Place: Spangles
Lunch: Garlic Parmesan Bacon Cheeseburger, Pepsi
Spangles is a Wichita-based regional burger chain with a fifties theme and an extensive menu of cooked-to-order burgers and things. They're not Freddy's or Culver's, but they're decent. I like their breakfast bowls. But this...the Garlic Parmesan Bacon Cheeseburger...is just magical. Easily the best thing they've ever come up with. A burger patty coated in garlic butter with bacon, shredded parmesan, and Swiss on grilled sourdough bread. They say it's a limited time offering. It should be a permanent menu item. It's SO good. It would certainly make my Burger Hall of Fame.
I heard a radio commercial the other day about disconnecting. It started with a family member excited about the night's television offerings, a mom texting her daughter, the daughter busy with responses to her social media post, the son's new video game...it all became a mass of noise. Noise which we apparently need to disconnect from. I think it went on to encourage spending the evening outdoors camping or enjoying the fireflies (while not capturing them in jars) or otherwise somehow connecting with nature without being eaten by a bear, but I might be mixing up plots of the various PSA's the station I was listening to airs.
(Side note...they really could stand to get their sales people to work harder at selling their online stream ad slots.)
This got me thinking about all the noise in my life.
I routinely get awakened in the middle of the night by work-related emergency calls. Said callers have an unnerving knack to know exactly when I've taken two Advil PM and am dead in the middle of a dream about the ice cream shop next to the other ice cream shop in the strip mall that closed...in fact they BOTH closed...and I'm standing there trying to remember if they were ever open in the first place or even real.
(That's not a joke, by the way. I had this very dream last week, and would have never remembered it if it weren't for my voice mail notification tone waking me up.)
After handling such issues, I usually can't get right back to sleep. I find myself laying there in the silence, thinking about things. Over thinking about things. Usually dumb things. So I end up turning on the TV to drown out my thoughts. That's what ends up getting me back to sleep. It totally works. Thanks, Night Gallery.
I always have noise in the car. If I'm not listening to music from my library, I've got some talk show or podcast on. It's very rare that I don't have the radio on. Same with planes. Flying with my music through my headphones makes flights go by FAR faster than without.
I stream radio all day at work. Vegas in the morning, Portland in the midday, Salt Lake City in the afternoon. (No, not on the company network. On the cell phone network, nosey co-workers.)
So when do I need to disconnect? When do I need the silence?
Sometimes when I get home from work. I shut off the car, the garage door closes, and I'll sit there for a minute with my eyes shut before getting out.
But not much longer. I'll be reading Twitter with the evening news on in the background minutes after the cats are fed.
I can remember the days before the Internet. It was a dark and terrible time. I was SO bored.
Y'all can have your great outdoors and your fireflies.
I'll keep the noise.
