Odd
The satisfying crunch, a powerful force of destruction between our jaws, met with the reward of salt and cheese, a permeating flavor sensation and puffed texture crackling away like the choicest fatty fry off a freshly flipped, wholly browned piece of bacon — a nacho cheese bugle in this case, but perhaps a Cheeto or Dorito — what a wonder! Junk food, basically anything processed to defy the laws of time or physics, engineered to bliss our senses and leave us wanting for more — such a luxury is made all the better by its return from abstinence, the scarcity and freedom from guilt that comes from the exception rather than the self-loathing norm.
Dark chocolate, lightly sweetened and sparingly spread across a proportionally-thick graham cracker: not too much cocoa butter fat to muck up the mandibles, but enough to coat and cling to the collapsing lattice of cracker. Divine.
Melting ice cream, sweetness cut with fat, growing in intensity as the ice crystals warm and coat the tongue: no, I would not spend my 10 mindful minutes eating chips and chocolate and ice cream, but I would focus on some form of joy, of pleasure. The thrill of achievement, the actualization of a perfect score or completed goal — the beauty of a scene uncovered — all of these moments, the highest of highs, pale in comparison to the process of anticipation. If we remember the peaks and troughs of our happiness, anticipation is the integral — anxiety, stress, regret — their own kinds of integrals throughout memory and things yet come to pass. And yet these emotions cloud our experiences, bias or frame the moment in a way that can leave the fizz feeling fizzled, the sweetness artificial, the success underwhelming. To be completely in the moment is so difficult and so important — the improvement sought some hundreds or thousands of iterations away has the same potential for joy as the present. The satisfaction, the growth of achievement over time, certainly important, but perhaps only as a refinement of taste, a shaping of the curve around the event — an improvement of the anticipation, execution, and results affected by the execution. In images, we can relive and re-examine those moments, rebuild anticipation and rediscover the process that took us to those places — but our memory adds more dimensions, more senses, and more avenues to embrace the best we can imagine, to fantasize before actualizing and experience to our fullest.
I would edit for coherence, grammar, and the rest, but I think I want to talk about coherence tomorrow and the unedited ramble will make good analysis.
