Chocolate Hushpuppy Hot-Almond Nugget

What word would best describe the opposite of surprise? Whatever the word, and whatever the feeling, I felt that earlier tonight when I made myself a little snack to eat. It was the sort of thing you put together when two factors are at work. The first is hunger and the second is that lack of anything to eat in my apartment. A strong desire for something, combined with an inability to sate that desire, can lead to frustration and the perpetration of activities better left undone. I know, for tonight I created the, "Chocolate Hushpuppy Hot-Almond Nugget."

It reads worse that it is, for it is not a euphamism for a turd. It's actually a monstrosity I cooked up in the microwave about an hour ago, using a cold hushpuppy and a piece of a chocolate bar with almonds. My father made a batch of hushpuppies earlier in the evening, out of a mix sent up from my sister, who lives in North Carolina. We don't really have hushpuppy mix around Boston, but I suspect that it wouldn't be too difficult to whip-up. I'm not sure why he suddenly got the urge to make a batch of hushpuppies, or why he had the urge to put cinnamon in them (he was rebuffed), but there they were, in all their crusty glory.

And I enjoyed them. But they somehow didn't hit the spot. I'm a fat man, so I have a lot of spots to hit. Earlier in the day, I bought a Hershy's bar with almonds, to fill a spot that apparently needed filling at the time. But as the clock ticked towards 9pm, I felt a hunger that the chocolate bar nor the hushpuppies could sate. For reasons that are unclear to me, I thought that cramming a piece of chocolate into a hushpuppy and applying heat would create a taste sensation.

It didn't. With my fat, oily fingers, I made one out of two over the kitchen sink. It's important to mention that my fingers, while always fat, are not usually oily. Doing surgery on a deep-fat fried ball of corn meal made them that way. Eating shit like this is what made my fingers fat, though. But if they weren't fat they wouldn't match the rest of me. Anyway, I dropped this thing in the microwave for 10 seconds.

Why would I make such a thing? Have I no self-respect? Is this how my mind works? Trying to figure out unique ways of cramming things into other things to make them more appetizing? As I stood in my kitchen holding a hot hushpuppy filled with chocolate, and possibly an almond, I had an epiphany, sort of. This moment of profound realization wasn't coupled with any deeper understanding of anything. There was no truth revealed, only an awareness that something very important was happening. Moments like that are really fucking frustrating. All the emotional currency of a guiding revelation, but no actual revelation.

So I ate it, and there was an almond, and I saw that it was good. It certainly wasn't great, but it was better than a sharp stick in my eye. But it did make me sick. And in that moment of sickness, I told myself to stop eating such ungodly crap. Now that I look back on the events of the evening, from the buying of the candy bar and the cooking of the hushpuppies, to the (inevitable?) creation of the CHHAN, I ask myself, "What lessons have I learned?"

None, apparently, as I'm about to go make another one. Mazel tov!