I love Jack in the Box, purely because it's not afraid to offend. When these people brought back Jack, the antenna ball with legs, they did so in an advertisement in which he blew up the corporate boardroom. Maybe it's selective memory, or wish fulfillment, but I distinctly remember bodies flying out from the room, Jack standing there proudly. Now, there happened to be a rash of mail-bombings of corporate offices at the time, and the ad was deemed in remarkably bad taste, though it had been filmed, if not released, prior. I thought it was hilarious, and fuck the namby-pambies who were offended.

This is a fast food restaurant that later had a sign at their drive-through window featuring an antenna ball saying, "Don't tell me you only bought enough money for food." This offended my mother, and rightly so: here's an anthropomorphic figure accusing the customer of being cheap for not buying him. Imagine Mickey Mouse saying, "Hey, cheapskate, no excuses for not buying me on a keychain this time." No reply of having no need for a keychain, or an antenna ball, much less having no idea why anyone would need one, can suffice in the face of this combination of cuteness and obviously manipulative attempts to induce guilt.

I'm in a Jack in the Box now, the only place to get food in this area of Waikiki at one in the morning, and I saw, pouring my own soda, this slick and glossy sign on the soda machine just before my laboring eyes: "We don't make it 'till you order it" -- with a picture of a burger -- followed by a picture of a soda and the line, "Except the drink. Make it yourself." Both pictures and their accompanying text are of equal size, equal importance. The quotation is kindly attributed to "Jack," just in case you had any illusions that their mascot and fictional C.E.O. was somehow ignorant of this offense.

This is why I love Jack in the Box. I don't eat there often, but I like the place. Not because of the food, but because, in this politically correct culture, they're offensive. Oh, they can call it "sassy" -- as in "Jack, that sassy antenna ball" -- but the truth is that making a point of telling a customer to make his own (damn) drink is offensive. And, I think, quite charming.

Now, that's not to say the company's depiction of Jack is consistent. One patriotic post-9/11 commercial sticks in my mind: Jack, on a motorcycle, giving the thumbs up to American truckers and asserting that "America is still the best country in the world" -- as well as advertising his value menu as a way of helping out poor Americans through frozen and reheated tacos. Such inconsistencies are betrayals to what I love about Jack in the Box.

I would have preferred more office bombs, or maybe, in the wake of such attacks after 9/11, a bit of corporate anthrax to make us laugh, shocked at corporate "insensitivity" -- or, rather, striking a different tone than the politically correct, oversensitive, neurotic crowd.

Now, I grew up on McDonald’s Happy Meals. (Shouldn't a trademark sign follow that?) I used to go to Kentucky Fried Chicken (before it became KFC to hide the unhealthy way its food was prepared in an acronym) in California because, though I hated the food and still do, at the time it was the only place to get Mountain Dew, which I loved as a thoroughly caffeine-addicted kid. When my family moved to Illinois and stayed for a week in a hotel before we could take possession of the new family house, I became briefly addicted to A&W, assembling the massive cardboard houses that their children's meals came in. I still fancy A&W for their old-fashionedness and good, sweet root bear in thick, beveled glasses like beer steins, not to mention the old car-docking stations where girls on roller skates used to ride up and serve food in simpler times before heavy metal skates gave way to streamlined plastic blades. The A&W where we visited in those days of transition became the place just up the road from my high school, and I remember walking there on my lunch breaks as a freshman, buying food alone and feeling that I knew no one. That A&W also had a fireplace in the center of its seating area and wooden placards that held their supposed ingredients behind little glass shields that slowly deteriorated over the years, breaking and spilling, until the place was finally closed due to lack of business.

It is an oddity of American life that one can write one’s life story by the fast food restaurants one visited, and when.

Later in high school, it was Hardee's, where I went because my friends went there and because the management rarely kicked us out for buying a coffee, closing the blinds, and playing cards for six hours. It was there that my first girlfriend had me sit and talk to her ex-boyfriend, who I had discovered that day was her boyfriend again, and by whom she was pregnant, which I also discovered on that day of charbroiled burgers and tears. It was there that any number of fights with my first lover occurred, times in which I felt more frustrated and truly mad than any time before or since.

Then there was college, when I shifted abruptly to meals of three hundred dollars instead of three. And, in all that time, I can't recall ever eating at that "restaurant named for a child's toy from those pre-video game years when a box that chimed crudely "Pop Goes the Weasel" and opened suddenly could seem amusing in a tactile way now hopelessly lost for the young.

So, don't get me wrong. No fast food is fine dining. I don’t like Jack in the Box for its food, or faintly amusing impression thereof. But in a nation dominated by fast food and fast food culture, Jack is that rarest of quintessentially American figures: the contrarian.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT THIS WEEK

This column is five days early. The next one's due on Thursday, 29 August. But I still have two columns that I missed due to a scheduled hiatus and that I've promised to make up. Those two shouldn't be a problem, as five columns should hit you at once when the series they comprise is finally finished.

No updates to report as I'm planning a big, not to mention greatly time consuming, online move.

Your assignment this week is to buy some fast food -- just kidding. There's actually no assignment for this column because it's coming right on the heels of others, one of which did have a (rather laborious) assignment. You're welcome.