Was it the gravy?

It seems that Wilbur Hardee, founder of the iconic - vaguely southern - fast food chain has died. (I say "southern" because while the shift isn't quite as dramatic as the "because of the odd similarities" White Castle to Krystals - the Castle being a subject for another day, though the largest WC in the world just recently opened in the city across the river from my own hometown - it is akin in the geographic imagination to a partioning out of McDonalds and Hardees, and yes McDonalds is ubiquitous - maybe the distinction is more akin to general economics than a Mason-Dixon divide; you never look twice when you see a McDonalds in an untowards area, but how often is a Hardees restaurant seen in an area that is not bluecollar and or generally downtrodden.) Hardees saw a sister-in-law through college (and she still knows how to make large billowy biscuits) and I often skipped Sunday morning mass to eat $1.99 all you can eat biscuits and gravy of surprisingly good taste and presumed quality. But more than that, more than the many Mushroom and Swiss burgers that I consumed after weight-lifting, more than the Mailman and its juicy chicken, it was at a local Hardees restaurant that I first and most frequently practiced the "intellectual brutality" that marked much of my undergraduate career. My trek through academia to now teaching and working in its lower rungs had its own sinuous if not entirely torturous route, but it is one that would have been made less likely - or at least more wendsome - without the 24Hr Hardees that held down the edge of a local stripmall ring in my hometown that was anchored in its middle by a Big Lots where my best friend worked. It was there, in its slick, slightly greasy but hard curved benches that I plowed through pages of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre - Foucault would come, not long after picking up a copy of The Portable Nietzsche and chewing through a used copy of Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. With Jon I awkwardly clambered over these authors and the general topics of government and ethics and the specifics of the Los Angeles riots and whether Kissinger is a war criminal. I held to Walter Kaufmann as translator and interpreter and sidled up to Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach; the former I moved past, the latter I still have odd dreams about. It was while in its orbit that I first read the one novel I still return to, Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Nietzsche claimed in Twilight of the Gods (trans. Kaufmann) that he would use a hammer on the idols of the age like a tuning fork, sounding out which were hollow; I cannot with surety claim that there were any idols sounded out or even thumped for ripeness, but there were exercises of mental gymnastics and verbal menageries most certainly tumbled through in the hours between the Thickburger and the "made from scratch" overstuffed breakfast biscuits. As a leftbank cafe Hardees might seem lacking, but is it not the situation rather than the context? Do tubetops take away from the general sense of the salon?
-fp