Are We The Dining Dead?

The time is afternoon and Joel sits in a restaurant with his dearly beloved, or whatever she has devolved into. She’s chewing on her chicken, he on different food. There’s more chomping than there is talking, more licking on chopsticks. There’s no talking at all but plenty of musing, you can tell. Plenty of troubling. As she picks up another morsel of dead chicken, still avoiding his eye and his conversation, he asks himself: Are we the dining dead?



Here are the thirteen signs (number completely impromptu) that we are, all of us, the Dining Dead. We are the victims of our flambé, we are to drown in our coffees, we are to boil in our soup, we are to pass on our yawns, we are to grow the color of our chairs, we are to douse our salads with the juices of our sameness, and we are to deserve it. I am a waitress, so I’ll go ahead and consider myself a pundit, describing a few things I notice at the café where I work with no small measure of regret.


1. We’ve reserved a table. Two of us arrive before the rest of the fun gang, and while we wait, we refuse to talk to each other. If more is merrier, is less a painful misery?


2. I know what I want. Every time. No, don’t give me the specials. I want what I got yesterday. One same old, please.


3. I was here yesterday.


4. I was here the day before.


5. My attire hollers: I have a fashion show to attend after this meal. Reality whispers: I’m going home and checking out my Facebook profile after this meal.


6. I bring Facebook with me! I’m caught in the world wide web, and it’s going to eat me like the atrophying housefly I am.


7. We’re a loving couple when we walk in, all a-giggle. By the time of the entrée, we are two people sitting next to each other, saying nothing. Pass the ketchup.


8. I find it more important to complain about the mint leaves in my Mojito—“they’re a little too squishy. You know what I mean? Sssquishy.”—than to do something about the social funeral that is my Saturday night.


9. I’m 16, mingling around twenty-year olds, fading into an eighty-year-old. I have a grandpa, and he’s probably sinking into his chair as we speak for the next two years, watching life go by. We're not very different in that respect, he and I, except that I'll have my salad without the pills.


10. I make a “thing” out of going to the restroom (it’s a three-person-minimum event). There’s nothing like urine to spice the night up.


11. I don’t know how to tell my parents I don’t want to be dining with them, so I just ask for more coffee, please.


12. Me and the fun gang have travelling plans. We’re going to go to another country and find cafes just like this one. And we’re going to do the same thing we're doing RIGHT NOW.


13. There are a million things I could be doing instead of sitting here for hours on end. But I choose this. Every single time.


I see a lot of things that I like though. I like people who come to read, ‘cause it’s a really pretty café, kind of shut off from the city and suitable for a good, relaxing read. I’ve never happened upon a client who was there alone, though I would like that. I like people who are genuinely happy to see their friends after a long time, and their reunion is a display, but only for themselves. I like people who come with messy hair, and people who are easily convinced to do shots with the waitress, just for laughs. I like couples who sit in a corner and hold each other for hours, as if there’s no-one else but them in a crowd of two hundred. I like people who start with a smile, whatever they’re starting. I like mothers who stroll close to the flowers so their babies can touch and smell. I like gangs that get louder with every round of beer. I yearn to see more of that; more of the Dining Alive N’ Kicking.