In and of itself, the word “brunch” is ugly. It’s falsely onomatopoetic, mimicking the sound shit makes when it meets a human face and then is immediately tamped down by a heavyset man in steel-toed Wolverine construction boots, the screams of agony stifled by the crunching and brunching of the facial bones.
There will be a 30 minute wait, minimum. Salad is recommended, but rarely heeded, and your Bloody Mary will be garnished with the icy chill of death. This is the poison of our generation. We are dying, one meal at a time.
Much like human happiness itself, brunch is a false construct. It’s just fucking lunch. Why does it need a different name? Literally nobody eats breakfast anymore. Lunch is generally the first meal of every living human's day, so it’s not like brunch is all that different just because you slept in. Oh, it’s brunch because it’s the weekend? Because there are eggs? If you’re actually eating breakfast, then why not just cook the eggs at your house, save yourself the wait and get on with your life? Do you not value your time? Brunch becomes doubly stupid in the winter, when after you’re done with the fucking thing all the daylight is gone and you’ve wasted your entire day.
There are generally two categories of people who get brunch: people who want an excuse to get day drunk, and people who actually want to eat food. When they get together, they form a dining experience I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy, let alone my parents, the only people I seemingly ever go to brunch with. They are twin cancers, meeting up in the stomach, expediting the process of death.
Drunk Brunch is an apocalyptic scene. There are beautiful young people revealing their ugliness one mimosa at a time, screaming, descending into the realm of the sub-human. It is these people who will stumble throughout their neighborhood, wreaking havoc upon whoever and whatever unlucky enough to cross their path. Relationships have ended because of drunk brunch—petty fights stretched into full-on conflicts as real as the coldness in the eyes of a sous chef unnecessarily dolloping hollandaise sauce (which, by the way, looks like something that might have originated in Big Bird’s prostate) over some abomination of not only cuisine, but decorum itself.
You might as well save your money and go to Popeyes.
There is a reason you’re supposed to get drunk when it’s dark, around other drunk people. Being sober and watching drunk people is fucking terrifying, doubly so in the daylight, so why would you want to be around people getting drunk, sitting at a table, poking listlessly at crab cakes? And if you’re getting drunk during the day, why don’t you have shit to do? Don’t you need to mop your kitchen or something? Getting day drunk means your day’s pretty much over until after you take a nap, and then you’re just going to wake up and get drunk again. That’s fucking stupid.
What about that other type of Brunch Person? He Or She Who Actually Wants to Eat Food? Foodie culture is pointless and classist. If you’re not paying top dollar for brunch, then you’re probably getting food that’s stuffed with whatever makes chickens look like this. You might as well save your money and go to Popeyes. If you are shelling out for some namby-pamby, farm-to-table nonsense, then you’re eating lettuce that’s been fertilized with horseshit. Think about that.
And that, ultimately, is why brunch is so fucking annoying. It’s an act oozing with leisure afforded only to those with privilege. The very ability to go out and get an overly long, expensive meal on the weekend means you either have rich parents, or a job that affords you both the time and capital to eat an expensive meal for no other reason than to be social. It’s class warfare, garnished with celery.
Drew Millard wrote this while drinking sake on a Suzuki in Osaka Bay. You can read more of his work over at Noisey and follow him on Twitter here.
