It’s the hot glow of electric freedom. It’s a blazing sentry of liberty. It’s the neon sign across the street that reads COOK OUT — and those are tears in your eyes.

To dine at Cook Out is to be presented a dazzling, dizzying array of choices. There are endless meal combinations — including the option to order a quesadilla or chicken wrap as a side — because this truly is the land of the free, the home of the tray.

Then there are the milkshakes. The menu advertises 40+ flavors, from vanilla to eggnog. You’ll count 44 possibilities on the menu board, but the seasoned patron knows that the number is actually much larger than that. A new flavor like Butterfinger pops up now and again, and there are murmurs of secret shakes. This is also the place where dreams come true. If you want to combine flavors and order say, a Blueberry M&M shake, you just go ahead and follow your bliss. No one is here to judge. This Mother Church of grease and gluttony accepts all comers.

Cook Out bills its milkshakes as “fancy,” and a truer word has never been spoken. Though Cook Out is a no-frills institution where meals are best enjoyed on a curb or on the hood of a car, the core tenet that drives Cook Out is this: View the world not for what it is, but for what it has the potential of becoming. You see a shake as ice cream and syrup blended in a Styrofoam cup. We see sugary manna from heaven.

Trying to explain Cook Out to someone who isn’t from the South is like trying to explain the sky’s infinite stars to someone who only knows the sun. In many ways, the beautiful experience of eating at Cook Out transcends words, but it’s worth trying. Just like every shake on the menu.

It’s fair to say there were shakes we didn’t like, but we don’t regret a single spoonful. Eating every Cook Out milkshake on the menu over the course of one summer was an emotional, physically taxing, lactose-laden, existential journey. And one we’d do all over again. Bless up.