I fucking hate Long Island sometimes. I really, truly, wholeheartedly do.
I decided not to attend tonight’s "Welcome to NY, Sue Duhnym dinner in NYC. Why? Because I’m tired & wasn’t relishing the idea of so much travel. I figured that I’d just eat out someplace with my family, as is our Friday night custom.
Well, we got going late, of course (My mother wanted to do…something. Her daily sit-ups, maybe?). Strike fucking one. We couldn’t decide where we wanted to go, so that took another five minutes of haggling.
(Here’s a rant within a rant about that: My father’s Friday morning custom is to say to my sister {who couldn’t give a flying squirrelshit about where or what we eat, ever} & I. When I say “Mexican”, he vetoes it. Why in the name of all that’s holy did you ask me in the first place? To see my brain fizz? If you know you don’t want to go someplace, let me fucking know.)
So whatever, we decide that we’ll head down Sunrise Highway (6 lanes) a few towns & go to a diner we frequent. First, however, we have to pick up some prescriptions from the pharmacy, even though it doesn’t close 'til 9PM. Fine, okay.
By the time we get to Sunrise, it’s 6:30 PM. We are heading east. It is a weekday. Anyone who lives on Long Island knows that this is a bad, bad thing. You see, east = home for many people who’re coming home from jobs in NYC. And as we all know, rush hour extends from… Well, it’s pretty much all day now, isn’t it?
Well, we get on Sunrise only to discover that it’s barely moving. On a good day, it’d take us ten minutes on Sunrise to get to the diner. Now, who knows? Brakelights as far as the eye could see. Like so many stop lights. We’re all, of course, pretty hungry at this point, and pretty fucking irritated. My father & I both tend to get bitchy when hungry, so that’s a fun thing.
“Fuck this”, we say, and swing around, hoping to see another diner on the way from whence we came. Shock of shocks, we find one - yay! We’re saved!
Ah, no. The fucking diner has no wheelchair ramp. Now we’re doubly pissed. We decide that this is ludicrous, let’s just go the fuck home and make some goddamned packaged crap soup - if we’re annoyed, we might as well be bloated from sodium intake. On the way back, we spot another diner. You’d have thought we’d been bashed in the collective head enough to learn our lesson, right?
Maybe the head bashing gave us collective brain damage, 'cause we figured, “Hey, let’s go in here!”. No sooner had we pulled in the drive when we saw the sign:
VALET PARKING
WHAT? :eek:
Valet motherfucking parking at a diner? Is this a joke? Where’s Allen Funt, that old bastard?
We hightailed it out of there. And now I’m home, starving, and about to eat a dinner of…eggs, I think…and wishing fervently that I hadn’t been an asshole and had just gone into the city.
Ugh.
