Killing Me Sweetly Part 1: Circus Peanuts

Is that title not confusing enough?

I figured that there are several candies out there that need to die a painful death, and there are too many to fit in a single post. So Memoirs of a Gouda is pledged to do a multi-part investigation on Friday's Leave it Dead column on the legion of tooth-rotting gastronimic nightmares from our childhood. As opposed to the tooth-rotting, gastro-orgasmic treats of love that we want to keep.

What inspired me to go down this path, you ask? Well, as I was swooning through a mental climax that can only be inspired by creamy mashmallow covered with chocolate and cashews, otherwise known as a Rocky Road Bar, I found myself wondering what could possibly kill this moment.

And out of nowhere, a Circus Peanut popped into my head. You know what they are- the fake, foamy, formidably funknacious, fucking GROSS candies that look like this:


I know they aren't "dead" in the sense that my regular Friday entry typically requires, but I think I need to work this bit of mental anguish out. To not "leave it dead", but to once and for all make them "dead to me". I saw some of these disgusting capsules of evil dangling in a cellophane bag in the corner gas station just last night, and I had my typical flashback involving my first bite of the pugnacious puffy peanut. It was in the third grade, and the girl at the desk next to me asked if I wanted a piece of candy. Upon my eager nodding, as any healthy child in elementary school is wont to do, I accepted in my hand the finger-like, flesh-colored morsel and took my first bite, whereupon the dire urge to vomit assailed upon me like a pair of rough cops on Rodney King. I remember looking at my friend, grinning sheepishly, placing the entire peanut in my mouth, and feigning joyful chewing with all of the skill of a taster on the Iron Chef who has just sampled a spoonful of salmon roe ice cream. When she looked away, I immediately removed said peanut, now tacky with sucrose-laden juvenile saliva and tried to figure out what to do with it. In a fit of ingenuity that would only befit an 8-year-old, I plastered it to the underside of my desk, where I promptly squashed it with my fingertips, like a giant piece of chewed bubblegum. I flattened it as much as I could, and there it stayed for the remainder of the school year, and as far as I know, for years after that.

I imagine that desk now lies rotting in the bottom of some landfill, but that mutilated, petrified circus peanut remains as intact as ever, holding my DNA like a solid piece of amber, only it's been avoided by every specimen of bug, mold, and vermin that exists in such places. Nature will not reclaim what is not of this planet, I am convinced. And I'm also convinced that the Circus Peanut should forever reside in the Hall of What Should Never Have Been and What Never Again Will Be.

Stay tuned next week when The Gouda investigates another conspiracy likely cooked up by evil dentists. The Easy Tooth Extractors known as Ju-Ju-Bees and Milk Duds.