I want to begin by assuring you that everything in this essay is real. I mention this up front because I write fiction for a living, and my track record on trustworthiness is right there in the name of this publication. But no. These are actual products, currently for sale, in the country where you live. I did not make them up. I could not have made them up. My imagination has limits, and apparently the American product development pipeline does not.
At CES this year, a company called Lollipop Star unveiled a lollipop that plays music through bone conduction. You put it in your mouth, the candy vibrates, the vibrations travel through your jawbone into your inner ear, and a song plays that only you can hear. It comes in three artist pairings: Ice Spice is peach, Akon is blueberry, and Armani White is lime.
Sit with that. Somewhere, a licensing meeting took place in which a lawyer said, “Akon will be blueberry,” and everyone nodded and wrote it down.
I read this to Karie over breakfast. She looked at me for a long moment and said, “So it’s tinnitus you pay for.”
Yes. Exactly. It is subscription tinnitus, and the subscription is candy.
The technology itself is legitimate. Bone conduction is how Beethoven heard his piano after he went deaf, biting a rod pressed against the soundboard. Two hundred years later, we have taken that same miracle of human ingenuity and used it to inject Ice Spice directly into a child’s skeleton. Somewhere Beethoven is biting a rod in his coffin just to hear himself scream.
Naturally, the current roster is only the beginning. I have obtained (invented) the upcoming flavor slate:
Morrissey (Unsweetened Grapefruit). Stops playing halfway through and refuses to say why.
Kenny G (Flavorless). Lasts forty-five minutes. You will beg it to end. It will not end.
Post Malone (Gas Station Cherry). The vibrations leave a small tattoo on your soft palate.
Enya (Chamomile Mist). Does not dissolve so much as ascend.
Nickelback (Photograph... of a Banana). Recalled within the week, though not for the reason you’d hope. Something about the FDA.
Gregorian Monks (Communion Wafer). For the liturgical candy market, which I assure you exists and is furious about something.
Meanwhile, in the canned goods aisle, Bush’s has released Rocket Pop Baked Beans. Also Apple Pie Baked Beans and Dill Pickle Baked Beans, but I need you to focus on the first one. A rocket pop is the red, white, and blue popsicle of your childhood, the one that tasted like cherry, mystery, and blue. Someone at Bush’s looked at that popsicle and thought: beans.
This is what the nation’s 250th birthday has done to us. We have run out of normal ways to be patriotic, so we are now expressing love of country through legumes that taste like a freezer truck.
Karie’s position on this was firm. “The beans already had a flavor,” she said. “It was beans.”
I pointed out that the company describes these as flavors people can’t stop talking about, which is technically true in the way that a car fire is something people can’t stop talking about.
Trouble McFussbucket, our pig, who is currently 156 pounds and blaming the humidity, heard the words “baked beans” from a full room away and presented herself at the porch door with the confidence of an invited guest. Trouble does not care what the beans taste like. Trouble has never once in her life asked a follow-up question about food. In this way she is Bush’s ideal customer, and I have half a mind to write the company and tell them their target demographic is a pig in Keswick, Virginia, who would also happily eat the can.
Forthcoming flavors I am prepared to predict with total confidence:
Candy Corn Baked Beans. October. You know it’s coming. Don’t pretend you don’t.
Eggnog Baked Beans. For the family member who ruins Christmas anyway. Give them a reason.
Birthday Cake Baked Beans. With sprinkles that survive the canning process through means science does not wish to discuss.
Margarita Baked Beans. Rim of the can comes pre-salted.
Beans-Flavored Ice Cream. The circle closes. The prophecy is fulfilled.
And finally, Aldi is selling a box of four ice cubes for $4.99. In fairness, they are crystal clear cubes, the kind fancy cocktail bars use, which melt slowly and look gorgeous in a glass. In less fairness, they are ice, a substance my freezer produces for free while I sleep, like a small dumb elf.
That’s $1.25 per cube. Ice is now more expensive per unit than eggs were during the egg crisis, and the eggs at least required a chicken. The ice required my enemy, cold.
Karie ran the numbers. “The water is free. The cold is free in January. They’re charging five dollars for geometry.”
She’s right, and I expect Aldi knows she’s right, which is why I predict the line will expand:
Rustic Cloudy Cubes. The regular kind, but the box says “heritage” on it. $7.99.
Single Artisanal Cube. One cube. Hand-frozen. Comes with a card describing its terroir. $12.
Barrel-Aged Ice. Spent four months in a bourbon barrel. Is now just very cold bourbon. $19.99.
Pre-Melted Ice. For the customer on the go. Sold in the water aisle, next to the water, at triple the price of the water.
Here’s the thing, though. I sat on the porch last night with a glass of decidedly non-artisanal bourbon and some cloudy, free-range, farm-raised ice from my own freezer, and Karie next to me, and Trouble grumbling somewhere in the dark about the injustice of dinner having ended, and I thought about the person at Lollipop Star who first got a song to play inside their own head and ran down the hallway to make a coworker try it.
Because that’s what all of this is, underneath the licensing deals and the press releases. It’s people trying to hand each other a small surprise. A popsicle in a bean. A concert in a candy. A perfect clear cube for a drink you’re not going to share with someone anyway. It’s ridiculous, all of it, and it is also the most human thing there is: someone, somewhere, saying “okay but what if” out loud in a conference room, and someone else, God help us, saying yes.
I hope the Morrissey lollipop is real someday. I hope it stops halfway through. I hope we never find out why. I’ll have mine on a Sunday… which will be every day.
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.
He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.
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