For some, McDonald’s is just a quick place to grab some lunch, but for others it’s a way of life. Based on this map by Stephen Von Worley, I’m going out on a limb and saying Micky-Dee’s is probably a way of life for more people than are willing to admit it.

Stephen’s map visualizes the distance between McDonald’s restaurants for the continental United States with glowing orange lights. The brighter the lights, the closer the restaurants are.

While the sheer density of McDonald’s locations in the U.S. is staggering, I was equally impressed with the technology that went into whipping up this map. Stephen was able to get ahold of the raw data from AggData, massage a CSV file with some coding magic, and build a map that shows there are plenty of places all over the country for people that think they really do deserve a break today.

That said, there’s a frakking ass-load of McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. I can only imaging what the map would look like if it also included all the Burger King, Wendy’s, Chik-Fil-A and KFC joints, too.

Holy crap. I think my arteries are clogging just thinking about it.