The Procedure

Every Wednesday at 6pm during daylight savings time, Steve and Dave, along with any guests who can tolerate our weird conversations, head for the hills to gain about a thousand feet in elevation. On the way up, we complain about work.

Upon reaching the summit, Dave announces the day's stockmarket numbers, and we head back down to the city. Usually, we talk about vacations, equipment, retirement, or which restaurant to raid that evening.

Then, we load into the car and proceed to the aforementioned grub. (This part of the Hump is known variously as "foraging" or "the evening's festivities.") We alternately perform the great handwash, and then we chow down.

Amy

At some point during the evening we inevitably compare the waiter with our gold standard, Amy. Amy worked at Old Chicago a long time ago, but has since gone on to bigger and better things. And we don't even go to Old Chicago anymore.

Fiction?

Humpday guests often nod reverently - or nod off - at this point, but the evening is far from over. Next we trek to the nearest bookstore, to locate and identify misclassified non-fiction books. For example, we might find a memoire about telepathic aliens, such as the Pleiadians, classified as non-fiction. So we [pretend to] put the book where it belongs: in the Fiction section. Along the way we search for strange coincidental links between titles and cover art that might suggest cosmic significance, a shift in the literary zeitgeist, or some other mind-bending paroxysm.

We consider it a public service to re-shelve the offending books to their rightful place, and I'm quite sure that the books, not to mention their authors and publishers, appreciate our heartfelt efforts in this noble weekly endeavor.

Fiction books, it should be noted, happily announce themselves via cover annotation: A Novel. Therefore we must conclude that the authors of fiction are more honest in their efforts than the perpetrators of misclassified non-fiction.

Coffee

Finally we reach the evening's denouement: a cup of coffee, and sometimes dessert if we still detect more than a milliliter of unfilled space in our digestive tracts.

Winter

During the long, dark winter, we skip the hike and fatten up for the following summer.