To hell and back - in my lunch hour

Picking up lunch at Carl's Junior is very much the everyday and more successful equivalent of Orpheus' descent into Hell to retrieve Eurydice. For the uninitiated, the Carl's Junior six-dollar burger is not simply the finest fast-food burger, it is the finest hamburger known to humanity, the platonic ideal. I have eaten burgers at some pretty upmarket establishments (OK, in the bar of some pretty upmarket establishments), and I can tell you that all are as a travesty when set against the Carl's Junior archetypal form. Naturally, I have been widely mocked for this assertion, but such counterarguments that exist are based on ignorance and, to be fair, justifiable prejudice. For every other aspect of the Carl's Junior experience is loathsome in the extreme.

Of course, the interior is the standard neon-lit white-with-corporate-palette-highlights plastic limbo that is de rigeur in the industry, although there is a noticable absence of piped musak which, counter intuitively, only highlights the existential vacuum at the core of one's being. Naturally, the ambient experience can be minimized by getting the burger "to go"; nevertheless, one if forced to hang around whilst the order is prepared. The clientèle are typical inhabitants of Dante's third circle: a junkie sleeps off his fix under a table, another laughs maniacally into space, a pimp comforts a waif, and so forth, while even the staff - mechanically friendly if jaded and possibly in the early stages of withdrawal - avoid eye contact with their customers. One orders, jumping through the linguistic hoops necessary to escape with just the thing you actually came in for and not a supersized carton of fries and a bucket of well soda of an appropriate capacity for a horse. One is handed a ticket. Then there is the waiting. The area in front of the counter at Carl's Junior must be one of the few places outside of prison that elicits the sense that one might get stabbed at any given moment, adding a further frisson of excitement to the adventure. Then at last Persephone calls out one's number. You grab the bag and escape, taking care not to look back until safely seated at the office lunch counter. Thence to feast, a transcendent moment which - granted, unbelievably - makes the preceding quest worthwhile.

Oddly, the six-dollar burger retails for $4.95.

Obligatory photos of Ethan now follow...


A splendid occasion - we're invited round to Derek and Sonja's for dinner! Here Derek lounges beneath a picture of his homeland while Ethan ransacks his drawers.


Ethan playing with his old school wooden toy.


Bathtime fun. Am pleased that bathtime is again fun - there was prolonged phase during which it was considered abject torture.


He is wearing my hat!