A Pillow Book from the Land of Artichokes

MAKURA NO SOSHI: A WOMAN WHO LOVES INSECTS

Sunday, May 30, 2004

CHOCOLATE BATH BEADS

I recently acquired some Chocolate Bath Beads as part of an eBay Bath and Body lot . . . I'm hopelessly hooked on their aromatherapy line . . . grapefruit peppermint bath scrub, eucalyptus spearmint smoothing oil. Mmm . . . ! The Chocolate Bath Beads weren't, in fact, the part of the lot that I was actually interested in, but upon their arrival I became intrigued. They smelled so, well . . . chocolatey, as if they were just chock full of chocolatey goodness.

So tonight I decided to try out the Chocolate Bath Beads. It seemed so exotic. Chocolate Bath Beads! How novel! How chic! How wackadoo!

I decided to make a treat out of it . . . so I dutifully cranked my way through my To Do list . . . taking out the trash, washing the dishes, scooping the poop, vacuuming . . . and then it was finally time for my decadent Chocolate Bath Beads bath!

I got the hot water going, and then plopped in the Chocolate Bath Beads one by one . . . one, two, three, four, five . . . was five enough? Well . . . maybe six, and okay . . . seven for good measure . . . I wanted it to be good and chocolatey!

Instead of engaging in typical bath bead-like behavior, however, the Chocolate Bath Beads sank to the bottom of the tub and then proceeded to leave shit-like brown tracks on the bottom of the bathtub. And hey . . . wait a minute . . . they were starting to disintegrate in weird, messy and oily clumps. Now it looked like diarrhea.

I thought that perhaps if I held one under the water, I might help it along in terms of letting it melt into skin-softening, aromatic, chocolate bath bead-y goodness, and in doing so, I realized that, if anything, the texture was, well . . . too chocolatey. In fact, the outer gob fell right off leaving me to scrub between my fingers, as if I were some kind of a macaque monkey, a hard little kernel of something . . .

A hard little kernel of a peanut, actually.

It turned out that Chocolate Bath Beads was merely euphemistic . . . a cute little linguistic tour-de-force meant to signify actual chocolate . . . which was probably part of some type of Bath and Body gift basket, I presume.

Now I had a bathtub full of messy, sticky, melted chocolate. Which left a stubborn brown ring of not-so-good chocolatey nastiness which I had to spend ten minutes scrubbing.

So . . . I'm off to drink some dish detergent now, and after that, I think I'll shampoo my hair with butter.

Posted by Artichoke Heart | 11:14 PM |

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