The Last Supper… but with Bleu Cheese Burgers and Fries.

My dad has this cool tradition (it’s probably not a unique tradition, but it’s one that’s still fun to practice) called “The Last Supper”. Before you do anything cool, you make sure you have a memorable meal beforehand. If you have a great experience, you celebrate with another on the back end. When we went scuba-diving in Florida, we celebrated with ribs and crab-legs at a small restaurant noted for both. When I got back from a summer in Papua New Guinea, I ate $18 worth of Taco Bell (yup…$18 worth… and that was 20 years ago, so you can do the math…it was like 25 lbs worth of beans of tortillas, but it’s what one craves when they are 14,000 miles from home with naught but peanut butter to eat for 3 months). Sami and I practice the same and have done so for the last 10 years.

The problem is, there aren’t a lot of options here at O’Hare. But I found a Chili’s (and I happen to really like Chili’s), and so got a table and sat down to hack out my first journal entry in the cool, leather-bound journal that Sami bought for me to take. I ordered a Coke (NOT diet!) with lime, and a Chipotle Bleu Cheese Bacon Burger with fries (code name: “instant heart attack” for most operations), and then sat back and ate at my leisure. Or rather, what I thought was my leisure. The excitement of everything caused me to wolf it in about 6 minutes flat, and resulted in my feeling like I was carrying a shot-put around in my esophagus for the next hour, but it still tasted good, and allowed me to commemorate in style.

Oh, by the way, yes, that’s a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula on the table, and it’s my oldest copy. I read it in 1992 for the first time, and this particular copy is so marked with notes and has been read so many times that most of the pages only loosely agree to stay tucked between the covers.