Apr
21
Easter realization
(reprinted from 1937)
It’s the little things that bum me out. While walking through a Wal-Mart there are plenty of big things that might get someone down but I’m pretty much immune to them. It’s the things that normal people wouldn’t even notice that stick with me and linger in my head like a bee trapped in a bonnet. I realize that I could have gone with a manlier metaphor but that just shows you how upset I am.
Once I tell you about it I hope you’ll find some compassion and be able to look past the bee analogy. Here it is.
I’m in the Easter candy aisle, which stretched a good couple of football field’s in length, and I see this big chocolate rabbit for sale. Perfectly understandable. It is the week before Easter. But here’s what bummed me out.
The face.
The face was fucked up.
Somewhere in the third world there is a factory and in this factory is a machine that adds white eyeballs and teeth to the chocolate rabbit and then a little further down the conveyor belt there is another part of the machine that adds a little blue dot on the eyeball. The point of this machine is to transform this vaguely rabbit-shaped hunk of chocolate into the spitting image of the Easter Bunny. These little elements bring the lovable character to life.
But not these bunnies. Not the ones I saw at Wal-Mart.
The eyeballs were on the cheeks and mouth sat on the chin and the end result was a deformed rabbit certain to terrify any child unfortunate to end up getting one of these candytards in their Easter basket. All except the kid with Down’s Syndrome who would look into the green sisal, the name for the fake grass used in Easter baskets (see, you learn something every day … even from dumb stories such as this), and exclaim “Look Ma, da wabbit looks like me!”
An Easter Bunny with Down’s Syndrome isn’t the part that bums me out.
The part that has me walking around glum for the next few hours is the fact that somewhere there is a factory and in this factory there is someone who allowed those rabbits to ship out. They looked at these mongoloid hares and gave them the thumbs up. They approved them knowing that their final destination was a child’s Easter basket.
Then somewhere in this country there was an executive from the company that sells these misshapen chocolate nightmares and they too said they were good to go.
Then someone at Wal-Mart unpacked them from a box and put them on the shelf for the consumer to stumble upon.
Nobody cared enough to say “Hey! These rabbits are fucked up. We can’t sell them. We’re going to have to take a hit and fix the machine and then do them over.”
Nope. Fucked up or not … hippity hoppity out those rabbits went.
And the worst part was that there were a few missing. Some parent had grabbed one, from a selection of literally dozens of normal Easter Bunnies within arm’s reach, and decided that it was good enough for their son or daughter. I can only hope they didn’t notice and it wasn’t on purpose.
Perhaps it’s the whimsy associated with rabbits and hippity hopping that had me thinking of bees and bonnets in the first place. Whatever the case, I’m bummed out. Have our expectations really fallen this low that we can’t even get a fucking Easter Bunny right?
It’s the fucking Easter Bunny!
I’m led to understand that all the t-shirts printed up before the big game announcing the Super Bowl loser as the Super Bowl winner are shipped off and given away free to Africa instead. Can’t they do that with the chocolate screw-ups? Africa could be like an ‘Island of Misfit Easter Bunnies’ except instead of waiting for Santa to swing by all the unsettling-looking bunnies would get gobbled up by starving kids.
Now there is a happy ending .
But nope. Regardless how stupid they look everyone involved in selling them think the consumer is stupider (is stupider a word?). I guess we are.
Bummer.
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