Guilty

When I lived in Orlando the closest grocery was two blocks off. It was called this: Publix. (My niece visited once and said something like, I think we just drove by a pooblix.) You could walk there from my apartment and buy fresh salsa, cheap beer, a cantaloupe. Now, in Minneapolis, the closest grocery is only comfortably reachable by car. Tonight Sarah and I drove through highways and detours to get to Rainbow, which is a popular chain up here, so we could buy general groceries and polar bars, which are sort of like gooey bakery-made ding dongs. They are delicious delicious (double delicious). I talked about them a lot in Florida and when we got back here I was afraid for a while that they'd been discontinued, because they're very difficult to find. They're like tiny, intelligent, beautiful gnomes scamptering through the boxes and bottles of the grocery, dodging away whenever you go to grab one.

Tonight there were no polar bars to grab. As a consolation to myself (not really; I woud have gone there anyway) I went to the toaster pastry aisle with the intention of buying cherry Pop-Tarts. Instead I bought these:

!

I'm hoping they just taste like cherry Pop-Tarts without the frosting.

Then on the way home I stopped at a pizza shop and picked up a large loaded with roni, banana peppers, jalapenos. Then now I just poured about an inch of something called Canadian Hunter into a glass and am getting ready to drink it! The smell is like something from a medicine cabinet! Oh well!

The idea seems to be that I am trying tonight to wreck my body. An hour ago, while I jammed pizza crust around in a tub of garlic butter, I remembered how in high school I deliberately abstained from tobacco, alcohol, fatty foods, table salt, then how in college I started backing up from soda, bread, excessive amounts of cake, ice cream. I felt very motivated then to maintain the body-robot as well as possible. Now, with less time to go and more at stake, I just . . . care less. I mean, I still care, but I have willfully gone powerless in the face of

Cherry Pop-Tarts

I have so much love for these things that I feel weird about it. I rarely write about Pop-Tarts, and when I do it's usually on Twitter, but when I do I feel like the lamest type of public endorser, the type who not only hoorays the unhealthy, grittily doughy product of a conglomerate but who also does it with great joy, and for free!

Well, they are tasty, and they're foil-wrapped. The cherry glaze over the top of a Pop-Tart will crack when you bite it and flake like the frosting on a stale donut. One Pop-Tart is never enough but two is invariably too many. Here's a true story about cherry Pop-Tarts: thirteen days ago I walked across campus from a meeting and remembered the Pop-Tarts in my bag. What a nice afternoon! I thought. Sun fell down in a gentle blanket and people jogged by and little electric golf carts of trash rolled along and I ate both Pop-Tarts and felt after a while that I might soon vomit.

(Don't worry; I didn't.)

Skittles

In high school, after a dress rehearsal for a play I was in, I went to some vending machines and bought a bag of Skittles. I was still in costume, and probably wearing three-dimensionally thick makeup, and surrounded by giddy friends, and wanted to celebrate with vending machine candy. I poured the entire bag into my mouth and chewed that mass and felt the vacuum of it against my teeth and then felt something off, a roughness against my tongue and a pliable hardness in the candy. Can you guess what happened? Highlight this text to find out: What happened was, the suction of the Skittles tore a cap off one of my teeth.

There, now it's like you're reading a children's puzzle book.

I stayed off Skittles for a long time after that but at my last job got into the habit of enjoying them slowly, individually, over lunch. I'd pour them out on my desk and line them up by color sometimes or more often by nothing and munch them while reading Monkeybicycle 7, which I was trying to review. A nice thing about Skittles is that you can imagine you're eating the very color of them, you can look at a yellow one and put it in your mouth and taste yellow against the inside of your cheek, draining away.

Teddy Grahams

I don't actually like these that much but earlier this year Sarah came into a trove of pre-packaged Teddy Grahams and brought them home and I set them out for easy consumption while playing New Vegas one Saturday morning and then looked at the arm of my chair and thought, That looks like a bunch of bears in a hastily dug ditch. Then someone else saw the photo and said, "That looks like a mass grave of tasty."