For Here or to Go?

We ate our meal as jauntily as we could, setting aside our uncertain feelings for the surrounding décor, which at its best must have been plucked from a lost-and-found of the 50s. It was hard to stare at the ceramic dish between my palms, as its sheen reflected the pasty yellow lighting of this diner. I tried shifting my seat as an attempt at making the meal more comfortable, but was interrupted by a loose tile in the floor. It meagerly trapped the leg of my chair, begging to be returned to its place in the ground below. I scoffed it away with another grunt and tug of the budget throne, managing to snap the age-old tile in the process. 

Before creating enough of a scene to pull the other guests away from their colorless food, I scraped my chair back into position and hastily grabbed the nearest fork. I could see stains where the washer must have forgotten to scrub, and suddenly I felt the need to distract my fellows from whatever it was that might have inhabited their plates. A weak sigh slipped out of my throat, and I covered its tracks by gazing off into the shadowy corners of other reserved tables. While crossing eyes with a bitter couple, I caught the sight of a familiar blue glow. A small TV set shimmered from a perch in the ceiling, its light severely contrasting that of the dying bulbs around it. I figured television could probably offer me more solace than a BLT, and I would have been right if it weren’t for the channel that TV was tuned to. 

On the screen, littered with infographics and grammar-less statements, was a commercial. Displayed in slow motion was the ever so slight placing of several bacon slices onto a pale ovoid platter. Soon after, a pair of unmanned spatulas precariously placed an entirely obese steak onto the same platter, following it with a saucy barbecue drizzle. I was beside myself. I would have exfoliated my anger onto the other patrons of the diner, but that idea left me as quickly as my former appetite. 
Of course an American diner would run ads for another diner on its own TVs, while we are eating their food. At this stage, the last thing on my mind was my stomach. 

I wanted to leave this retrofitted Hollywood set. I wanted to create some distance between myself and our server who wore too much makeup and smiled too hard for me to believe she liked her job. I wouldn’t really want to cause a fuss though, and somebody had to cover the bill. I’d have asked if we could all split it, but it wouldn’t be right to force everyone else to have this restaurant in their records. I can picture it vividly – a quiet night in the kitchen spent rummaging through receipts, only to discover a grimy, off-white sheet with the name of this diner smudged onto it in oily letters.

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