"A Crisis of Extraordinary Proportions" by Dean Koontz

September 26, 2015

This essay in the latest issue of Useless News (Summer 2015) has also been posted on DeanKoontz.com.

Maybe it’s a genetic abnormality, maybe it’s a dark knot in my psychology that can never be untied, but whatever the reason, I never much liked chocolate milk. Chocolate, yes. Milk, yes. But the two combined always seemed to me to be a culinary experiment less successful than trout ice cream. Then, a few years ago, Gerda——who doesn’t share my long list of food quirks ——brought home a half-gallon container of Hood’s Calorie Countdown chocolate milk. My life was forever changed.
Hood’s is headquartered 3,000 miles from me, in Massachusetts, where I have never been and where, therefore, I couldn’t even be certain that they had cows or knew about chocolate. Yet here was a sublime concoction, more chocolatey than the bland chocolate milks I had known before, like a liquid version of the chocolatiest of chocolate ice creams, yet only 90 calories a glass. The vicissitudes of life ceased to bother me. I no longer worried about planet-killing asteroids plunging toward Earth or that some demonic TV network would resurrect the old series My Mother the Car…