazines spend more time attacking natural foods like meat and cheese and eggs and milk, than they do pre-packaged manufactured foods. Fucking asshole publishers can’t side with foods that human beings actually EVOLVED eating, they’d rather sell you some garbage that costs less to produce, more to buy, designed in a lab, is full of soy fillers and has no fucking nutritional value. So she decided to become a vegetarian. Then she decided it was best to be a vegan. And so on until she simply eliminated nearly every food from the list of stuff she would eat.
…Her parents did everything they could. They warned her that if there wasn’t any improvement she was going to the hospital. I was just a kid so I didn’t know what to do. There was no such thing as intimacy. I just sort of watched over her and tried to help her, because I loved her.
…Its awful to watch someone you care about disintegrate before your eyes. You just want to grab them and smack the shit out of them and force them to eat something, but it isn’t that easy. They conceal their bodies with warm clothes because they’re always cold. Then one day they take off the jacket and you can’t believe how much they’ve wasted away, right in front of you. Gradually, you notice their personality has changed and they aren’t even the same person anymore. Deep down you know it’s because of brain damage and there’s no turning back. Tell me that realization wouldn’t make your blood run cold.
…I’d buy her food and I begged her to eat. She just became more and more distant. She wouldn’t talk, she wouldn’t drink her little calorie shakes that her doctor was giving her… I felt like I’d lost her even before she was ever mine.
…No full grown human being should ever weigh less then 100 pounds, there is no reason for it, health, aesthetic, whatever. If you see someone doing this to themselves, it’s your job as a fellow human being to tell them they’re all fucked up. And be brutal about it. Snap them out of it or check them into a hospital. My girl got down to 76 pounds before the hospital finally took her in. 76 pounds. Thats about 34.5 kilograms. Thats two bags of dry dog-food.
…I called her to break up with her because I couldn’t stand the thought of watching her die. The same day I got a phone call from her telling me she was checked-in to the hospital and finally getting some help. I felt like such a bastard. I’d lost my nerve right when she needed me the most, and I didn’t even have the heart to visit her the whole time she was in the hospital. That’s one of my greatest regrets and it still haunts me.
…Well, she got better, and she grew into a beautiful woman. Tall and healthy, slim but strong. Long brown hair, and a face that belongs to a wood nymph. We stayed on good terms but she was still a little odd, and anyway, I knew that I no longer deserved her. I don’t know her anymore, but I still love her.
Her name is Regina.

JACKINMACOCK

This Tricky-Dick had his very first Jack-in-the-Box experience today. I got their #1 sirloin bacon death-burger meal with seasoned curly fries. Did you know that meal comes with a gallon of soda? I’d be a little afraid of how bad it is for me if I wasn’t so sure that it was going to shoot through me like the fucking ebola virus.

It actually gives me an idea for a manly game of wills. You get a group of real tough guys together. I’m talking Charlie Bronson tough mother fuckers. You sit them at a table with a pile of Jack-in-the-Box food in the middle. The object of the game is to eat as much as you can and hold out as long as you can without running to the toilet. Last man at the table wins a shot of penicillin or something.
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…….Tricky-Dick is on the road so please forgive me for my low contribution rate as of late (if anyone out there even gives a flaming rat’s ass)
…….Please allow me make this entry a little more personal than my usual fare… as a simple gesture that I hope will illustrate, indeed, I do still care. With luck this may even be the first entry in a larger ongoing work that will become my travel journal. How lame.

…….Anyhow, I now present to you, gentle reader, Tricky-Dick’s guide to…

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…….There aren’t any happy hours in Walla Walla, Washington. Beer is no less than three dollars a bottle, no matter where you go, and there isn’t anything on draft that won’t give you a framing hammer headache. Walla Walla, and perhaps greater Washington state, is a refuge for beer snobbery.
…….Allow me to elaborate; the hotel I’m staying at, the Marcus Whitman, has a restaurant with a bar. A real schmancy place, not schmancy enough for Angostura bitters, but schmancy none the less. Pricks. Anyhow, anywhere I go, I always order draft beer. There once was a time I only ever ordered longnecks but the reason for that change of mind, is a story for another time. I noticed they had three beers on tap. Two of them were obviously pretentious microbrew swill and the third was Guinness. Not wanting to blow a $3 bill on garbage I asked the barman for a Guinness. Well a few Guinness’ later I asked him how his night was going. He told me it wasn’t bad but the only tap that was pouring was the Guinness tap. I knew that he meant that the other two taps were effed up, but I told him the best way to fix that was to put a Bud Light tap up there. It was a joke. And I was pretty proud of how laconic it rolled out. But he didn’t laugh. Beer Snob.
…….Cigarettes are too expensive to smoke, and the price of a shot of liquor will put you on skid row.
…….The roads are narrow and the there doesn’t seem to be a standard place for traffic lights to be located; some are directly above their intersection, some are over the far side of the road, some are located on either corner, some only over one corner… sometimes all on the same street.
…….The streets are shaded by hundreds of immense scaly grey trees whose shallow roots have crept beneath and buckled the pavement every hundred paces or so. The road lines come and go sporadically, and entire lanes disappear and reappear, without any foreseeable rhyme or reason.
…….Everyone drives like they don’t know what the speed limit is and they’ve got a cop on their ass. As a visitor, I was constantly unsure of where my next turn was, so I was constantly hesitating behind the wheel… and yet I couldn’t help noticing how everyone else on the road seemed to be driving the exact same way. Like a jackass without a clue of where he was going.
…….The cops are ruthless stalkers with dark blue cars that have low profile lights that could pass for luggage racks. Nuff’ said.
…….Every business follows the “we’re open whenever we fucking feel like being open” policy. Do you need gasoline? Is it past 7pm? Well then, good luck buddy.
…….Some additive in the water supply makes it impossible to have an ordinary bowel movement. Don’t fart in Walla Walla.

Stay tuned for more lengthy and tedious updates to this boring experement. To make it more fun, try to determine which entries were composed during a drunken state.