The Dollar Menu & The Hail Mary

The convenience of the golden arches won out again at yesterday. I try to bring my lunch two days a week, go out with my co-workers two days a week, and on Friday we order pizza.

“Two nights a week I cook. Two nights a week he cooks. Two nights we go out. And then there's sandwich night.”

“I bet your sex life is a real thrill.”

So unless somebody has a craving for haggis, we usually just hit the streets and end up at either Jimmy John’s, Chipotle or McDonald’s, depending upon which way the wind is blowing. The winds were out of the SSW at 9 mph, so we obviously ended up at McDonald’s, where I exhibited my Zen-like discipline and merely ordered a single grilled chicken snack wrap. Maybe Zen-like isn’t the right word there, but I like to pretend I’m enlightened even when I’m giving my money to Ronald McDonald. However, I did fall prey to one of their latest marketing ploys and ordered the new large sweet tea for the special price of $1.

You see, I require a lot of fluids. More fluids than something that’s liquid-cooled somewhere where it’s like really hot. I love unnecessarily awkward and simple-minded analogies. They amuse me. But I digress. Water is the primary drink of choice, but servers can rarely keep up as I suck it down faster than a hungover beagle in the Mojave Desert, so I usually order a side beverage so I have something to drink between refills. I used to prefer Wild Turkey on the side, but that had several side effects that made it difficult to perform simple feats like standing after a couple rounds. Besides, McDonald’s stopped serving Wild Turkey sometime in the 90’s when everyone started getting politically correct. Or maybe that’s when they started enforcing the “no flasks during lunchtime” rule.

“My favorite gift I’ve ever received is a flask. I think giving someone a flask is a nice way of saying: ‘Hey you seem like a drunk on the go. You strike me as needing hard liquor at all times… This would be good for you in your car.’” Jim Gaffigan

After giving up Wild Turkey I went on a diet cola kick, but then I read something about laboratory studies indicating a higher incidence of herpes in fruit flies that drank Tab. So I quit that and switched to iced tea, in which I might drop an artificial sweetener if I’m bored or trying to impress an artificial sweetener distributor. But when I saw that sign at McDonald’s, it said to me, “Dude. Your time is too valuable to waste trying to figure out whether to use processed sugar or an artificial sweetener. Don’t fool yourself – you don’t know the difference between saccharin, aspartame and sucralose, and even if you did you’d never use the right amount. We’re in the taste business, we do this shit for a living – let us do it for you. You’ll be lovin’ it.” How could I refuse?

And now for my review… good lord, that stuff sucked. I have a major sweet tooth so intense that it requires magnum floss. I drink straight up maple syrup for breakfast and eat marshmallow fluff for lunch, but this was disgustingly sweet. Only after the ice melted did it become somewhat tolerable, but I wouldn’t recommend it to a monkey on a rock. Nor to you, gentle reader. Let’s boycott the joint until it’s time for shamrock shakes.