Skip to main content

You Can't Catch Me, I'm The Gingerbread Pop-Tart Man

If there is one immutable fact about me that the passing years only intensify and heighten, it is this: I love candy. I love Mountain Dew Throwback and Ghirardelli milk chocolate & caramel squares and Coke de Mexico and Giant Chewy Nerds and, on more than one occasion, I've consumed all of them sequentially in a pancreas-blighting anti-purification ritual.

So it was with great anticipation that, during a recent trip to eastern Ohio, I found Gingerbread Pop-Tarts for sale (right next to bags of Dove Easter Eggs made with milk chocolate and peanut butter, which I also snagged). I went conservative, buying only one twelve-pack, and immediately regretted such hesitation.

Because. They. Are. Delicious.

Should they be called candy? Of course, given that they have more sugar than the average Pop-Tart, which is laden with the sweet stuff. (The biggest giveaway is that layer of frosting/icing on the inside.) And they have great printed pictures on the surface, pictures that almost look like things in the world, but with a bit of Surrealist distortion. (Remember that part of the sadistic thrill of eating gingerbread men, much like chomping the body parts of chocolate bunnies, is the delicious amputations each bite provides.)

Now, I'm not going to ask people to buy me these rare delights on sight; I made that mistake writ large last year, when I asked my Intro Psych classes to buy me boxes of Franken-Berry and Boo-Berry, which I couldn't find. (Because of my flip requests, I was on the hook for 42 boxes of cereal, for which the bounty was double the purchase price. Sometimes I should shut my fucking mouth before Mr. Impulsivity comes roaring out.) But as I prepare to chow down on the last package of Gingerbread Pop-Tarts, I wonder --sniff sniff-- if I'll ever see them again.

Perhaps, in some sugary dream land.

Which I'm sure I'll see soon, as all this sugar should put me into a diabetic coma quick smart.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...

Some 2024 Listening Pleasures

It started with a gift of two JBL Control 25 speakers, and by "gift" I mean "borrowed" -- a.k.a. "will never return" -- from an obsolete tech detritus pile at work. I may have snagged more than two gifts, of course, but the raw footage proving such a claim remains elusive. And after installing the JBL speakers into the upper corners of the music room, and after installing speaker stands for the rear speakers I already had, and after making the hard choice between a big-ass bean bag and a comfy leather recliner to properly center myself in the audio field (R.I.P., big-ass bean bag), there was only one missing piece: the Apple TV 4K unit. So for me, 2024 was the year I streamed a lot of music in Atmos through Apple Music, surrounded by new tunes and old bops in thrilling new dimensions. Some might say you don't need surround sound, 'cos the two ears + two speakers modality has been dandy for a while now, but that's like saying you don't need ...

The Natural's Not In It

  For nearly seven years on the button, Courtney and I lived on Perch Lake, just outside of Gaylord. Right next to Perch Lake was The Natural Golf Course, eighteen holes that twisted and turned through the best nature that the 45th Parallel could offer. The picture above is the view of the first green, and if you left the wooden bridge to the right and briefly ambled through the woods and over a rusted metal fence, you'd get right to our old driveway. Every now and again, an errant golf ball would appear at the edge of our property, like a single egg laid by an itinerant duck. Of the three major elitist sports -- golf, tennis, skiing -- I golfed because the barrier to entry was pretty low and the interest in golf on my Dad's side of the family was high, from playing the sport to watching it on television on the weekends. As spare clubs were abundant and my growth spurt had yet to overwhelm statistical norms, my grandmother would take prepubescent me to the Roscommon driving ran...