Seriously. In the hierarchy of black market trading in the 4th grade, this shit reigned supreme. I mean, unless you had Pokémon cards or a really good Gameboy Color game, or, for a while, Crazy Bones, this was the "good stuff," because not only did it mean that you'd been to a science museum and survived long enough to get to the gift shop, it meant that your mom hadn't made you leave with an educational toy.
No, you got to pick your own thing, and that automatically seceded skipping past all the geodes and telescopes and went for the ice cream. It's what the astronauts eat. You know, when they're not doing actual work or peeing in a bag.
I found this particular specimen on a rainy night on spring break (yeah, that's what I'm talking about!) in a Walmart, sourly dissipating all of my lies about childhood. I ran over to the display and jumped up until Swagger reached it for me, screeching, "HEY, ASTRONAUTS DON'T SHOP HERE!" only to find that it was some freeze-dried camping shit.Intrigued, though, we bought it, delighted to see what intrepid campers survive on. It's a relatively small block, pretty dense for its size, and is separated into the three traditional colors of the Neopolitan ice cream- strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. It was, sadly, broken into quite a few pieces despite the amount of packaging that Mountain House used. Seriously, all that stuff could choke like, twelve baby seals and an infant to boot and the ice cream still cracked. And we pulled it from the back part of the shelf. For shame.
Tasting it was strange. It resembled, in no possible way, anything ever related to ice cream. This was like the Chevy Chase end of Steely Dan...like, really? The flavors, though vaguely akin to their original predecessors at one point or another, like, vaguely strawberry, tasting like snorting Nesquik, vaguely chocolate, like bittersweet baking chocolate, and vaguely vanilla, tasting like sweetened dairy creamers, were all completely dry yet still had the uncanny and unpleasant quality of sticking to all our teeth.It didn't melt in our mouth and destroyed my childhood. Eating this was like realizing how hard it would take to become an astronaut and get to consume this in a space ship- that I'd have to do a lot of math and work out all the time. If I were on Mount Everest eating this, I'd have thrown myself off out of sheer self-loathing by now.
No comments:
Post a Comment