Misfit Desserts
My pal Drooq visited on Friday—we sat roughly six feet apart (and six feet under because we’re metal as fuck) from one another at my kitchen table while chatting—to grab a dusty weight bench from my basement. Todd Rundgren crooned some ballads from the stereo down the hallway while we both tasted a Tom Collins for the first time.
“Not sure it needs the sugar water,” I said, “but I’m glad we didn’t add maple syrup.”
“I dunno what I was thinking,” Drooq replied.
Drooq had mistaken maple syrup for simple syrup when I asked him to bring some earlier in the day. As we kept chatting, mostly about music and The Viral Elephant in the Room, I mentioned how I wasn’t sure I wanted to write about the latter until some time had passed.
Of course, that’s (vaguely) what this blog entry is about. Good to know I waited less than forty-eight hours.
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Sue and I planned our weekly Blebbzday hang intending to revive a periodically embraced tradition: Misfit Desserts™️. We’d made some Crispy Rice treats (the generic cereal) a couple New Year’s Eves ago, setting them to cool on her deck due to the below freezing temperature (and to avoid irritatingly cramming them into her consistently stuffed freezer). Sue coined the nickname as she noticed how the misshapen blobs looked nothing like the perfectly rectangular treats we were familiar with consuming. When making a peanut butter and mint Oreo hybrid afterward, its’ comically frightening appearance was (thankfully) offset by the deliciousness of the confection.
Sitting in the kitchen for an hour yesterday—me changing the channel from MSNBC to CNN only for her dedicated news junkie self to change it back every time—we caught up on recent Covid developments. At one point, I attempted to explain how the stock market works while revealing—having stowed it away for over thirteen years—how I used to have a major crush on doe-eyed financial analyst Maria Bartiromo.
“Let’s find a no-bake recipe,” I told her.
“Are there any in my Recipes folder?” Sue asked.
She keeps a folder in her kitchen covered with a caricature of herself she drew featuring her tongue sticking out. Unable to find such a recipe, we opted to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, following the instructions step by step. As expected, we wound up with a chocolate pool of oats in the bowl, spooning the atrocities onto parchment paper in hopes they might magically become cookies on the countertop if we ignored them for a few hours. (They were later moved to the freezer.) Next up was yet another standoff with Crispy Rice.
“I need to go grocery shopping on Tuesday,” Sue told me earlier in the afternoon.
Upon opening the freezer, I confirmed there was barely room to fit a pea inside it, never mind an entire tray of shapeless Crispy Rice disasters. I removed a bag containing three doughnuts she’d saved, shifted some okra and mixed veggies around, and somehow jammed our creation into its two-hour hiding space.
While eating a dinner of chik’n (nugget) Francese and vichyssoise—France was the star of our meal—we viewed a Jeopardy! episode from October. Sue keeps a queue of old episodes to watch together during dinner, which is mostly because we love the show and partly because we also love shitting on the irksome contestants. One lady named Lindsey got our blood boiling.
“I hate the name L(i)(y)nds(a)(e)y,” I said, minus the parentheses.
“You can spell it so many stupid ways,” Sue replied, completely unaware of how I would spell the name a day later.
“I think I told you how in sixth grade I literally took the retarded bus to school.”
“Oh yeah!”
“Well, my mother fought for this girl Lindsay to be on it too. [Author’s Note: The town would only provide the “short bus” for us to continue attending the school instead of switching to a different school for our final grammar school year.] She lived a few streets away. She was such a bitch to me. Plus, she had terrible acne and scars all over her face. And that’s why I hate the name.”
My diatribe got interrupted by the Final Jeopardy! category: AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT.
“A-MER-I-CAN PLAY-WRIGHT GET AWAY FROM MEEEEHEEEE!” Sue screeched as if she were fronting the Guess Who.
Fighting through my intense laughter, I pretended to air drum and added in an air kick drum for good measure while Sue riffed away on her air Les Paul. Even better, Lindsey lost the game, her terrible haircut nearly as shameful as my grade school nemesis’s ignorance of Proactiv.
Returning our dishes to the kitchen, we unearthed our Crispy Rice abominations, and I referenced Sue’s playwright joke much to our amusement. Confusing a splotch on her glasses for a teardrop, I stared into her right eye from inches away—in violation of Covid Law—and demanded to know: “ARE YOU CRY-LAUGHING?” She wasn’t, but in the wake of my invasive question she began to do just that.
Munching on the haphazard desserts, I gave Sue a back rub while we enjoyed an outstanding episode of Better Things, which featured four unforgettable scenes: a seemingly improvisational solo piano performance of Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” a gorgeous owl trapped in a queen-size bed, a three-legged dog eating part of a girl’s finger that got sliced off in the door of an El Camino, and a mother and daughter repeatedly calling one another cunts so many times in a row it easily set the record for most uses of the word in a half-hour sitcom episode. I also licked Sue’s shoulder and cheek in jest, prompting Alexa to notify the National Guard to knock on the door and alert me to Covid protocol.
Extricating our oatmeal chocolate chip “cookies” from that same precarious freezer spot, we wrapped up the night nibbling while laughing at our mutual favorite Twitter feed, reluctantly researching the definition of a Joe Biden “shadow briefing” on a right-wing website, and learning of the vagus nerve’s existence when pondering why cats and dogs get so excited after taking a shit. It was a banner night for intellectual curiosity.
Sue bid me farewell from her deck—we say “LoveYouBye!” while waving to one another until I’m out of sight—and I made the three-mile drive home. I heard a familiar song on the radio, smiled as I reached for an oatmeal glob, and air kick drummed on my brakes while Tennessee Williams’s blistering guitar solo on “American Playwright” reverberated into the empty night. Misfit Fill-in-the-Blank™️ is more like it.