Amy Ray sings, "I heard that you were drunk and mean down at the Dairy Queen." To me, it's a statement about life in a small town, and the absurdity of the convergence of randomness in a single place. My whole life has been a conversation with absurd randomness, and the ability to make sense of it all, even if that sense is no sense.

Today one of the housekeeping staff at the hospital I'm at was talking about the things people leave behind when she worked at a hotel. There was (of course) the random assortment of sexual objects, cases of beer, and all manner of expensive jewelry. But she also shared (in what I can only describe as a special share) about the puke someone left in the shower and across the closet and in the nightstand drawer and splattered on the wall. Oh, and there's the birthday cake that their five year old ground into the floor. All left without a note of apology. They treated the hotel room as if it were the identical twin of the shit that gets pulled at a Dairy Queen. Perhaps more places are like Dairy Queen than not.

The eternal optimist in me (and at heart that's what I am) sees an upside to places like the Dairy Queen though. It's a place where first dates that lead to marriage can plausibly happen. My own was at a bad burger joint in Atlanta called Zesto's, and I wouldn't have chosen any other place if my life depended on it, though several of my friends at the time said I was nuts (I think that one's still up for debate). The Dairy Queen is a place of authenticity as much as absurdity, and I hope that's part that's what this blog will be about.

Establishments like the Dairy Queen are authentic in that enough people subscribe to the place that they have followers, those who come in several times a week with exact change for the exact menu item they ordered last time. And they sit in the same booth and talk to the same person. And while most of us explore a variety of answers, we find ourselves asking some of the same questions throughout our lives. What are those questions? I don't really know, but still I know it to be true.

So that, in a nutshell, or rather an Oreo Blizzard, is what being Drunk and Mean at the Dairy Queen is about.