I don’t hate McDonald’s.  I’m just tired of eating their food.

The root cause is a combination of picky-eating kids and a (presumably) evil genius in the McDonald’s marketing department.  As a parent, there are times (long car ride) when a quietly-accepted McNugget is worth its weight in gold.  And when it’s time for lunch on a car ride, there is always a McDonald’s nearby.  It’s as if Ray Kroc himself conjured the interstate highway system for the sole purpose of linking his restaurants into a sentient matrix.

But recently I have begun to sense my family turning a fast-food corner.  We have yet to progress to any of your more exotic haute cuisine like, say, Taco Bell.  But lately we’re not getting nearly as strong a lobbying effort for McDonald’s from the back seat.

And that makes me happy.  Again, nothing personal against McDonald’s, but you must agree that there’s something unsettling about how McDonald’s food all smells the same in your car regardless of what you ordered.  And the way a lone wayward fry can make your car smell like a vat of oil for a week.

Let’s be clear.  I’m not some kind of gourmet snob.  Give me a sack of White Castles and a tub of Skyline chili to dip them in, and I’m a happy man. (As a distance runner, my theory is that one must consume a certain level of grease to keep one’s knees from seizing up).

But McDonald’s?  I’m just tired.

A couple weeks ago Laura had a Sunday School function after church so the kids and I were on our own.  (I would have cooked them a healthy, delicious lunch myself but Laura’s group was meeting at our house).  My plan was to go to Fazoli’s, which offers me the opportunity to feed pizza to happy children while enjoying some kind of pasta for myself.  I am a little ashamed at how much I was looking forward to my Fazoli’s.

But on the way I made a wrong turn and popped out on a main thoroughfare going away from Fazoli’s.  Do you know how sometimes when one little thing goes wrong, it spins off in unexpected directions?  Sort of like when you find yourself at work wearing blue socks with khaki pants because the phone rang while you were brushing your teeth that morning and interrupted your routine?

So as I looked for a place to turn, I noticed a new burger restaurant I’d heard good things about.  I’ve wanted to try it for a couple months.  It was right there in front of us, and since Jacob and I love burgers, and surely they offer a chicken nugget, ring, or finger for Shelby, this would be a great Plan B.  We pulled into the parking lot and I immediately became disoriented.  I should have called a timeout right there and immediately retreated to Fazoli’s.  But I forged on.

The parking lot was tiny and full, so I went around to the other side.  Here I encountered a dead-end and even fewer parking spaces (all full) with a sign telling me that there was additional parking in the rear, but on the side of the building from which I had just come.

And here is where things get fuzzy.  I think I saw open space off to the side and figured I’d just go over there and park, and drove out of the burger place’s lot.  I immediately encountered signs telling me I better doggone not park there if I was going to that burger place, since those spaces belonged to another business.  I turned to go back around one more time (my mind was reeling), and then something happened I still can hardly believe.

As I tried to work my way back out to the street, I realized I was literally driving through the outer reaches of a drive-thru lane of an adjacent McDonald’s.

All of the frustration of the last few minutes built into a wave that crashed upon our old Toyota Camry.  I gave up.  Sometimes not just electricity but electrical engineers seek the path of least resistance.  “Kids,” I asked dejectedly, “what do you want from McDonald’s?”  The sack was in my hand before I considered how easily I still could have just gone back down the road to Fazoli’s.

A man can do a lot of thinking as he marinates in fry fat fumes.  I wondered if possibly, just perhaps, the evil marketing genius sat in a meeting one day and proposed that if they just angled their drive-thru lanes just so, they could entrap some tiny percentage of customers who weren’t even trying to go to McDonald’s.

I’ll never look at a wretched fly struggling in a spider’s web the same way again.