I’ve Been To Cracker Barrel 100’s of Times, But Never Knew This

is as constructed as the menu font. Someone chose which histories to foreground and which to vanish, which faces get framed on the wall and which never existed there at all.

Yet the illusion holds because you quietly agree to hold it. You lean into the script, fill in its gaps with your own longings, and call it authenticity. There’s no crime in wanting continue reading …