Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Long live the Queen!

My long, restful summer is coming to an end. It has been a time of contemplation, or answering big questions, like:

How delicious is Trader Joe's hemp/flax granola?
How disgusting is the vanilla goo at the bottom of Brown Cow's lowfat vanilla yoghurt?
And, mostly, if you give in to the daily urge for Dairy Queen - specifically a small vanilla/chocolate twist dipped in chocolate coating, light on the ice cream, heavy on the chocolate - will the urge abate or intensify?

The answers are: relatively delicious, v. disgusting, and you probably already know the answer to that last one.

Seriously, I have been demanding Dairy Queen almost every night before bed. In Minneapolis, I kept demanding it and instead being fed hip and interesting local ice cream. Tasty, to be sure, but twasn't the 'Queen. There's something about Dairy Queen's ice cream that is not too sweet, their chocolate is a cool, refreshing chocolate, and their chocolate dip is delightfully crisp and waxy (though application skills vary widely). This is the same thing I have gotten since I was too short to order for myself at the Glen Dairy Bar...I have spent a lifetime perfecting the art of vigilantly catching the ice cream dripping out from beneath the brittle, cracking chocolate crust.

The cone itself brooks no argument, nor waffling. Eat it or let it melt, it cares not. Its knowledge and surety of itself is not dependent upon your approval or consumption - it is at the end as it is at the beginning: perfect and whole...simultaneously out of time and imbedded deep within it.