Dearest Rachel –
This is the sort of thing you and I would share of an idle morning, or maybe talk about while we were walking Chompers around the block or two that he needed to do all the business he had to deal with. Meaningless, nonsense stuff; the sort of thing that was good for a laugh, maybe a few lines expanding on the concept as we toyed with it back and forth, before moving on to the next subject, like whether the old lady on the corner behind the office park was still setting out breadcrumbs for the squirrels like she used to. That sort of thing.
I miss being able to do that with you; and I expect to write you about the subject in more detail at a later date in more seriousness. But for right now, I hope you’ll just indulge me in sharing this thing to chuckle at – and maybe the ideas that I build onto it will amuse you as well. It’s all I ask for at the moment.
A meme wound up in my feed – and I’m not going to display it here, because it featured a certain politician, and would therefore automatically tee off half the people reading this over your shoulder – with the legend “Dove chocolate tastes way better than their soap.” The joke is, presumably – and I realize that, by being explained, it dies – that this individual is too stupid to know you simply don’t eat soap, even if you are dumb enough to think that the brand means it’s made by the same folks who make that silky-smooth (by American standards) chocolate.
It’s actually rather damaged by depicting a political figure, because it changes the tenor of what, back when we were young, would just be a run-of-the-mill blonde joke (or, going even further back, a dig at one or another ethnic group; a Sunday school teacher of mine used to refer to them as ‘Smallgarian’ jokes, so no real nationality would be indicated, but I’ll bet one comes to mind). Then again, the individual supposedly stating this “fact” is depicted as doing so as if part of a speech; as if they were imparting some great nugget of wisdom to the benighted masses who don’t know better, so maybe it needed to be this way.
And maybe this individual is as deserving of ridicule as whoever posted the meme in the first place thought they were. Certainly, they are known for making proclamations that ride the ragged edge between the painfully obvious and the clearly wrong, without any apparent recognition of which is which. Maybe they believe that every word that drops from their mouth is a pearl of great wisdom; maybe they know it’s all absolute rubbish, but that their adoring public will eat up every word they say.
At the same time, it occurs to me; what is it about that statement that isn’t true? Chocolate does taste better than soap; who on earth would be willing to say otherwise, even without tasting both firsthand? Moreover, it’s not like a fair cohort of our generation haven’t had to eat soap at least once in our lives, so it isn’t as if this individual implying that they have is necessarily admitting they mistook one for the other (unless they happen to be a fan of white chocolate, which frankly is a whole different subject entirely). Maybe they had strict parents that tried to discourage a certain vocabulary; although judging from the current political discourse, their parenting attempts didn’t ‘take’ very well.
It would give a whole new meaning to that scene in A Christmas Story where Ralphie claims (and subsequently denies in his grown-up narrative) to have said “fudge” at one point. I can see his dad’s reaction; “You want fudge?! I’ll let you eat fudge!” and we cut to the shot of him with the cake of soap in his mouth.
That being said, it does make me wonder why we don’t have soaps (or perfumes) that smell like chocolate. The idea of putting scent into soap – and almost all soap has an added perfume to it – is to imbue the user with a pleasing scent to replace that of the dirt and grime the soap is meant to wash off. Given how pleasant an aroma chocolate is, why not infuse soap with such a scent? Of all the foods that one could smell like – pizza is wonderful, for instance, but waking up to a house (or a bedmate) smelling of it wouldn’t be all that welcome – chocolate would be particularly inviting. I actually think some comedienne make a whole riff about how one’s love life would be enhanced if one partner or the other smelled (and tasted?) of chocolate, although I forget the exact details (including her name), so I can’t plagiarize the bit.
This is the sort of thing I can picture the two of us talking about – and building on – throughout the course of a walk, or over the dining room table. We’d touch on the logistics of what color the bar would have to be so that some little kid wouldn’t make the mistake this political figure implies having made. We’d point out the fact that we’ve been trained to associate certain scents with cleanliness (and debate about toothpaste in particular, since I follow the conventional wisdom regarding mint, while you and Daniel had a fondness for a particular brand that offered an orange flavor – he’s since switched to another brand’s mango, as the brand you favored stopped making orange, by the way), and how chocolate isn’t one of those scents. We’d probably even discuss just how accurate that comedienne’s assertion would be, depending on whether Daniel was paying attention to our conversation or not. That last part of the conversation I really miss, since I suppose there might be a person or two I could talk about the rest with to one extent or another.
It’s strange, isn’t it, how a silly meme winds up making me think about the two of us, rather than dwelling on the politics of what its creator originally intended. Even the alleged stupidity of the statement dissipates when you look at it closely enough, and it just becomes a topic of conversation, a surprisingly rich opening gambit for those willing to play along. There aren’t that many such players these days, though, honey, and I wish I could hear from you, or someone like you, again some day.
For now, I’d just ask for you to keep an eye on me and wish me well. I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 