my little pony

I'm having a cash crisis. It's not very pretty. If you came to my apartment you'd notice that most of the food items in my apartment look stunningly similar to aisle's 3 and 4 of The Dollar Store. I used to get Planters Roasted and Salted Assorted Nuts (less then 50% peanuts). Now I've got a stack of cans that have a plain brown wrapper with the word "nuts" hand written on it with a magic marker. It's cool, though; at least I know what I'm getting.

I have grown to accept that at least half of my daily intake of foods don't fit in the 'normal' 5 food groups. Most of my food sits off to the side of the glorious and respected Food Pyramid, in a group commonly referred to as "irregular" or "damaged packaging." My aspirin is missing the tamper-resistant seal, and my Snapple doesn't go "snick" when I open it. This is all fine and good with me though. It's the pretzels that scare me.

Under ingredients, at the very bottom it says: "may contain peanut pieces." MAY CONTAIN!!! What the hell is that? Why would someone put nuts in with my pretzels? I remember a day long ago when I used to purchase Chex Mix -- the very expensive mix that contained nuts and pretzels and, well, also Chex. Those were the good days. I mean, if the people who make my pretzels are going to give some people nuts, shouldn't they give everyone nuts?

I can only assume that there is a huge assembly line and every couple of hours or so a foreman hollers: "it's super special peanut time!" And then everyone stops what they're doing, stripping off their factory jumpsuits to reveal brown and red Bavarian suspender suits with knickers. They laugh and cavort around by the elbow tossing in a couple of nuts into the pretzel machine.

Well, at least I won't be surprised when I bite down into something hard.

That reminds me of when I was a kid. I remember I was sitting in front of our woodblock counter in my kitchen. I was eating Rold Gold pretzels, you know, the good shit; I just opened a new bag. I had a little pile on the woodblock counter. My mom kept the kitchen pretty clean; and the wood block counter was no exception. I remember every couple of months she would massage castor oil into the wood to preserve it. You may have lived your entire life not knowing exactly what castor oil was used for. I, however, have known since I was five. So I was seated at the well-preserved woodblock counter eating pretzels and watching "My Little Pony. "

I was very young, and I remember DISTINCTLY that my mother told me that My Little Pony wasn't a girls' show; she said it was for boys AND girls. I was dubious, but took her word nevertheless. After all, she knew so much about castor oil. What followed was a barrage of "My Little Pony" puzzles, board games, stuffed animals, plastic pony figurines, the my little pony ranch, signed collector plates... I wanted to slaughter all of my relatives! I mean, hey, I watched the cartoon, it was good, but Christmas after Christmas and birthday after birthday of pony paraphernalia could very well have warped my sponge-like child mind. I'm normal...I grew up fine... I'm normal...normal...normal...normal...

Whenever I watch TV show documentaries about famous people who have overcome tremendous obstacles and have survived what they call a "rough childhood;" I always kind of smile and ponder in quiet recognition of a fellow survivor.

I'm nearly sure that somehow, this traumatic experience was the springboard to my teenage job of pony walker. And pony poop picker-upper, and pony hair braider. Yes, yes, I had to braid the f-n ponies before we could take them to children's birthday parties and street fairs. It may not sound very masculine, but I also had to scrape out lumps of compressed and fungusifided horse crap from their hoofs with a metal pick. I'd like to see a girl do that without getting kicked in the head (which is what ponies like to do when you're screwing around with their hooves).

But I digress. I was talking about pretzels. I was eating these pretzels, I was watching Gingerbread, who was one of the twinkle-eyed ponies (who you may remember had a bastardized version called Shortbread released years later in the "Brush and Comb" series of ponies?). Well, Gingerbread was in a predicament because she wanted her tail to curl up like Sanddollar who was a baby sea pony. She didn't understand that baby sea ponies had a curly tail but they didn't have the sparkly eyes that twinkle eye ponies had... It was
My Little Pony's attempt at racial understanding. Well, I leaned forward in my chair wondering what I would look like if I had a curly tail, and I dropped a pretzel.

Because I was young, I didn't understand fully that when a food item touches something like a floor, it is suddenly garbage and not food anymore. Innocently, I looked on the floor for my pretzel. I found it and put in my mouth.

For a split second, I remembered how I opened the bag of pretzels just minutes earlier. I remembered how happy I was that my mother had bought me pretzels. Everyone else liked potato chips, but not me. We never had pretzels in our house, and now I had just opened a full bag which I could enjoy all myself. However, the piece of "pretzel," (please notice the quotes around "pretzel") wasn't a pretzel at all. I don't know what it was, but it was in my mouth. I started to gag, and looked down noticing that the pretzel I dropped was actually on my lap. I know ponies never had these problems. They eat anything.