Ftrain, by Paul Ford

The other day we were in the grocery store making good choices. And I saw, on a bottom shelf near the vegetables, several boxes of "Snack Muffins." That is the story of my life in two words right there.

Actually, as the picture shows, that's a dozen, individually wrapped "☀snack muffins," the words silhouetted by a cheerful sun, because nothing says sunshine like muffins. I am not being ironic.

NOTHING SAYS SUNSHINE LIKE MUFFINS

Look at them, in their cardboard tub. Like something you'd find at a farm store. Just tear off the plastic and throw the box on the ground and yell "soo-wee snack muffins!" They'll come-arunnin.

Note:

From the Wikipedia page for "☀":

"Alchemy of the Black Sun Cult" is the first single and video from the American black metal band Goatwhore's 2006 album "A Haunting Curse".

I told my friend about the snack muffins. She said, "every muffin is a snack."

Ah the muffin. Sweet and starchy, but not a cupcake (actually it is a cupcake); it can be served with butter or just by itself (and good for you for not having it with butter); it can be warm or cold; and the cheaper ones bunch up in your hand like river clay which satisfies in a toddleresque way. Also, it's part of breakfast, a sacred meal. That was smart of them, to align with breakfast; if muffins had ended up at dinner they'd be in trouble right now. But breakfast is a caloric-DMZ, when you can, without fear for your virtue, chew through anything--say fried eggs with bacon, beneath a sheet of molten cheese, delivered via spatula into the fold of a warm bagel. Salted, peppered, pampered, until, finally, the assemblage is wrapped in foil and then again in paper, and finally handed over, ready to be undressed and, adoringly, savaged--the entire process taking only a little longer than it took you to read this. And why not have, if you are me, a muffin as well?

The "☀snack muffins" name is strangely uninflected. Foods like this beg for cees to be kays, for new coinages and portmanteaus. The awful constraints of trademark have forced linguistic progress--resistance in the materials of commerce leading to true art. From 2007:

I promise myself on Friday night that I will write 20 pages, but instead I read about space orcs while eating 25-cent packages of misspelled food—Chipchaps, Salt Smackerz, Funcorn, Yeesty-Klair, Mintee Sourz, Chocoprong Cheezers, Kake Snax, and Yumchkins.

"Just as we have smashed the words together to make a new word," promises the packaging, "so will this food feel like other foods smashed together to make a new food." I wonder if there is food name-generating software somewhere. An algorithm. First draft:

• Plurals to singular (Tasty pies ▶ tast-ee-pie)
• S ⟶ Z when you want to emphasize the voicing of the fricative
• C ⟶ K
• CK, CKS ⟶ X
• Y, EY ⟶ EE
• HARD ⟶ -O-
• Remove modifiers and descriptive terms (i.e. breadsticks ▶ sticks; cut the word "fried")
• Join words where possible
• Add suffix EE
• Other suffixes: -winkies; -odiles; -ball; -krimpet; -kake; -unch; -ers, -bomb.
• Add descriptive, positive prefixes: pleasure-, tastee-, delish-, etc.
• Add mediating vowels: -a-, -o-, -ee-, etc.
• Add needless hyphens
• Overemphasize healthful ingredients (NATURAL BLUEBERRIES!)
• Quantifiers are good (TRIPLE, EXTRA, 10 PERCENT MORE)
• Otherwise just wing it.

Thus:

• Cheese-topped Breadsticks ⟶ Cheezee-stix
• Deep-fried Apple Pie ⟶ DOUBLE Tast-ee-pie with REAL APPLE!
• Chocolate-iced muffin with sprinkles and icing inside ⟶ Choc-hole crunch
• Lunchbox-sized fudge bar ⟶ Fudgepacker Funbars
• Aggravated sodomy ⟶ Diet Fudgepacker Funbars
• Candied snake asshole ⟶ Slither Snakkers
• Angina ⟶ Health-ee-heart Lite Brisket
• Coffeecake smeared with owl shit ⟶ Kreem-ee Krumblehoots

Following my own rules with "snack muffins" I end up with "muff snakkerz." So perhaps the muffin people made the right choice for themselves.

They move a few letters around, throw in some exclamation points, and throw it on the floor. And for the most part they've been right.

Just about everything in America starts with the words "Here you go, dumbass."

Weight: 331 lbs