The Last Time I Dined And Dashed

Today.

By today, I mean last Sunday. Not “today” today. 

Let me explain. I did not go to a restaurant, eat and leave without paying, which is the traditional “dined and dashed”.

I heard about this food delivery service recently. I’m old and behind when it comes to new shit, so I assume Grub Hub was created around 1977.restaurant home delivery

Anyway, someone told me about Grub Hub and how you could get people to bring restaurant food to your house. Food that isn’t pizza or Chinese take out. I never looked into restaurant delivery because  it sounds like crazy, sci-fi stuff.

Then, on Saturday, while I painted the hall bathroom trim, I considered how much I didn’t want to cook, but also didn’t want to dine out. I remembered that futuristic service, pulled up Grub Hub, and learned they do not deliver to my area of the country. Totally bummed, man. I wanted a gallon of sweet tea and a Reuben from McCalister’s.

Turns out, there is more than one player in this whole “We will bring you any food you want” game.

DoorDash delivers here and, so far, I’ve used it twice. Only I don’t call it DoorDash because I found  saying it wrong gets on the boy’s nerves.

Me: I’m going to use that “dine and dash” service again for some wings.

Joey: Mom. It’s call “DoorDash” not “dine and dash”. Dine and dash means something else.

Me: No, it makes sense. I want to dine, so they dash right out and bring food to me.

Joey: It’s not dine and dash.

Me: Pretty sure it’s dine and dash.

Joey: This is just the first step to you being like the humans in Wall E.

Me: Be a deary and run out and get me a hover chair.

Joey: Exactly.

Me: Don’t fucking try to tell me you wouldn’t dig a hover chair.

Joey: Oh hell yes.

Now, excuse me. My wings are here.

When I wrote this post, Valentine’s day was still in the future and 17 kids from a Florida high school hadn’t been gunned down yet. 

I am sad and outraged and determined to do all I can to make sure we get the right people in office in November. Something has to give. We just can’t keep going like this. 

I wasn’t going to post this today. I told Randy that it makes me feel like I’m dancing on the grave of the world. Randy reminded me shitty things are happening every day these days. Every day. We have to keep moving forward and we have to keep living.

Hug someone you love extra hard, okay? 

 

Graphic courtesy of Mohammed Hassan

35 Thoughts.

  1. Man. I will have to check this. I also live somewhere where most wonderful things like this are not available.

    Also — I feel ya. Last night I posted on Facebook about turning over in bed and my toenail making a pfffft noise scraping against the sheet, so I had to keep trying to replicate it so my Hub didn’t think I farted. He let me know that the fact that the noise came from my toe claws was much worse than a fart.

    Yeah, I posted that and then saw that the rest of the world knew about the shooting 🙁

  2. I could totally use a dine and dash service—sorry Joey. 🙂 But, I could. I’ll have to check it out in my area and see if we have any.

    It was bad enough yesterday afternoon into the night, watching as the events unfolded at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, but when you wake in the morning, that reality sinks in even more. The high school isn’t that far from where I live. My niece works as a family counselor at another high school only fifteen minutes away from Douglas. She’ll be assisting with the grief counseling. There is some kind of serious sickness or poison spreading throughout this country (the world?) and the current administration is one of the symptoms of the disease. They need to go.

  3. I also hate what’s going on in the world, but feel we must keep swimming, so…
    The last and only time my wife and I ordered anything from a food delivery service–I’m pretty sure it was GrubHub–the guy was absurdly late, the food was cold, and we both ended up with terrible diarrhea. And that shit’s not funny.
    Saying “that shit’s not funny” about diarrhea, though, is always funny.
    And it always amazes me when I hear people talk about getting Chinese food delivered. In New York, yeah–I assume you can get car batteries, chocolate milk, and a Malibu Barbie delivered to your door at 3AM, no questions asked, because that’s how New York rolls, but I’ve never lived anywhere near a Chinese place that delivered.

    • Believe it or not, Randy and I lived in a tiny little Ohio town between Columbus and Cleveland (if you took a super indirect route). Anyway, we could get Chinese food delivered to us from a couple different places.

  4. More like Dash and Dine, which is totally what Ima call my delivery service.

    Also, GrubHub is horrible, and I prefer DoorDash and Delivery because they’ve never let someone steal my account and order $80 worth of food with my credit card.

    Ya. I guess I’m still salty.

    And the world needs to laugh. So hard.

  5. My last job was at an organic produce and grocery delivery service. Making a buck on the “last mile” ain’t easy, but they’re still going ten years later.
    I know that’s different than restaurant food delivery, and the only kinds of restaurant food I’ve ever had delivered are pizza, pasta, and Chinese.
    Unless it counts when you buy your friend who has a car a burrito to get her to go get you one, which I’ve done a few times.
    We had a start-up here in the East Bay called SpoonRocket that made fresh, healthy meals daily for delivery only, but they didn’t make it. Or they’re coming back. Or something. One of my Paratransit drivers told me about them. He said his sister worked there and that the food was really good. I told myself that I would try them while I still had a few extra dollars in the bank, but just never got around to doing it.
    I remember them because they were just a few blocks from the foundry building, and we used to drive past them a lot, and say “We should really try them before they go out of business.”
    I have a friend who drives for Lyft and also does pot deliveries for a dispensary, which seems like a good idea to me. If you take the “drive a car” element out of marijuana use, the whole thing makes much better sense, to my way of thinking.
    As for the shooting and NRA thing, I just keep thinking about what Bill Clinton said (about dirty political tactics, but I think it applies here also) on his first Daily Show interview. He said they’ll keep doing it as long as it works.
    I heard that as my marching orders: I have to make it stop working.
    Which may sound a little far-fetched, but really, it’s a concrete and attainable goal, and those are sorely lacking in the gun violence issue.
    I hope you are doing OK, I have a feeling things are gonna get even crazier as the wheels start to fall off of the Fergusmobile, but as Nako Case put it:

    “A Widow’s Toast”

    Specters move like pilot flames
    Their widows toast at St. Angel
    Better times collide with now
    The tears were warm, I feel them still
    Their heat to vapor and disperse
    And cloud our eyes with weary glaze

    You raise your glass and may exclaim
    “I’ll put my hands on the truth by God”
    But it’s faster, love, than you and me
    Faster than the speed of gravity
    That’s how it catches you from falling
    And how it always slips away

    Specters move like pilot flames
    Their widows toast at St. Angel
    Better times collide with now
    And better times
    And better times are coming still

  6. Welcome to the future. I discovered Grubhub relatively late, but it was a lifesaver during our recent kitchen remodel. I liked that you could pay for the food and tip ahead of time, so there was no juggling pens or credit cards. A person shows up, hands me a bag and I say, “thank you.”

    And yeah, yesterday hit me particularly hard. It’s that this shit is happening every day. Every. Damn. Day. And it horrifies me that children were saved by the “active shooter protocol drill.” Why do we have that? Because we don’t have an “actively engaged body of representatives.” It’s some evil shit when you see Republicans talking heads saying “the investigation is ongoing” and “it’s too early to talk about this” and wishing, even for a second, that someone in their own family were shot out from under them to break the mask. I hate myself for wishing that, but for a second, I did.

    • We’re getting closer and closer to listing our house. I am sure dine and dash is going to come in very handy.

      As far as your wish? I have harbored ugly thoughts. I didn’t ask to have them, but like you, I’ve thought terrible things. I know that I would not wish harm on anyone and I’m not going to beat myself up for the occasional ugly thought. It’s stressful fucking times.

  7. First off, Randy is right that there’s always something shitty going on; you can either make your blog all about those shitty things (which would be fine, goodness knows I do a fair bit of that reading) or you can keep being a funny escape from my daily reality. I vote for that second thing, if my vote still counts for anything anywhere.

    Second: keep saying it wrong. For we are mothers, and what is our purpose if not to annoy, frustrate, and embarrass the next generation?

  8. I’ve had an issue since we moved to the boonies – no one delivers here except for the crappy Chinese place and pizza. But they’ve started our own dine and dash – and now I may need to try it.

  9. We rarely eat out – a delivery service sounds delightful for those times when I just want to veg on the couch. I mispronounce a couple of my kids’ friend’s last names and it bugs them so much that I refuse to learn the proper pronunciation. I just end up shrugging ‘you know who I mean!’

    Yes, I concur. Keep the laughs coming.

  10. I love your blog. I confess I don’t read it every time, but when I do it makes me smile. I recently started blogging to deal with our major life event. We lost our house to a fire. We are all safe! Today your blog really helped because I too have a “boy”. He would have said the same things.

    I hope to hone my skills and maybe your blog might help. Therapy is what its all about. The writing, the reading, the smiling.

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