Last night my wife and I had a conversation.
“What’s for dinner?”
“I don’t know. What do you want?”
“Dunno. What do you want?”
“Dunno, either.”
“Looks like we’re going out.”
“Yup.”
“Yup.”
Seriously. Why I’m not picking up an Oscar for best original screenplay beats the hell out of me.
Up next was Yelp. Because I don’t allow my aorta to pump out a fresh serving of blood from the ventricle without at least four stars. Make no mistake, I’ll bleed out before accepting three stars.
“Here’s a place,” my wife said. “Remember that seedy burger joint you pointed out on XYZ Avenue? They got four stars.”
“I have been wanting to try that place,” I admitted. “Let’s do this.” For added emphasis I may have also yelled, “DAYUM!!!”
My wife adopted a cautionary tone. “Remember. They’re on XYZ Avenue. And, get this, they only take cash. We better hit the safe.”
“Roger, that,” I replied.
Half an hour later we were on our way with my wife behind the wheel. Twenty minutes after that I was like, “Where the hell are we going?!”
“Yeah,” said my wife. “I thought we would have been there by now.”
I grabbed my wife’s iPhone and demanded answers. We were on the wrong road. We only had to backtrack by about five miles.
A few shouting matches later and we pulled into the place. It was 7:25 p.m.
“Don’t forget,” I offered lamely at the last possible minute as we approached the door. “This place is cash only.”
She gave me a very strange look. “Did you bring any?”
“No,” I replied. “You?”
“No.”
“Motherfuck.”
“Hey, look,” my wife pointed. “They have an ATM.”
“There goes five bucks,” I grumbled. I had no fight left in me. We were past the point of no return.
The door said, “PUSH.” My wife tried to pull. BOOM.
Suddenly she turned on me. “This is all your fault!”
“My fault?” I said with all the innocent umbrage I could muster. (Believe me. It was a lot.)
“I have to take care of everything,” she quipped. “Why the hell don’t you do anything?”
It was time to release my accusatory judgmental tone. “You picked the place!” I hissed. “You looked it up on the map. You’re the one who drove down the wrong street. You’re the one who didn’t bring cash. I assumed you took care of it. You. You. You.”
That last “you” was uttered a la Bridge on the River Kwai style.
I punched the ATM. It gave me $20 and, oh sweet heavenly miracles, it charged us $2. (That’s a fee of only ten percent.)
At 7:29 p.m. we placed our order for a couple of burgers. At 7:30 p.m. they flipped all the “open” signs to “closed.” Yelp had lied about their hours.
Our food arrived. We each took a bite. Mine was pretty good.
“Ugh,” my wife said. “I do not like this Coney Island sauce.”
“Want to switch burgers?” I said.
“Want to switch burgers?” my wife said in unison.
Burgers swapped, the meal was consumed. We decided that a four-star rating was very generous. And it was all my fault. All of it. Every last bite.
Shouts from the Abyss 
#marriage
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How’d you know? Was the word “wife” a giveaway? 🙂
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I was saying that the whole situation screams #marriage.
I would have pulled a “Well it’s your fault we’re here in the first place because YOU could have made dinner but NOOOOO it always has to be me.”
Love it.
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I offered to make jungle curry for dinner, but my wife does not like jungle curry, so no help there.
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Of course it was your fault.
You dish the dish and you’re dishing for disaster. *grin*
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I am a disher of men.
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I don’t want to jump on the “Kick Shouts When He’s Down” bandwagon, but I cannot believe that no one has pointed out that you are also guilty of ordering a burger with “Coney Island Sauce” on it. I realize that Mrs. Shouts was probably the one who actually ordered it, but we know you’re somehow to blame. Despite the fact that Coney Island is known for hot dogs and over-priced T-Shirts, the lovely-but-flustered Mrs. Shouts ordered a sauce named after it on her beef patty. Your ceaseless brow-beating over her shortcomings as a driver/navigator clearly caused this lapse in menu judgement. For shame!
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I never venture far from the menu. So, in a burger place, I ordered – and I quote – a “burger.” And I told them to slap some cheese on that sumbitch.
My wife now admits that she had no idea what “Coney Island” sauce was when she placed her order. She thought it might be thousand island based or perhaps cheesy. As far as we can tell it’s just another name for chili.
I think the moral of the story is how I stepped up and sacrificed my beloved burger even though I liked it just fine. This is like gentlemen of yore laying their coats over puddles simply so women could step over. That’s how I roll.
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You’re like some kind of new-fangled Sir Walter Raleigh.
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So what y’all had there was a failure to communicate?
(I couldn’t think of a decent BOTRK quote to apply here, so I switched the context to Cool Hand Luke)
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Interesting, because I found a neat little #PDX food cart that offers a single serving size of 50 hard-boiled eggs. They’re free if you can eat ’em all in under an hour.
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