DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME is ending, but first, did you ever eat at a Golden Corral? It’s a place where people who like to eat to excess go to strap on the motherfucking feed bag, hell yeah, and then also the dessert bag, and then maybe back to the feed bag, you know? They also have fresh fruit. It’s very American, I guess! Or maybe Roman, didn’t they sorta invent Gluttony as an official Decadent Activity, the Romans?
SERIOUS WARNING: This next paragraph contains a description of Disordered Eating, and I do not Judge, however, to me, this is kinda disgusting, in my opinion, so you can skip the next paragraph and then get back to the Golden Corral part, which is also kinda gross, but not in the same way, again, in my opinion:
Like, there was an attendant at the Ancient Roman Feast who, after you got to a certain point in your Gluttony, would tickle your uvula or something with a feather so that you would then unpack all the Ancient Roman victuals you just chowed on, and then once you were clear, you could go back to eat more? Is that even true?
END WARNING: AND NOW REGULAR POSSIBLY SIMPLY OFFENSIVE:
I don’t have time to look at Snopes for this because I have a Column to produce, so let’s just pretend it’s true or howabout we think of it as an Apocryphal Ideal of Gluttony hearkening back to the days of Ancient Rome, so I can set up my argument, if I have one. E Pluribus Uvula!
I will defend the Golden Corral on one aspect: they have really good fried chicken, and you can order it in advance and pick it up and take it someplace else to eat if you are interested in trying it, you don’t have to do the whole Corral experience, which, quite frankly, in this Age of Uncertainty, I wouldn’t recommend, the whole going inside and dining in a roomful of Golden Corral–ers, no offense. At the same time, down here in Maryland there’s a chain of gas stations that made it into Food & Wine magazine for their fried chicken, so let’s keep it all in perspective. Also the Circle K has Krispy Krunchy fried chicken, which is pretty goddamn good, it’s kinda on the Popeye’s spicy end of the spectrum, and I’ve never seen a Circle K around my town that also didn’t have gas pumps, but let’s get back to the Corral, OK?
There’s stuff on the Internet about how shit jumps off at the Golden Corral, and I know exactly why, and I’ll get to that, but if you have never been to Golden Corral, it’s like this:
You pay a certain amount of money based on if you are going to just eat off the Buffet, or if you are going to get a steak or other premium item brought to your table especially for you. I used to always just get the buffet—it’s been awhile, and it was in the Before Times, so it might be different now—which worked like this: Wait, did I already do a HERE IS THE PROCESS: Colon? That’s an inside joke because of COLON, hiyo!
Anyway, you pay BEFORE you sit down to eat, which is some sort of indicator, eh? Then you go in to the big dining area and grab a table, which can be stressful, because you don’t want to be right up on the food stations with people milling around, and you don’t want to be off in some adjacent dining room way far away so you have to hike a mile to get to the food station. A server gets to your table and checks your paperwork, and brings you your first clean plate ready to be filled with all kinda Corral, and off you go! To the salad bar (maybe), and the entrees, and vegetables and side dishes, and you could eat healthy, if you have Discipline, but c’mon, you are there to Eat Heavy, and there’s all kindsa red meat and white meat and other white meat and other-other white meat and chicken and fish items that can stand up to sitting in a steamer tray under a Sneeze Guard, and you can haz all you want!
The Sneeze Guard, though, that’s yet another Dealbreaker, eh? The Sneeze Guard is just the regular and normal disgusting aspect of eating at an all-you-can-eat buffet, the idea that you’re in there shoulder-to-shoulder with a buncha strangers, and some of them are so ill-mannered as to possibly sneeze on the goddamn food while they are stacking it onto their plates! Golden Corral!
Ohh, wow, I’m not gonna lie, I used to love to eat beyond the Point of No Return, and some times I still do, seriously, just not at a Corral (no offense), where there’s trays of spare ribs, and pot roast, and entire things full of gravy, and hot buttered corn, and mashed potatoes, ohh, I mean, you are in the El Dorado of hot Buffet food! You are feasting on the Big Rock Candy Mountain and it’s not just dessert items! You are inside Willy Wonka’s Food Factory, and you’re not on a tour, you are a Paying Customer, so you can go Hog Wild, like a hog! You could just go get yourself a soup bowl off the rack and fill it with brown gravy, I’m not kidding, it’s insane. What the hell was I talking about? I’m so hungry.
All right, so this is where Daylight Saving Time comes in, and remember, it’s not Daylight Saving Time that people are mad at, it’s the lack of Daylight Saving Time, because right now, Nov. 3, 2022 A.D., we (as in The People of the United States of America) are mostly in the Time Zone of Daylight Saving, and we are getting ready to Fall Back one hour on November 6, 2022 at 2 a.m. in the oh-dark hundred hours, it will suddenly be 1 a.m., and that’s what makes people mad and sad. Next week I’m here in Baltimore, far from the Equator where there’s more daylight, minding my own business, 5 p.m. rolls around, and what the fuck, where’d my Daylight go? No matter what time it says on your Apple Watch, there’s gonna be less daylight, all the way up to December 21, 2022, less and less daylight, two minutes a day. Adjust your schedule accordingly! Get one of those daylight lamps if you get bummed out!
So it is November in North America, and no matter what your Religious beliefs are, we will have less Daylight. Winter is Coming, eh? The Conventional Wisdom is that more folks will be doing more stuff indoors, as opposed to outdoors, where there’s a breeze and more air moving around and usually more space in between people, which makes outdoors a less risky environment if you subscribe to Scientific principles about how when people get packed together they breathe all over each other more, and that’s how Little C spreads and proliferates and stuff, contagion-wise. They even came out with a Sneeze Guard for your face, for the pandemic, but it didn’t catch on.
I have all kinds of Vaccinations and Boosterizations, because as a reasonable human being, I am confident that Medical Science has generally helped people around the world live longer and not die sooner.
With this in mind, Scientifically, the last place I wanna be is the Golden Corral, where people get so stressed out about getting a good seat, and getting some of the most-recently-cooked steak and chicken out of the steamer tray and onto their plate that they get into physical altercations! You could go look on a YouTube, it ain’t pretty! How are you gonna trust yourself in an environment like this where people lose their shit for a piece of meat? There’s no Sneeze Guard for some dumbass who’s mad at you because you grabbed the last piece of chicken out of the tray! I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that anybody going in on a risky environment such as Golden Corral—I miss it, I’m not kidding, they have a soft-serve ice cream machine and you just grab a cone, or a bowl and you can poop out as much soft-serve as you want and then go put some hot chocolate on it from the “Chocolate Fountain,” a device that provides a cascading flow of hot liquid chocolate gravy in an endless and mesmerizing fashion—I said anybody at Golden Corral is gonna be somebody who doesn’t give a shit about the Virus! And double doesn’t give a shit about you catching a dose along with the three slices of different kinds of pie you just grabbed! You can get a lemon meringue, and an apple, and whatever other kinda pie and nobody says anything, you already paid! Leave a tip, though, it doesn’t have to be 20 percent, but you know, c’mon, the servers are locked up in a Corral all day, express some Gratitude.
Anyway, I’m sorry about Golden Corral. Do they still have Chocolate Fountain there? It’s wild! I don’t have an official example, but there’s this thing here I saw once, good lord, you could just stick your whole face all up in there, but take your mask off first. I know, I know, how do you even construct a Sneeze Guard for this? Stay healthy!
The MR. WRONG COLUMN is a general-interest column appearing weekly wherever it can appear, no matter how dark it is outside.
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