#keewaydin

Coastal Living Shares The 10 Best Secret Beaches in Florida. Our very own Keewaydin Island in Naples made the list! 

  The problem with being the sandwich bully - Is that what I am? I just thought it was the title I gave to this fuckjob blog but OK, whatever. The problem with being the sandwich bully is what happens when you have to deliver the negative review to the local business that absolutely nobody else has a problem with. I can slag off Subways and Chipotles all day every day eight ways from Sunday and nobody cares: Those are multi-billion dollar businesses that will not hurt from one bad review, especially not some dick-off number like Sandwich Bully.   However, I stand to do greater damage to a local independent joint - or I would if this were a popular blog, I have no delusions regarding the small fry nature of this thing. And in that, you think my near anonymity would permit me license to say "Fuck this joint!" but it doesn't: Local business owners are concerned with how they're doing, what their public perception is; they Google their businesses not for the ego boost of the five star Yelp but to know what caused the two star complaint.   At some point, they'll see me like I'm Tom Joad and they're my ma.   And I'm also quite aware that one bad review is not going to shut a motherfucker down, is not going to lay off staff, is not going to result in a garden hose taken out to the garage in the middle of the night. I, as you may all understand by now, am a total jackoff. Nobody cares what I have to say.   Well, until those two little words pop up:   FOOD POISONING   Yeah, that makes the meerkats pop their heads up out of their dens.   "Food poisoning" in a local restaurant review may as well be "shots fired" on a police scanner, so I am super hesitant to use it but, in the case of last night's dining experience, food poisoning wasn't the only thing that me and GF were ultimately unhappy with. And as much as I don't want to write a shitty (pardon the pun) review about a lakeside snack stand, I'm also inclined to tell the truth. You don't come here for me to not tell the truth. Sometimes you come here for stories like the time I climbed a tree to get away from Magic Walter's drunk horny aunt who just got out of prison. Sometimes you come here for stories like the time Tim Evans got a DUI for passing out drunk in the Taco Bell drive thru. Sometimes you come here for stories like the time I had to drive my first ex's dad to the airport to pick up his mail order bride in a car without a working speedometer. Sometimes you come here for stories like the time I fucked a spy. But I assume you don't come here for lies. You come here for the truth. So here it goes.   Also, this is the first hotdog post on a blog that claims that hotdogs are sandwiches.

  Last night, GF wants to go get a paddle boat and says there's this place next to the paddle boat joint that we can get a quick dinner at and I say that, yeah, I've seen that place. Been meaning to check it out. I Google it and the little thing that tells you how busy it gets says about a half hour wait. How the - What are they - Is it like a Michelin star bistro or - Let me look at the menu.   GF says, "They just do burgers and hotdogs."   I says, "I can look at the menu, though, right?"   GF tolerates this because - Actually, I don't know why she tolerates this. Maybe she just lost the receipt.   So, red flag: Their menu link wasn't working last night but that wasn't a big deal. It's burgers and franks. How hard can my decision be once we get there? But in my effort to jab my phone with my thumb at least ten times trying to open the fucking menu, I forgot completely why I had tried to look at the menu in the first place: The half hour wait.   We get there and GF wants to check on the paddle boats because the place closes at nine and then she sees the large stock of paddle boats and says she's not worried so we walk over to Sandcastle. Line's about five deep. I eye the menu and see the Nokomis Dog, a slawdog with hot peppers. We're on Lake Nokomis, why would I get anything else? And I like slawdogs. GF wants a BLT and to split an order of fries. We each get a beer.   We're handed a little buzzy light up thing that'll tell us when our order is ready. We get a spot on the grass and then eventually some proper seating over looking the lake. And then?   We wait.   I'm not going to drag it out for dramatic effect: That half hour ETA Google gave me wasn't a joke. It seemed to take forever for our food to be ready. Actually, it kind of did. It took long enough that, though we arrived at about sevenish, we totally missed the deadline for the last paddle boat rental at eight while we were just finishing up our meal.   Bear in mind the number of factors: We get there about sevenish, ish, we get in a five deep line with a bunch of Eden Prairie fuckos (likely in for a big night in the city) who don't know what they want while they are at the register - one guy changed his order at least four times and I wanted to kick him in the fucking nuts, then there was the part where Google warned us about the very real half hour wait but still, GF said it: "It's a hotdog and a BLT," which earns her the gold star: A hotdog and a BLT shouldn't take a half hour to make. So, all told, we're looking at roughly about forty minutes from arrival to getting our order. And that is ridiculous: I don't care how popular you are, I don't care what night of the week it is, I don't care about your prime lakeside real estate, I don't care about your first / summer jobs for underskilled teenagers, it shouldn't take forty minutes from the time you get in line to the time you get a hotdog and a BLT.   When that happened to us at Broder's? I kind of got that. Upscale, out of the way, Italian eatery, safe money is on making a reservation. This is a fuckin' hotdog stand. Even if it does serve shrimp tacos, it's a hotdog stand.   Now let's get to the hotdog.   GF asked me how it was.   I told her there was a lot of bun.   The frank was skinnier than what I'd get from a pack of Babars, the bun was big and fluffy and overwhelming, the slaw was just cabbage and (I'm guessing) Hellman's, and whatever those pepperettes were, they weren't hot, they were slightly sour and not really interesting. Think I paid five bucks for it. There are still worse things I've paid five dollars for. [cough Arby's gyro cough]   Asked GF about her BLT. She said, "It's kind of hard to mess up a BLT. I just don't get why it took a half hour."   True, boo. True.   Anyway, GF is a little bummed that we can't get a paddle boat but we go for a little walk around the lake instead. On the way back to the car, I tell her we're going to need to go right back to her place. She asks why and I tell her I refuse to use a park bathroom. And then a little knock at my backdoor and I tell her, "NOPE! Not going to make it!" and I hand her my bag and pinch-butt run to the men's room.   One toilet. Flip-flop-shod foot with a toe ring visible under the stall wall. And I wait. And I try to look nonchalant like I'm not about to shit in the sink if Toe Ring can't move things along a little faster.   Toilet flushes. A woman comes out of the stall. "I'm sorry -"   I move by her.   "- there was no toilet paper in the women's room -"   "I'm really not bothered by this," as I enter the stall.   "- so I had to come in here and squat -"   "OK!"   "- it's kind of gross in there."   I've seen worse but we're totally laying down the toilet paper triangle.   I hear a dad come in and ask his kid about the urinal. "Is that too high or do you need the toilet?"   Before the kid can answer, I very audibly defecate and the dad realizes what's going on and asks the kid, "How about I just hold you up so you can go?”   Oh, I'm sorry. You're squigged out by this story of acute onset diarrhea in a public place? Yeah, you just have to read about it. I had to live through it.   Long story short, I get in the car, GF asks me if I'm OK enough for her to detour to Cold Stone Creamery, I tell her, "Uh..." and she says that's OK and we go back to her place where she gives me permission to Hiroshima her bathroom so long as I light the scented candle in there. It was bad. I then settle my stomach with a carton of Goldfish, salt content be damned.   If I give the place any positive points, those points go to their friendly staff. But the food itself, discounting the ensuing carnage but still taking the obscene wait into consideration, was a let down. The frank was meh, the slaw was tangy but not really all that crisp (and also the most likely suspect concerning the gastrointestinal Nagasaki), the peppers were, uh, there, I don't know what they were doing but they were there, and there was a whole lot of fluffy white bun. It was the majority of it. It wasn't worth the money or the wait and I'm pretty sure I'd say the same thing if the My Lai Massacre hadn't occurred inside my guts.

  By the way, you like how all those references were awful things the American military did to Asian people? Kind of like how we put them in internment camps? Like we're doing now to Latinx folks?   Yeah, I'm using this space to say ABOLISH ICE.   Even a dumbass sandwich blog in some backwater like Minneapolis has stronger political convictions than Taylor Swift.   That was an unnecessary dig at T-Swift. I'm sure she'll shake it off.   NEXT!

Photo by me- Of bestfriend claire bear :)