I shouldn't love ice cream trucks, given the numerous traumatic moments in my life associated with them:1. While ordering out of a truck once, the ice cream man asked me if I was indeed standing barefoot in a nest of ants. Indeed I was. I was instantly whisked home and stripped of my clothing, and I don't even think I got my ice cream.
2. True story. Our neighborhood ice cream man used to ask us if we wanted bubble gum instead of our change back. Bubble gum! What kid could resist? Who needs those four dollars when you can have two pieces of Dubble Bubble?
When the neighborhood parents finally caught on and forced us to ask for our change back, the ice cream man never came back.
3. I once ordered a bar called the "Screwball." This was the most vile product ever invented. It tasted like frozen vomit and had a tooth-cracking gumball at the bottom of the cone, in case you weren't crying enough by that point.
Ice cream trucks also blast that music that sounds like it's coming from a Casio keyboard with low batteries. And the one that circled our high school campus was little more than a sloppily-disguised drug front.
But still. I've always liked the King Cone, and those ice cream bars with gumball noses that are in the shapes of cartoon characters (Mario, Aladdin, etc.)
For that, I can forgive them the music and the fact that most of their vendors look like Switchblade Sam from the "Dennis the Menace" movie.
I HATE: COLD STONE CREAMERY
I went into Cold Stone Creamery last week for the first time since 2002. The windows were barred. Tumbleweeds rolled across the floor. An obese man was passed out in an enormous bowl of Birthday Cake Remix muttering "Gotta have it." An apparently abandoned child was wimpering in a corner. Bands of feral cats hissed at me as they reproduced. The cashier snorted lines off of the stone slab. I gagged at the sight of it all.This is a slight exaggeration. But I got the general sense that the "cold stone" craze had wound down.
Why did we ever think it was so revolutionary to throw ice cream onto a slab, smash lots of crap into it, and then sell it for eight dollars? Most of their creations have thousands upon thousands of calories and are little more than a random mash-up of nauseatingly sweet ingredients.
Also, they didn't give me a job. Fools. Lousy, bureaucratic fools.
That was going to be my first summer job at the age of 17. As I have actually described in a previous blog post, I even went to the trouble of wearing an "interview outfit" that consisted of a cream-colored polo shirt over an extra-large, gray t-shirt.
A thirteen-year old got the job instead. Ironically, two months later, I lost a piano competition to another thirteen-year old.
I suddenly realized that I was old.
And I have only gotten older since then.
