Jack Harlow Recounts 30-Second Existential Crisis at Texas Roadhouse

Jack Harlow circles the parking lot of a Texas Roadhouse, his mind and body burdened with an all-encompassing exhaustion familiar only to those well-versed in time travel. It takes a lot out of you, an increasing amount, in fact, with each trip. Especially the future ones. But no matter, Jack has made it, here, to this particular Texas Roadhouse at this particular moment for a very particular reason: For exactly 30 seconds, he’s going to watch his future ex-wife and her future post-Harlow husband enjoy a meal of the steakhouse variety with their future children.

No, this is not the opening shot of a decidedly meta film starring Jack Harlow as a time-traveling version of himself. It’s something that actually (well, kind of) happened to the “Lovin on Me” artist and The Instigators actor. As concisely recounted in a tweet on Monday, Harlow found himself steeped squarely in existential crisis territory while briefly watching a family through a window at an undisclosed location of the Louisville-headquartered steakhouse chain.

“Was circling the parking lot of a Texas Roadhouse the other night and I stopped my car at one of the back windows,” Harlow told the world. “I looked into the restaurant and saw a family sitting in a booth laughing and enjoying their dinner. It amazes me to type this but suddenly I was overcome with emotion and felt almost as if I was looking at my ex-wife out to eat with our kids and her new husband. Sat there for 30 seconds and then drove home.”

Naturally, Harlow’s recounting of an existential crisis at a steakhouse was almost immediately met with a timely inquiry regarding his potential enjoyment of nu-metal. After all, taking the nu-metal plunge is objectively one of the wisest decisions one can make whilst in the throes of ennui of any magnitude.

Compellingly, Harlow’s Texas Roadhouse moment of time-piercing revelation is preceded by a pair of previously tweeted-about experiences striking a similar chord. In one, Harlow expressed a certain wistfulness about how long it’s been since he was last able to have his mouth taste “like grape Swishers for the rest of the night” after a kiss. Before that, he time-traveled, in a sense, back to “chills”-inducing memories of another ubiquitous American chain, Great Clips.

Perhaps these three tweets should be viewed as an interconnected story, each entry speaking to a similar longing for something one couldn’t even put into words if they tried. Better yet, maybe it’s a story begging to be made into a feature length motion picture written by yours truly and starring, yes, Jack Harlow as Jack Harlow. For the role of the ex-wife character’s new husband, I propose casting Lil Dicky, thus loosely connecting this hypothetical film to the Dave universe.

Alternatively, one could argue that me spending so much time writing all of this and publishing it on a platform read by millions of people is an action itself worthy of at least 30 seconds of pondering. After all, aren’t we all merely circling the proverbial parking lot of the Texas Roadhouse in our minds, hoping against all odds to catch a glimpse of the future?