Dear Mr. Kat
Iä! Iä! Kathulhu fhtagn!
Climbing from the extruder abyssal
To dangle tongues on flavor’s thistle,
Soon will come the Great and Dreaded Kit Kats!
To destroy Reese’s, with flavour bats
Come at last with no caveats
'Til o'er all the candy aisle they reign, the candy aisle they reign!
Oh, ‘tis a dangerous game you play, Mr. Kat. The most dangerous game. No, not like in that weird-ass story by Richard Connell, about some rich guy who likes to hunt other men (but Not All Men amirite?) on his private isle, no… a far more dangerous game. One in which your trusty rifle will NOT serve you well.
I would not have expected it, nor in any sane world countenanced such dismay… All I wanted to do was to buy some asparagus, some onions, maybe some spinach, that day, when I in all innocence drove to my local greengrocer’s, Mr. Meyer’s (some call him Fred, or even Freddie, but such names are for close friends of his, and to my shame I cannot name him thus).
And lo, after completing my shopping for such bounteous veggies as Nature provides, and Mr. Meyer bangs up and bruises through the standard, violent processes of commerce that we in this degraded, modern age call “business as usual,” I hied myself to the self-checkout… where I spotted that product which man was not meant to ken:
Blueberry Muffin Kit Kats.
Lo, though my first clue should have been the display, whereupon these and other candies lay flat in a display at just a child’s fist’s height, tempting the youngest upon us to grab for a sweet while their hard-working parent just wanted to get through the goddamn line already, we don’t have time for this, you need to get to soccer, your sister needs to get to baseball and your brother needs to get to ballet, and anyway you’ve already had your sugar ration for the day and don’t make me take away your screen time, there it was. Was it meant to be hidden? Was it meant to lie in wait? If so, That Other Nature did a poor job of it this time, because amongst the oranges and reds and other colours out of space meant to beguile the young, listless, and sugar-mad, this sky-blue packaging, though otherwise circumspect and lacking in passion, stood out as being different from the rest. Different… and dangerous.
Did you hire Dr. Herbert West as a food scientist to act as one of your underlings? Did he decide to take a break from The Unfathomable Horror of Human Resurrection and instead turn his mad, beady eyes to Unfathomable Flavor Horrors of Late Capitalism, as a treat? For, as the astute shall note, this is not “Blueberry Muffin Flavored Kit Kats,” no. This is “Blueberry Muffin Kit Kats.”
As you, sir, are probably not aware, I am a bit of an accomplished homebrewer and baker, and so there is one fact of which I am absolutely aware: yeast breads, or even other, less fungal, leavened baked products, are not flat. And yet, here we have a product that claims to be one God’s perfect snacks – so perfect that no less august a state than Minnesota declared the humble Blueberry Muffin to be its official state muffin – that is suspiciously dense, and almost perfectly flat. Some mischief, some consensus-reality breaking mad science is afoot here. And I have an idea what it might be.
Yea, I have extrapolated from known precepts, as scientists such as myself must, and I have determined how Dr. West, your minion, must have proceeded. Dr. West, in his madness, developed the arcane and terrible arithmetic to transform an innocent blueberry muffin into that tesseract of breakfast, that monstrosity of carbohydrates and slightly dehydrated blueberries that Man Was Not Meant To Ken… and he inverted that horrible math. For illustration, please see fig A (attached), which is my drawing of a normal, everyday, almost all humans enjoy for breakfast or maybe even lunch, sometimes grilled, sometimes with bacon, sometimes with butter, sometimes eaten straight from the weird paper shell, blueberry muffin. No normal human should look upon such a muffin and despair, let alone have impudent thoughts… but Dr. West, your willing, supported, and encouraged disciple – he is no normal man. He looked upon that blueberry muffin and developed a terrible, non-Euclidean calculus… and in a stroke of capitalist genius, inverted it - and so a fluffy, delicious blueberry muffin, normal in its three-dimensionalness, was transformed into a two-dimensional, flat grid (see fig. B) of presumably sweet candy.
And yea, Mr. Kat, as I gaze upon this not-monstrosity, I shake and weep, and I gnash my teeth. For I do not know the state in which your Quality Assurance department resides - do they tremble? Do they have terrible aspirations? Do they love their fellow man? Or do they instead bide their time in the darkness, knowing that one day, their Lord and Master might yet be released from his prison? For what should occur if that terrible arithmetic, for now inverted, were to be set wrong again? There can be no good outcome if the terrible arithmetic that Dr. West, your charge and your employee, has developed should be set free upon an unexpecting and sleeping world, and should that innocent, normal blueberry muffin depicted in fig. A instead be transformed into a ravening, ravenous, tesseracted tentacled beast of a breakfast foodstuff, hungry for the kidneys and souls of the innocent! (see fig. C) This horrible arithmetic that has been willingly? unwillingly? developed in the hallowed halls of your pure R&D labs currently is tamed by the mastery of science and industry, but may yet be unleashed onto a world unready to face That Which Lies Beneath the Leavened Sugary Dome. Yea, with the simple application of that terrible arithmetic, those blueberries might yet become eyes, the weird raised bumps endemic to all leavened baked goods may yet become tentacles, and yea, the kinda gross, yogurty, only vaguely-blueberry tasting sweet coating may yet turn sinister and instead of melting in your mouth, may instead melt the mouths of those who seek to consume it.
Do you wish, dear sir, to become the one under whose aegis Harlan Ellison’s seminal story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, becomes a reality? Deep in your chocolatier’s lair, do you wish to become Azathoth, the Blind Idiot God whose laughter created and will one day destroy the world? Have you become tired of waiting, and do you long for and chase that dark day? Or are you instead simply a Captain of Industry, whose soul has become jaded, whose eyes focus only on profits, and do not look out and see what should happen if his QC department might run amok? Those of us who consume, and yet do not wish to be consumed, can only hope that you have simple, selfish aims, that you hold the reins tight, and do not look away from That Which May Yet Come To Pass – for you, your hideous henchmen, and your QA department, hold our world hostage, by the thinnest of strands, and should your attention waver…
I can barely think of it.
I hope this letter reaches you in good health, for the alternative is not to be reckoned with.
Yours,
Alex Parise
