Zen and The Art of Getting Candy

by Anhedonia & Crom

Crom: The acquisition of tasty comestibles such as candy has occupied the minds of children since the dawn of time. And Halloween has been the Burning man festival to candy for as long as I’ve been alive. I have unending memories of childhood costumes and various stomach aches as a result of too much eaten candy. I remember the houses I specifically hit around my neighborhood, and the ones I avoided. In fact there was one lady who gave out entire candy bars, rather then the small ones, I kept several costumes on deck for her place as it was around the corner from my house. So we’re going to leave the dugout and take a swing at what the best candy you can get for Halloween is. Grab a glass of tepid water and prepare…

Anhedonia: …Odd how you need the tepid water now isn’t it…

Either:

A). You have a hangover and need to drink water to replace the oh so ghoulish fluids you left behind on the street, on the side of your friends car, in the big white telephone, or…

B). You find that your ability to demolish the pillow case full of candy in less than one day is but a faint and glorious memory.

Suppose we go with the latter – Let’s chat about the contents that were in the pillow case. Waiting for the parents to go through the contents of the victory sac you spent all night sprinting to collect (and in Crom’s case in various costumes), was always painful…

They’d sort and pick out what they wanted, and year after year think it was a witty joke to say that they needed to sample the goods before you got your go at them. Thank god they usually had bad taste and went for the items such as the jelly dots, the caramel squares that were wrapped with clear plastic that would never ever ever come off in one piece, and the sick molasses kisses that made your teeth/or your parents dentures stick together for hours.

Crom: Right up there with the brownish unknown candy that was wrapped in the orange wax paper with pumpkins and bats on it. I’m firmly convinced that only one run of that candy was ever made, and the reason it’s still around is because they’re still trying to sell it. Fortunately my brother and I were somewhat smarter with our loot, in so far as we hid some of it out on the lawn and retrieved it at a later point in the night. No grubby grown up hands on my hard earned swag.

Brand name candy is always great, because you know what you’re in for, but they’re essentially little chocolate bars, and what good is that? You need the likes of “Rockets” those rolls of little Tums-like candy’s that must have been a compressed pill of pure sugar, 4 or 5 of those in you and it would take 10 cc’s of thorazine to put you to sleep. Suckers were always good currency, and a handy backup.

Anhedonia: Posh neighborhoods seemed to hand out the full size chocolate bars more often but every once in a while you’d get the oddball lady who would hand out apples or the dentist who thought it was a wizard of an idea to give away toothbrushes. I often enjoyed the tootsie pop assortments, and micro waving the tootsie rolls made them superfluously fine. For some reason anything with ‘Wonka’ on the packaging made it automatically good – mini nerd’s boxes rivaled the rocket rolls for the sugar content I think.

These additions to the lunch bag at school were times worth cherishing. It was always a painful turning point when you would run out of candy, and the pacers of the pack would keep pulling out the mini twizzlers package in front of you when you were left standing with a dismal sack of carrots for a snack. Let’s just say I wasn’t a pacer.

Crom: God I wasn’t a pacer at all. I had a small contest with my blood sugar to see how fast I could consume all the candy I got. I loved to have a constant sugar high for like two weeks after Halloween. So I hope everyone had an interesting Halloween, and won’t wake up with a headache from too much candy.

Anhedonia & Crom