Dear Chocolate Chip Pop Tarts:
I love the shit out of you. Until I tasted your warm, chocolate goo that’s too cheap to be remotely related to Nutella, I’d smugly blow past you in the breakfast aisle. You make enjoying science food worth never having to wear pants.
How I tasted you is because my kid picked you up after I told her seven thousand times three things will survive the apocalypse: Subway, Pop Tarts and Cher — but she wouldn’t if she continued to make poor food choices like eating a Jackson Pollack, cocoa splattered, stale-cake rectangle.
She took one look at me and wondered how I’m still living based on this scenario of poor food choices to life expectancy ratio. If I was Jesus, I’d have turned water into Diet Coke and broken a cheese steak to split twelve ways, only to be celebrated at the front of a church with single fries.
Given an an actual food-pocalypse happens in my house mid-week, every week, I’m fairly sure you were the only thing left for me, Chocolate Chip Pop Tarts. How? I don’t know. Like choosing Sarah Palin as a vice presidential candidate, this development was unexplainable. But, like a hangry Republican base, I went with it because you looked so damn pretty.
With disdain, I shuffled over to the toaster and let you tan to a gorgeous, golden brown. When you popped, I felt my defenses melt like your warm, still-not-Nutella-but-who-the-hell-cares-at-this-point paste, and yet you really did remind me of a chocolate chip cookie. Yes, a bit size-challenged, but so am I. How could I judge?
I held your rectangle edges in my palm and lifted you for a bite. You know when Wayne sees Cassandra for the first time and there’s stars and REO Speedwagon singing about dream-weaving? That was us. You can take me to the morning light or through the night — like yesterday when we shared one a.m. together in front of my laptop. It was magical.
Chocolate Chip Pop Tarts, you are not just a work of delicious art, you help people. I mean really help people. When a hurricane is coming, Walmart says sales of you increase seven-fold. Turns out folks aren’t driving their two-ton death machines without using blinkers for milk and bread, they’re Ludacris-ing it up for Pop Tarts. Move, bitch! Get out the way. I need strawberry paste and last century’s confetti icing. For survival purposes.
And in a way, I need you too Chocolate Chip Pop Tarts. For survival purposes. If we’re defining “survival” as in I had one dinner and halfway through it I was thinking about dinner number two. Dinner number one is the old ball and chain, but you, my astronaut-intended, look better with your disco wrapper on the floor.
So, yes, Chocolate Chip Pop Tarts, you complete me. In a way only shit I should never be eating completes anyone: you make the inner shame worth every bite.
