& amongstotherthings

Waffle House is one of the few chains in America that’s open 24/7/365, and where you can get both breakfast and lunch/dinner options at any time (I have had so many Breakfast Cheeseburgers at Waffle Houses). The food is really good, and people eat there at all times of the day or night, but it’s particularly popular as a late-night post-drinking spot because it’s all that’s open and it’s the kind of food that tastes especially good when you’re hammered.

Part of Waffle House Protocol is that all the servers and cooks greet every single customer as they come through the door. It sounds lame, but I’ve never been to a Waffle House where that greeting didn’t feel completely heartfelt. My mom is a health nut who could barely find anything on the menu she was willing to eat and yet she describes the Christmas Day lunch we had there one year as one of the nicest meals she’s ever had because everyone was so warm and welcoming. That sense of camaraderie gets turned up to 11, of course, at 2 a.m. when everyone’s shitfaced.

The jukeboxes have Waffle-House-themed songs on them (once you have heard “Raisins in my Toast” you will be earwormed forever) and there is an arcane system of hash brown ordering: scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, topped, diced, peppered, and/or capped. The hot sauce bottles say “Casa de Waffle.” 

Once, in Oxford (UK), my husband and I walked past a kebab van very late one night and he said “why do I smell Waffle House”

The location of most Waffle Houses means there’s some… classism that tends to get tied up with Anti-Waffle House Discourse, which is probably lending itself, in part, to this being such a fraught topic. (I’m looking at a map and apparently I was born and raised right in the middle of the Peak Waffle House Density Zone)

If I weld a joint, and the CWI comes up behind me with a radiographic test for it and finds that I just laid hot metal on cold metal or it looks like a sponge inside, you know what’s gonna happen? You think they’re gonna give me a low score and tell me to move on? Fuck no. They’re gonna hand me a grinder and tell me to take it out and put it in right.

When there’s actual work to be done, we don’t leave it at the first attempt if that attempt was shit. We don’t leave a trail of “what’s done is done.” If it takes you four attempts, that’s what it takes, and next time it’ll take fewer because you learned how to do it right after the third time.

School, as it’s set up, with unforgiving deadlines and single attempt high stakes tests are building a shitty work ethic. It says “I tried once, and that’s all you’re getting.” It sets you up to leave a trail of cut losses and barely or unfinished projects as you scramble to get something, anything, turned in before the deadline.

MORON CITADEL

CILANTRO MODE

CONDOM RETAIL

MOONLIT CEDAR

LORD MEAT COIN

RENT ACID LOOM

Only the deepest love will persuade me into matrimony, which is why I will end up an old maid.

“A Flemish giant rabbit.”