.disclaimer

To avoid putting any particular location in your justice crosshairs, we will call this establishment Duke’s Breakfast Hub or DBH for short. This is a fictitious name, but if you live in the continental United States, you have one of these within 50 miles.

It is an old building, with an oversized menu. It has wait staff that joined Earth when Wyoming joined the US and they don’t seem to age past 60 and sweet.

.event

My girlfriend and I visited DBH this morning, around 10:00am. We’ve been here a lot, but not in a while. The room was filled with a cacophony of clinking plates and conversation. Smells of coffee, bacon, pancakes, and eggs waft through the air as we are lead through the labyrinth of tightly packed wooden chairs and tables, flanked on either side by tall brown booths. Our shepherd, 2 oversized menus in hand, had safely led us to a booth in the back corner, I was thankful to not be in the center of the chaos. To our side, a table was within arms reach, currently unoccupied, it shared the bench I sat on, which spanned the entire length of the wall.

Awesome, we won’t have to interact with strangers.

Behind the illustrious kitchen doors I imagined a wooden box with a set of dice next to an abacus. I pictured our shepherd walking into the back, throwing the dice with foreign glyphs and runes into the box, performing an incantation and sliding a wooden disc on the row designated for our booth in the abacus to the right. ‘Customer seated, service needed.’ would be spoken three times, and from a portal, our server appeared.

Having only waited 2-3 minutes with this oversized menu, bolstering 300 choices, the freshly spawned server arrived.

‘What would you like to drink?’

They apparently asked, I could not translate the raspy dialect, my girlfriend was able to understand but I still asked. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

With a large smile, our server said “Drink?” tilting her head in a way that made me feel like a dog might when you say ‘Walk?’ to them.

Coffee, water, orange juice ordered. We’re now on page 14 of our Menu Encyclopedia. I’m debating between Greek Florentine Eggs Benedict and Country French Toast, when our previously unattended neighboring table had an unwanted deposit of bodies. The usual pleasantries of head nods and half smiles ensue.

My girlfriend and I go back to our studies, she’s on page 27, and I announce my resignation to the choice and say, ‘I’m getting both!’ She looks disappointed but then says ‘Ok, I’m not that hungry, I’ll just pick at that.’ I am pleased to hear this. I think some people on the opposite end of the room have been stuck in a decision loop for the last 5 months and are glitching out in their booth. Relieved to avoid the fate of decision psychosis, we place our order with our server and continue chatting.

Glancing about the room, we see people of all walks of life, with all of their decisions, and their forebearers decisions, and the deterministic nature of pre-sentient existence converged to bring this infinitely impossible gathering of people together at this exact moment. Faces filled with sadness, happiness, betrayal, waffles, eggs, coffee, and donuts. Walls adorned with dust, cobwebs, trinkets, doodads, and photographs. Stories we may never know, familiarity in it’s obscurity. Nothingness and everything. A beautiful moment, cut short by intrusive thoughts of judgment, my own self doubt, and the fact that the..

…food arrives…

…on two gargantuan plates. The Greek Florentine Eggs Benedict is complemented with a small heap of fruit salad, home fries cooked to perfection on an ancient gregorian griddle, and at the center piece, two massive english-style muffins topped with sauteed spinach, half a pound of feta, two poached eggs, and three gallons (give or take) of hollandaise sauce. The Country French Toast, not wanting to be outdone by the savory choice, is four pieces of cinnamon raison bread toast, put into two sandwiches with two pounds of sweet cream cheese and jam between them. These are cut diagonally and create a barricade around a pile of delicious ice cold fruit. In between each half of a french toast diabetic induction machine, a dollop of house made whip cream sits, its’ origin unknown with the myriad of ‘milk’ choices. I wished it was giraffe milk, but gathered it was just hormone and antibiotic laden cow orginated. Moo.

With wide eyes, my girlfriend and I look to each other, then to the plates, then to each other and smile. Off to our side, I clock the onlookers staring at our goods and rabbling amongst themselves. Their leader works up the courage to break the laws of breakfast dining and crosses the conversational moat ‘Wow that looks good!’

I die inside before putting my best face on, knowing that any response given will only continue the conversation. “Oh yeah! This is going to be great!” was my reply.

One of their lackeys chimes in, with the drawbridge down over this moat, apparently anyone can enter. “Wow is that the french toast?” they inquire, indicating their inability to identify objects.

“It’s the Country French Toast, I’m looking forward to it!” before I finish the reply, their whole table of four is now involved in the commentary siege. Our castle will fall, I give my girlfriend the look that says ‘We can get through this electric meat sack interaction, I want to remain cordial, should we resist their onslaught?’ She glances back with a look that says ‘It’s just harmless interaction, there is no danger here’. No need to pour hot oil over the castle walls, or scorch the earth. The siege continues.

“Where do you even start with something like that?” – Lackey 2

“Wow, I’m glad I ordered a small french toast.” – Lackey 3

Simultaneous questions flying in, bouncing off the shield of niceties. I stated “With the good parts!” to Lackey 2 and returned a courteous smile to Lackey 3. The foreign bodies seem to catch wind that we are ready to consume the contents of our plates, they offer one last smile, their leader gives the team the ‘Stand down’ look, and offers us one final comment.

‘Good Luck!’

We persevere and eat our meal. It was delicious, we saved some leftovers for the chickens at home and make our approach to depart. The Guardian before the exit stands behind a cash register still painted in the telltale yellow of nicotine. Mind you, this is almost two decades after smoking was banned here. We pay our toll, and file through the corridor to the sky world, putting the history, synchronicity, and strangeness behind us.

That last comment stuck with me though, it was so natural and made with good intentions but evoked this feeling of disappointment in me.

Good luck. Are we at a blackjack table? No, I don’t always have the best awareness, but I was pretty certain we were about to eat breakfast at DBH. We are technically risking something to gain something, but I would hardly think an offering of luck is warranted in that respect.

Good luck. Are they aware of exigent circumstances in our lives? Do they know about our financial stresses, our relational issues, our families? Are they wishing us luck in the future endeavors to come? Perhaps they know some fate we are about to endure and.. no, that cant be it. They barely had the courage to comment on our meal, I doubt their sorcery is that strong.

Good luck. Are they worried we may choke on this food? This seems closer, but I don’t think they viewed us as incapable of feeding ourselves, we have almost 80 years combined between us of existence at this point, and with the minimum consumption to stay alive requirements for humans what they are, they could definitely infer we know to chew before swallow and reasonably guess at what constitutes food.

Good luck- Oh no, the dread is setting in.

I know why this bothered me. Good luck, as in Good luck finishing that massive pile of food you gluttonous fools. The implications here are dire, ‘good luck overeating!’ With so much suffering in the world, you sit there before abundance and press your luck on the digestion of that caloric anvil.

“Good luck!“

With their jowls reverberating the chorus of my guilt. An image burned into my mind, their faces full of both glee and judgment. Their hands weathered by years of patting themselves on their backs. Sipping their sugary caffeinated drinks, eager for their own next task. It haunts me in this moment.

I catalog the events, going over them, only briefly glancing at their table after the Great Siege of Booth 41C at DBH in 2024. I didn’t want to invite them back to our lands, so I kept my glances brief. The gentleman at their table had a similarly massive plate, and to his side, a six-pound turkey sandwich and fries sat between us on our bench. This offered some reprieve from my guilt, for they too were gluttons in that moment.

Such a mundane morning had spiraled into a vortex of existential dread from one seemingly trivial comment. I imagined a world where manufactured scarcity didn’t exist, where decisions weren’t driven by human greed, where everyone could simply enjoy the fruits of collective labor without being marginalized.

But then I remembered…

It was just some breakfast, at a place that had been serving long before I existed and would continue long after I’m gone. There was no cosmic twist of fate, this was no paradigm shift. It was just a fleeting moment, one I often embrace, but served no purpose here.

Breathe in, breathe out.

The fresh late morning air cleared these thoughts away, and with them, my worries. I found myself back in my center, my happy place. This thought will likely stick with me, and I’ll always think back to that table, a moment locked in time where a few strangers shook my foundation with a simple well-wish. I hope to one day catch them before a meal, so I can return that wish of ‘Good luck’.