Baboon Pirates

Scribbles and Scrawls from an unrepentant swashbuckling primate.

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Location: Texas, United States

Friday, October 20, 2006

Waffling Around

Scattered, Smothered, Covered, Chunked, Topped & Diced!

Q: What has 6 legs and 10 teeth?
A: The night crew at the Waffle House!

I've got a craving for a waffle. There's a Waffle House right down the road, but I can't go there. It's not time yet. I need to wait another year or so.

See, when I was in college, I'd head to the 'Awful House' in the wee hours of the morning with Rockhauler and a few of our cronies, and we'd put the fear of God into the night crew with our diabolical gustatory habits. Back in those days, Waffle House had an all-you-can-eat menu, where for $7 bux or so you could stuff yourself into a coma and have enough money left over to play the Waffle House Theme Song on the jukebox.

When you're living on $120 a month, hitting the Waffle House wasn't just a good idea, it was a survival strategy. You could go 2-3 days on one of those gorging sessions.

We'd see who could eat the most orders of food, an order consisting of the main item and two sides. My favorites were the patty melt with hash browns and white toast, the cheese omelette with hash browns and raisin toast, or pecan waffles with hash browns and grits. We'd always get the hash browns scattered, smothered & covered (served loose, with onions & cheese) because the other options were an additional charge.

Normally, we'd start dry-heaving at about the 4th or 5th order, but this one friend I'll call AnthroGuy could down 7 or 8 plates without stopping.

I'm firmly convinced the reason Waffle House quit offering the AYCE option was due to our late-night raping of their profit margins.

When Rockhauler and I reached the realization that our waistlines were reaching unhealthy sizes, we decided that our Waffle House visits had to come to an end. Still, as good Southern boys, we couldn't just quit cold turkey. So, we decided to taper off our visits. We had one last visit to pig out, then swore a solemn oath to not return for a year.

A year later, we dropped in again. Our tolerance for sub-par diner food was still strong, and we realized we might suffer a relapse if we were coming every year. So, we decided it was necessary to double the length of time between visits.

It was two years before we went again, and 4 years until the next visit. We're due for another visit in 2007. After that, we're due for visits in 2023, 2055, 2119 and 2247. At that point, I'll assume our jar-bound brains will get wheeled into the Waffle House, where they'll float a pecan waffle on top of the formaldehyde, and ladle in some maple syrup.

For now, though, I guess I'll head to IHOP for my waffle fix. Seems wrong to go to a pancake place for a waffle, but a promise is a promise!