Chic-fil-A, home of one of my favorite chicken sandwiches, is owned by people who happen to be Christian. They are also closed on Sunday. The restaurant I work at is owned by an older couple who have their own belief system that they've not shared with me. I have no system of religious belief, and I don't believe in a host of other things. I'll freely admit to wishing that I had a unicorn for a best friend, but that's neither here nor there. Also, we used to be closed on Sunday until the owner decided we could do some bidness adding brunch to our schedule.
fwiw, I hate working brunch. It's the very bane of restaurant life. Most people hate it. May you always go to good brunch places and never suffer the indignity of a pre-broken yolk on you benedict.
Anyway, somewhere there's a conference involving a couple of churches and Christian couples learning how to be married in the proper Christian way. Of course that proper Christian way involves someone's interpretation of someone's interpretation of bronze age myths, and it filters through other filters on the way to the conference which lasts a day and a half or something.
I imagine Christian couple sleeping in cots in the gymnasium, holding hands across the empty space. Being gay I'd probably have found some nook in which to trap my partner and commit sinful acts, but that's just me. We wouldn't be welcome anyway, so that's really beside the point.
Chic-fil-A, in addition to being a slight pain in the ass to type, may or may not donate money to random organizations. I don't know. I haven't looked. Some intrepid blogger may well do it for me. I am sure that they sometimes possibly donate food to groups for events that might also involve some amount of people who don't like gay people.
The Chic-fil-A sandwich is not something I'm willing to boycott. Their waffle fries may not be as good as McDonalds regular ass fries, but they are the perfect side dish to the sandwich.
Chic-fil-A is sort of a reward for not killing anyone at the mall. I sorta tend to live and work on the square. It's a nice public space in the heart of downtown. There are a variety of buskers through out the day. There's the homeless guy selling our town's new street paper. Right now there are the last remnants of the ice rink, and in a couple of days there will nothing left of that but the increasingly smaller piles of ice. Sometimes you'll find someone passing a football with a friend American style, though only the employees of the Mexican restaurant across from where I work ever seem to pass a football international style. At almost any time of the day or night you're likely to see someone walking their dog, and sometimes it's a dog you know and can say hi to.
The mall is made up. It's a "public" space entirely devoted to commerce. It's full of mall people, and while I don't necessarily not like them, I don't necessarily like them at the mall. Maybe it's a turf issue. Maybe it's that they're all so seemingly alike. Maybe it's me and not them. Either way the mall can sometimes stress me out a little bit, and sometimes there's only one antidote for that stress.
Chic-fil-A's sweet tea isn't too bad at all, for what it's worth, but it really is their namesake chicken sandwich. It's a decent sized breast half, deep fried, served on what was once a toasted bun with a couple of pickle slices in the middle. I eat around the last pickle bite personally.
It's served in a small bag, white paper with a foil inside, and if you rip that little bag down the seam on the underside and then rip it open along the crease at the bottom you have room to lay down your waffle fries and create your little piles of ketchup and mayonnaise. I put them next to each other so I can mix them in the middle and still have either one by itself as well. On the sandwich I put mayonnaise and hot sauce.
And while I enjoy that fast food paradise, the mall melts away, disappears around me and ceases to exist. All my worries are gone, and I can see heaven in the distance.
Okay, not really. I'm still being catty in my head about all the mall dorks, but at least for a while my mouth is full and mostly free of words. I can sink into the goodness.
p.s. the whole point of this post is thanks to the fine people at towleroad.com. I really do love the blog. The link HERE is just the latest in a story that is ongoing. My own comment that is this blog post is in answer to comments that I've read here as well as other blogs. It's easy to sit back and laugh, so I do.
