Complex Numbers

Chocolate-Covered Crap Remains Crap

"30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  [13+]:
16. National Chocolate Covered Anything Day
Sounds like a great to 'pig-out' and enjoy!
Have you ever eaten anything 'unique' covered in chocolate?

"JAFBG"  [XGC]:
Congratulations! You get to kill one holiday song and never have to hear it again. Which will you choose?

One? Just ONE? Hardly worth it when there are so many that send me into paroxysms of grumpiness.

You know what my favorite thing to have covered with chocolate is?

Chocolate.

And I don't mean milk chocolate, or the abomination that is deceitfully called "white chocolate." There is absolutely no reason to sully the purity of chocolate with any other ingredients, except for a small bit of sweetener.

Which is not to say I don't sometimes enjoy chocolate-covered something. I'm fine with truffles, and it's okay to coat almonds with chocolate. Drizzle some on a dessert, fine. But to me, nothing beats the sublime goodness of pure, unadulterated dark chocolate.

Every year or so, someone will come up with a list of peoples' favorite commercial candy bars, and every damn time, Reese's makes it to the top of the list. As I noted in a previous entry, I utterly despise peanuts, although I'm okay with peanut butter. But to me, that crumbly, sugary, dried-out crap in the middle of a Reese's cup bears little resemblance to actual peanut butter. Okay, I can accept - have accepted - that my tastes are weird, as I've noted in a recent entry. But I simply cannot comprehend how popular Reese's cups are, with their fake, sugary "peanut butter" and waxy milk "chocolate."

I do have weaknesses, of course. Many of them. One of them is, or rather was, Oreos. I think I've mentioned this before, but it's been a while, so I'm going to relate this again:

Used to be I'd go to the grocery store and, in the course of perusing the aisles, the Oreos display would draw me like a moth to a flame. I'd get the standard Oreos, and go about my business, and then at home occasionally eat some of the Oreos.

Then Nabisco started doing different flavors of Oreos. The chocolate-filled ones were good, I thought. And then they came up with fudge brownie cream filled Oreos and OMG those were delicious.

Then they stopped making them. I suppose Nabisco thinks that if they keep coming up with new flavors, people will buy more Oreos. Not me. Once I tried the fudge brownie kind and then couldn't have them anymore, instead of occasionally buying Oreos, now I *never* buy the little fuckers.

Good for me. Bad for Nabisco. Doesn't seem to bother them much, though, as they continue to produce ever-weirder concoctions, the most egregious of which were -- not joking here -- Swedish Fish Oreos. Look, I have nothing against Swedish Fish, and I'm fine with original Oreos, but that combination just strikes me as being particularly heretical, like mixing Skittles with M&Ms.

Anyway, the point is, when it comes to chocolate, I'm happy to try different things; we have a chocolatier here in town that I can say with some certainty is one of the best in the world, and I've enjoyed nearly everything I've had from them. They are expensive, though, and my go-to gift for people who don't drink booze is a box of those chocolates. But of all of them, my favorite is still the pure chocolate ones, sans nuts, sans cream, sans goddamn cherries.

All of this is to point out that yeah, my tastes are obviously different from most peoples'. Another thing I shun with every fiber of my being is commercials, as I have also noted here before. I despise them with an all-consuming fiery passion. And yet... and yet... on Monday, I went to my optometrist. I had to Uber over there because they were going to dilate my pupils and I wouldn't be able to drive back, so in an abundance of caution, I ended up getting there half an hour early. Sitting in the empty waiting room (they've got anti-contagion protocols in place), I was subjected to a holiday music radio station.

I could feel my blood boiling, my lymph roiling, my brain recoiling. As with chocolate, I get that other people have different likes/dislikes than I do. That's fine, I get that, you do you, whatever. But that day, listening to one sappy, gooey holiday song after another, all I could get through my mind was: "Please go to commercial. Please go to commercial. Please go to-" And then finally they did. So yeah, it's official: as much as I hate commercials, I hate standard holiday music even more. Though I could argue that holiday music *is* a commercial.

And yet, in defiance of my wishes, it's still produced and broadcast. Like Swedish Fish Oreos. The only difference is, if SFOs are sitting out on a table somewhere, I can -- and will -- choose not to eat one. Or if there are M&Ms in a bowl and I can tell that they're the bloated, hated peanut kind rather than the inoffensive milk chocolate or delicious dark chocolate kind, again, I can simply pass them up. More for the people who like them, right? Not so with holiday music. It's out there and if I go out in December, November, and sometimes even cocksucking October, I'm subjected to it.

Obviously, a lot of people like it. Fine. And I'll admit that there are some holiday songs that I like. The Grinch theme comes to mind, as you might imagine. And I do appreciate good music, so if it's good music, I don't care if it's holiday or even religious themed; I will appreciate it. The problem is that most of the crap that gets drilled into our collective brains every season is the musical equivalent, to me, of white "chocolate" covered cherries and peanuts.

And I can't think of a bigger abomination than that, except -- maybe -- for Swedish Fish Oreos.

Clearly, I'm going to have to rearrange my schedule so that I get my medical crap taken care of in January, so that I can hermit every December. That way we all win: I don't have to be subjected to smarmy "White Christmas" bullshit, and you don't have to hear me bitch about it.