While running errands this evening, I stopped by the Godiva store to pick up a few things in preparation for my upcoming business trip. Apart from the gifts I stocked up on, I purchased a bar of dark chocolate, filled with a fine raspberry sauce. I adore the pairing of raspberries and chocolate; I simply couldn’t wait to finish my other errands so I could get home, relax after weeks of intense work, and eat.
I got home around 11:00PM, got into my pajamas, and wandered downstairs to the cool darkness of the basement. I turned on the television and tried to find something to watch. There was nothing on. Eventually I surfed my way to a repeat of Saturday Night Live and saw No Doubt perform ‘Hey Baby, Hey’. I rather like No Doubt, I have for quite some time. But there was something odd about it, watching Gwen Stefani gesticulate across the stage to a song that I don’t particularly like. It made even the scent of the chocolate seem bitter, hard, and unapproachable.
I didn’t want to waste my chocolate on No Doubt, but what else was there to watch? I eventually wound up watching an old mainstay of my Tivo. Over a year ago I was lucky enough to find a retro musical special from the 1960’s airing on PBS. It featured Frank Sinatra and a variety of guests, including Ella Fitzgerald and Antonio Carlos Jobim. While no one can ever say enough beautiful things to describe Ella Fitzgerald, Antonio Carlos Jobim has a much firmer hold on my heart. His music is revolutionary, smooth, enticing, and rich. The lyrics – either in the original Portugese or translated into English – envelope you and as they are sung, they seem to they blend right into the music as if they were nothing more than another instrument in a vast orchestra. Jobim’s music is a quiet, rolling, seductive stream of exquisite depth, echoing a humble recognition of the beautiful things of this world, tinged with a hint of pain. His songs of love seduce you with their subtle vulnerabilities, winning you over with their truth in longing.
It was perfect. I turned up the volume, listening happily as Sinatra and Jobim crooned back and forth. I put the first piece of dark chocolate in my mouth, savoring every sense of the experience. As the chocolate shell broke and it began to bleed onto my tongue, the coolness of the music was juxtaposed against the sharp, stinging flavor of the raspberry. Any harsh ugliness that had embittered my senses melted away as quickly as the chocolate had dissolved in my mouth. In a few short moments I was left alone with the delicious simple sensitivity of chocolate, two men, a guitar, and bossa nova. Life should always be so delectably serene.
Well there’s your two characters, a setting and an action. What do you need all of us contributing for when you’ve got Old Blue Eyes, some Portugese crooner, Bossa Nova and chocolate…Godiva chocolate even!? This is why people lurk, you know. I never would have made the two guys in a car suggestion if I’d known Sinatra was the alternative.
I rarely disclose this because look at me like I just kicked a puppy when I do.
ERIK’S RULES OF CHOCOLATE, A treatise attesting to the various disservices done to a venerable food by culinary misappropriations:
Chocolate is chocolate. Nothing more nothing less. A tree is a tree. Nothing more or less. Sure you can raze a tree, cut it down to a size 2 inches by 6 inches and build a house out of, but then what have you done? Destroyed something beautiful and made something that, albeit useful, in most cases does not match the beauty of a tree. Chocolate is the same. I enjoy a nice piece of chocolate now and again, but when you pervert it’s progenitor, so-called ‘cocoa’, by adding it’s goodness to something so pure such as ice cream, you have delved into dark recesses no man should be required to endure. ‘Chocolate Ice Cream’ is a travesty and an affront to the progress to modern man. Shall we go back to living in caves? ‘Chocolate cake’ is also an offense too heinous to ignore. ‘Chocolate Cake’ and ‘Chocolate Ice Cream’ are two villains that should not be allowed to sully the good name of ‘chocolate’ any longer! Chocolate deserves to remain in one of two permutations of its natural state, either liquid or solid. Certainly, no good person would deny that having chocolate in a liquid state over ice cream is good! Or that solid Chocolate shavings over a piece of cake is not delicious! However, my chocoloate rules state that Chocolate must not be ‘in’ a comestible, rather it shall remain a single and seperate entity to be added at the consumer’s leisure.
Summation: I hate chocolate cake and I hate chocolate ice cream even more. However, I do like chocolate. Go figure. I am a cocoa-mystery wrapped in a choco-nigma.
What a sad, lonely life your chocolate must lead. Is salt good on its own? No, it needs peppa’. How much fun is one little Hydrogen atom? It’s not nearly as fun as when lots of them go through fusion. And how funny is a lone Teller? He need Penn! Greatest comes in the combining of two otherwise great things for a synergistic explosion of potential. And besides, with food it’s all going to the same place anyway.
I am with Tim on this. Chocolate is good and icecream is good so chocolate iceream is good. Chocolate icecream is good and ketchup is good so ketchup chocolate icecream is good. Ketchup chocolate icecream is good and bolgna is good so bologna ketchup choclate icecream is good,
Still I do agree that Chocalate cake is generally pretty vile.
Mmmmm…sounds like a delicious time for multiple senses at once! 😀