I have a confession.

I ate McDonald’s the other day.

To be fair… I made the most out of it. I ate it with expensive Champagne. Really expensive Champagne. I figured, if you’re going to clog your arteries and tempt the gods of morbid obesity, you may as well throw some pricey bubbles on top of it all.

It started out with a craving. Like, a pregnancy, last-day-on-earth, just-smoked-a-fat-doob craving. I honestly don’t really know what a pregnancy craving is like, and I’ve somehow managed to avoid landing myself on death row thus far, but I do know what it’s like to get the munchies, and this was that feeling. On steroids. I needed grease and salt, and I needed it immediately.

But I wasn’t going down alone. I had to drag my entire staff with me. They were also going to eat McDonald’s and drink Champagne or they were going to get fired. I took requests from my confused, slightly terrified team and set out to purchase the fast food goods.

There are few things more unpleasant than a McDonald’s in midtown Manhattan during lunch hour on a Friday, and I learned this the hard way. Not only was it the most inefficient clusterfuck of total and complete mayhem (might I suggest an “order here” and “pick up here” window, rather than an “order, pay, stand around, complain, talk on cell phone, ask for more sweet and sour sauce, AND pick up here” window, dear McD’s?), I was also given one damp, half-ripped paper bag to carry enough food and beverages to feed the entire upper east side, in which I was supposed to transport our carcinogenic feast six blocks. This is what I looked like when I returned:
The camera doesn’t quite capture the sticky mess all over my arms and hands from the neon yellow and pink strawberry lemonade that Henry insisted on getting, as it is currently all the rage in the fast food world. It did, however, capture the multiple soft drinks and dye from the McDonald’s bag that I took to the chest, and subsequently tried to sponge off.

Despite an experience I would like never to repeat in this lifetime or the next, I was able to return to my clan with this tasty looking spread:
It seems a bit wrong to wash down something like this with water. But I’m just not the soda type, and I don’t really trust people who are. So, we decided to line up some alternative beverage options for the in-store fatfest.

No…no…no…no…yes.
The bottle of Cristal was a bit of an afterthought… a joke, really. It was a gift to the MWX team, and we had sort of been saving it for a special occasion. Or, well, at least a more special occasion than sitting around on case stacks on a random Friday afternoon, eating a collection of strange animal parts fried in fat. There wasn’t even a staff meeting. But, the more we thought about it, the more it seemed like an utterly brilliant idea. The best idea we’d ever had, in fact. 
There is no better sound than that of a Champagne bottle popping, in particular in the workplace. While we all wanted to be celebrating raises, instead, we were celebrating our heartbeats (which we were about to be very thankful we still had, after this little cardiac arrest in a paper sac). We were alive, the sun was out, we did have jobs, thankfully among people we actually liked, and we were surrounded by the come-hither aromas of D-grade “beef.” Celia Cruz was on the iPod. Life was good.
Let me tell you something, dear readers. Nothing does McDonald’s justice like Cristal. Even more so than my beloved bubbles and bacon, egg and cheese, or, of course, our Champagne and Hotdogs… this pairing blows the mind. It’s everything you could ask for in a marriage of food and wine. Salty, oily, artificially flavored bites of Big Mac begged for a post-chew deep cleaning, a challenge our swank sipper was more than happy to tackle. The special sauce stood up to the yeasty complexity of this vintage Champagne, and mingled nicely with the finish, neither one dominating the other. And, if there has ever been a soul mate for god’s gift to late night drunk binge food – the McDonald’s french fry – Cristal is it. The tight, clean perlage was a match made in heaven for the cancer sticks, and a natural for cleansing the palate of all remnants of fat.
As you can see, I basically dislocated my jaw to cram this into my mouth. My parents would be so proud:
If only we could now get that unmistakable, eternal perma-grease scent that only McDonald’s could leave in its wake off our hands and clothes. And the store.

But we didn’t care if we all smelled like a car after a road trip to Vegas. We were drunk, fat, happy and much in need of a nap. All in the name of a hard day’s work.
7/6/2023 09:10:10 pm

This was loovely to read

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