It’s November, and so like clockwork, I’ve spent 5 of the last 6 nights winding up my long, thankless work days trolling the darkly-lit highway corridor in my car looking for which fast food or convenience store grease trough is still flashing their lights at 9:30 at night or later.

The other night I pouted like a delusional hitchhiker when I found out that Taco Johns had mistakenly kept their drive-thru menu lit up long after closing time. (I sat there yelling “Chicken Potato Burrito” madly into the intercom in vain for maybe 5 minutes.)

Throughout the other 11 months of the year, I can maintain an awareness on my food choices.

But in November without forewarning or conscious deliberation, I’ll just black out in my apartment at my laptop and then wake up on the lower-end of a Taco Bell drive thru, with some asinine 11 p.m. digits on the dashboard, searching my cup-holder for grimy, syrup-stained quarters so the poorly-shaven, acne-faced teenager wearing the smock doesn’t have to run my card and find out my true name before he hands me my bag of $0.80 beefy chicken burritos.

I blame this partially on Daylight Savings Time.

All my comfortably-off friends bitch on Facebook about DST ruining their post-work trips out to the garden to tend their late-season rutabagas or whatever. Some talk about the dent the earlier dark times put on their dog-walking or kids’ football schedules.

But fuck that I’m woofing down Tornados and Kool-Aid Purple Jammers like I’m a 18-year-old having fits with his first rendezvous with the Mexican Dragon (as established two posts ago, I’m experimenting with euphemisms for drug-use….).

Kanye West in 808s and Heartbreak whines that his friends got copies of their “kids’ report cards,” and all Kanye could do was go and buy “a brand new sports car.”

Insert “one of those crushed-bun late-night burgers from Burger King with the onion ring in the middle” for everything after “buy…” and we’re talking the same language.

My mom once told my brother it was okay to be a little fatty pants as a kid because “being rotund was a sign of nobility in Victorian England.”

?

My mom’s grasp on 19^th Century British class structures remains dubious. But I’m all for sizing up and justifying general malaise toward healthy eating habits—or in this case, just general scarfing of Chuckwagon sesame seed burgers from Kwik Trip—with totally irrelevant and slightly ad-hoc causes.

Do I eat because I’m depressed?! I don’t know, maybe. How about, do I nervously fiddle with the keys in my hands while I start up my car before driving 2 miles to a Culver’s in the same way a man fumbles with a condom when he’s purchased a $400/an hour prostitute because Daylight Savings Time fucks with my biological clock and I’m hungry at 11 p.m., or even better because I’m preparing for a winter of “hibernation?!!”

Hell yeah. But don’t worry, it’s just a seasonal thing, I assure myself.

In the later winter months, like Christopher McCandless returning to the wild, I start reading Jack London and begin to feel the atavistic cave-wanderer in my soul come to the forefront. I sense the oncoming long Minnesotan winters and bountiful snow flops that will prevent me from making mad dashes in my car to those assembly lines of dumbshit-cheap foods out on the highway with deep-fat-fried delights and warm emanating pouches of food in white plastic take-out bags. MMMM.

So with a deep November in my soul, I find justification for throwing off all the fast food strictures I’ve foresworn earlier in the year. I’m not Ishmael. I don’t give a damn about knocking off hats at the end of a funeral line. But you can call me if you’re heading out the door at 11:55 p.m. on a Tuesday night to see if McDonald’s will still honor today’s Dollar Nuggets deal.

~Dunstan McGill

Photo courtesy Christian Cable