so good you could die

i'm serious about this.

and i need to stress tat this is not a paid endorsement. because i'm about to go all crazy about a commercially available product and i need to stress that while if asked i might be willing to review products provided to me, i have never been asked to do so and this degree of my enthusiasm can't be purchased anyway.

if you are some promotional person looking for my honest review because you think i will LOOOOOVE your product and i will then crank out some glowing copy you can use, think again because what you will probably get is a little reflection on how favorability bias creeps in when people evaluate free stuff.

so even if i love your product, you'll probably get a lot of me wondering about how much i really love your product, or that it was free.

on the other hand, i have a fairly well-established record of deep product loyalty for subaru wagons, camelbak hydration packs, asolo boots, and i TOTALLY love both my giant and bianchi bicycles, so if anybody over there at those companies would like to give me free stuff to endorse them, i'd be toasty with that.

garmin GPS products, not so much. garmin, i like your devices, but your maps software and customer service both suck. i mean, individually your representatives are competent and pleasant, but the fact that i have to spend so much time talking to them after wading through your byzantine contact queue really ticks me off. and when one of your otherwise lovely representatives suggested that delorme GPS units are somehow of lesser quality, it was all i could do to bite my tongue and not say that if the unit freezing up entirely and needing to have its batteries removed before it can be restarted and set to right several times a day due to a KNOWN hardware issue typical of an entire model line is higher quality, i'd have to agree.

uh, anyway.

i was talking about fudge.

you knew that, right?

specifically fralinger's boardwalk fudge. somebody gave me a box of it last month and i was all, like, ok, fudge. i could probably eat that.

because in general fudge is a thing i can pass on. it had been years since i had eaten a piece of fudge because while it is not unpleasant, i don't like it enough to take any when i pass a bunch of it on a plate.

so i opened this fancy shiny box of "famous" fudge and was confronted with a giant brick shaped confection i had to wrangle out of its package and cut.

but all right.

so i ate some. i eat some every day, while it lasts. and for a large part of each day i am having fantasies about the next time it might be appropriate for me to eat more.

because the hit of sugar and cream is so intense that i can feel it in my fingers even NOW, and it was a half hour since my last piece, not that i'm counting.

i'm eating my daily piece and i'm thinking: do i sense a creamy undertone reminiscent of high quality condensed milk? notes of coconut? and then my piece is gone and i have a momentary panic because even though the piece is gone, i am not emotionally ready to be done eating it.

oh. this is so good, i say to nobody in particular, you could... and then i just trail off, eyes glazed and ready for my nap.

you might could order yourself a box, but you'd be treading dangerous ground. this is a fudge of great power and must be treated with care and respect.