Brain Freeze

As you direct the heaping red plastic spoon toward your watering mouth you are thinking only happy thoughts toward the geniuses at Dairy Queen and their trailblazing Brownie Batter Blizzard. Frozen pseudo-dairy hits the tongue and something odd happens. Rather than melting in a chocolate pool of wonder and delight, the ice cream whips out miniature dirty bombs and detonates them in your sinuses and down through your neck. Your brain screeches to a grinding halt, hardens into lead, your eyes cross, you yowl.

Thankfully, the freeze isn’t lasting and most people go on to finish their Blizzard with no lasting damage. Death by ice cream would have rendered the treat extinct and illegal long ago. Ice cream parlors would have gone the way of opium dens and Furr’s Cafeterias.

I am having the writing equivalent of brain freeze. Big scoops of life have hit my tongue. I have tasted and my brain has reacted by sealing itself in an armor-plated cocoon. I wish that life has tasted like chocolate or pot roast. This week it has tasted like Furr’s Cafeteria “green” beans, black licorice, and prune juice—whipped together in a Blizzard of devil’s design for the purposes of making me silent, for once.

Maybe that isn’t a bad thing—to simply be still. When bad things happen attention turns to what is important and what is good. The green beans make the chocolate more chocolatey and the pot roast more roasty.