Sunday, August 6, 2017

Donuts and Murderers

When I was a kid, Sundays meant going to Emmanuel Christian Church's 11:00 a.m. service, being bored out of my mind for an hour, then stopping on the way home to pick up donuts. I can't remember where we got those donuts. There was a bakery not too far from our house . . . it was called Gondecks Bakery 1 . . . and I remember going down there all by myself as a little kid (1/2 mile each way) . . . 'cause in the 60s you could do that shit and not be abducted and murdered . . . but I don't think that's where the Sunday donuts came from. 

ANYway, I started thinking about all of that when I saw an iHop ad for something called a Bacon and Maple French-Toasted Donut. Speaking of which, I was interested enough in that shit to have a look-about online until I found this information:

Calories: 530
Sodium: 980 mg
Total Fat: 31 g
Total Carbs: 48 g
Sugars: 18 g
Cholesterol: 65 mg


Wow. That is some SERIOUSly unhealthy shit. But it shoe do luke good.

530 calories is about 1/3 of my current daily allowance.

So that's do-able.

Though I don't think I'll do it.

Probably not.

ANYway, I was so hammer-cow-stunned by that donut commercial that I kept watching the channel (which was either CNN or MSNBC), and it was a program about people being held in the Louisville Metro Department of Corrections. Louisville, eh? So I kept watching. And there was a guy who looked dead up like a stupid and heavily bearded Willem Dafoe, and he had murdered his roommate and was being held in the LMDC pending his trial. Turns out that his roommate was a guy who was confined to a wheelchair, and the S&HBWD guy had strangled him over an argument. And then called his girlfriend and convinced her to help him put the body in the basement of his house. He said he had put a lot of air fresheners in the house to try to cover up the smell, but that it hadn't worked. "It smelled like decomposing body and air fresheners," he quipped. 

He quipped.

He expressed his remorse . . . emphasizing his remorse for involving his girlfriend, whom he loved.

And he talked about how he would never see her again, and he got weepy.

And it had a strange effect on me. 

It made me think, "We are all just so superficial, so useless, so stupid. Going through life, doing stupid things, falling in love, getting laid, losing love, crying, eventually dying. Just passing the time between the first gasp of air and the last."

I don't know why all of that bubbled into my head. I mean, it's not like they were new thoughts for me, but the presence of them at that precise moment would seem to indicate that I was identifying with this stupid, mean, son of a bitch. And I don't know why that would happen. I'm not a murderer. I'm not stupid. I don't have a girlfriend. And I don't look anything like Willem Dafoe. 

But that's where those fucking donuts led me.

How about you?







1  I wasn't sure how to spell this name, so I went online and typed "gondecks bakery baltimore maryland." The fifth hit was a piece of page 21 of The Baltimore Sun from Monday, December 2, 1946, which was a list of available jobs, including "BAKER 2nd hand. Good on pastries Ai decorating. Good salary. Apply Gondeck's y, oumnur opring rn.." Which translates into "BAKER 2nd hand. Good on pastries & decorating. Good salary. Apply Gondeck's,  1332 Suphur Spring Road." I think. I'm not sure about that 2nd hand. baker bit. 2   Man . . . I LOVE the 21st Century. A pit about the flying cars, though.


2  Speaking of newspapers, the page I found that ad on included an ad for a subscription which included access to the archives of The Baltimore Sun from 1837 to 1922 for a mere $74.90 for six months. That also included access to a shitload of other newspaper archives, including The Burlington Free Press, which is so cool that I almost had to put my money down then and there. There's also a cheaper version which "only" gives you access to The Baltimore Sun from 1923 to 2017 . . . plus a shitload of other newspapers . . . for a mere $44.95 for six months. It looks like those prices are just introductory rates, though. Still . . . . It'd be kind of cool to look back at that shit. And the "cheap" version would be good enough if I just wanted to investigate things related to my and my family's life. Hmmm. Donuts. Is there anything they can't do?

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