Eeek. Napped all afternoon, in that annoying reality way where I relax while reading, not really going to sleep per se, more like intense daydreaming, and then get back up and it’s four hours later.

It’s especially annoying because I lose the time without seeming to gain anything. I don’t feel well rested or relaxed or anything. In fact, honestly, I could use a real nap. I feel more tired physically now than I did when I lay down. But I’m doing dinner with my friends soon, so that’s not on. Plus, you know, gotta write this very thing here.

Oh well. such is the harsh and cruel life of whatever the fuck it is you call my sort of life shaped thing.

Otherwise, it’s been a nice weekend. Nothing too exciting, just the usual. Went to Denny’s with my friends on Friday night. Of our usual haunts, it remains my favorite. The servers there are very nice, and they seem to genuinely enjoy us being there and appreciate our business, which has not been true in other places we have tried in the past.

So we’re loyal to them, and them to us. Plus, Denny’s has a great menu with a lot of variety and a uniform good quality. None of it is fancy or Cordon Bleu, but that’s fine by me. In fact, honestly, it’s nice to go to a place here on the Wet Coast that isn’t trying to be yet another casual chic trendy Left Coast brew pub slash restaurant slash sports bar with weird stuff on the wall.

It’s just Denny’s.

Plus, while they sometimes have “the game on”, it’s only in the front part of the restaurant, and we always go right to the back, where the seating is less cramped and it’s almost always quiet. We eat out to enjoy one another’s company while having a relaxed meal served to us by others. We do not want to have to yell at each other over loud music or a sports event with hollering fans.

Basically, we’re all quiet verbal types, and loudness, therefore, repels us.

I have said it before but it bears repeating as it’s been on my mind again lately : I think the main reason the modern world supports so much eating out at restaurants is that doing so activates some highly relaxing instincts in our minds by providing us modern busy types with someplace you can go and just have a meal with people. We never eat together at the table like family at home any more. At home, there are far too many of our modern distractions. It’s too easy to just grab something in the kitchen and then wander off to do our separate things like we do in the modern world. Plus, and this is vital, if you eat at home, someone has to cook it, and someone has to clean up afterwards too. It’s all too real, too mundane, too dull.

But go to a restaurant, and there is a sense of occasion, and vitally, nothing to do but talk to each other. not only that, the mere acting of sitting around the same table and eating together is powerful human social bonding mechanism. Family, on a primal level, is the people you eat with. Many of us had childhoods where the only time we were all together in the room talking to each other was at meal times. This trained us to a certain deep expectation of a certain amount of coordinated social connection each day.

Plus, I am convinced that, on a deep level, being fed by people who are nice to us makes us feel like we are being “cared for”, and thus gives us that nice warm feeling of safety and comfort that comes with things which activate and sooth our social bonding urges.

Hence, you drive down any random primary street in our modern worlds, and there’s a strip mall every three blocks or so, and half the places in there are fast food, and there’s a simply staggering number of traditional restaurants everywhere you go.

We have a lot of options in this modern world when it comes to what to do with all that money that we don’t spend on basic necessities.

I think it say something about what it means to be human that we spend so much of it on the simply pleasure of sitting down to eat with one another.

With, of course, someone else to cook and do the dishes!