We had a little incident last night. It wasn’t a big incident (that’s why this isn’t a “Get a Load of These Fuckers”), but it was definitely an incident.
We’d gotten home from Christmas in the early evening, and while we had food in the house, it was a get-takeout night. Rules are rules. You get back from a trip in the early evening, you get takeout. It’s in Leviticus.
The puppy, Fargo, has had some diarrhea lately, and by lately, I mean right before we left for dinner. She was also a little wet—she’d gotten a bath that afternoon at the boarder—which meant she had the zoomies. The result, a sixty-pound bundle of muscle and teeth and fluff launching herself across the house and threatening to take another messy dump in the dark backyard with little warning, provoked me to volunteer to go pick up dinner. I wanted out.
One of the roommates wanted Sweetgreen or Cava, the fanciest fast casual Austin can offer, which isn’t far off the fanciest fast casual most cities can offer, I don’t think. Los Angeles probably has some secret, fancier fast casual. San Diego probably has independent, better fast casual, but with a more accessible ethos. New York just has holes in the wall and tourist traps. In one city, it might be fancy fast casual, but in New York, it’s a tourist trap. Beyond that, New York is a wall full of holes, in one of which the NIT Final Four is played each year and in another of which LaGuardia Airport swallows travelers’ souls. Souls in holes. If they played college football at Citi Field they could call it the Soul Hole Bowl.
I, millennial that I am, started checking hours on Google Maps. I’d seen a sign on Sweetgreen’s door last week, when I was picking up my nephew’s toy basketball (start ‘em early), that the Sweetgreen on The Drag had different hours during UT’s winter break, but Google Maps said it closed at seven. Google Maps also said the Cava in those lands closed at ten. It was not yet seven. Nor ten. I had my doubts about Sweetgreen, but I trusted Google Maps when it came to Cava. Or I trusted Cava when it came to Google Maps. That’s the real question here. Because both ended up being closed and I went to the Cava downtown. Who keeps the Google Maps hours up to date? How rare is it for two places to both have their hours wrong on Google Maps? Am I wrong to put such limitless faith in an app run by a faceless corporation known for helping draw people to my website when I blog about songs the Jonas Brothers have covered?
These are the sorts of questions one gets pondering in this time of year, these times when the days are the shortest and the hours on Google Maps in college towns are the most wrong. Winter is upon us, friends.
