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Excerpt from mail sent 1998:
I did recently get a hankering for some candy cigarettes. I'd never had any when I was growing up, and was curious. I looked around, but couldn't find any in stores. And no wonder. What could be more evil than candy cigarettes? What better way to corrupt the young of our nation?
That got me thinking about child pornography, and thus, logically, to the internet. Duh. I did a hotbot search on "candy cigarettes" and was soon hooked up to some candy-by-mail outfit which had a candy cigarette source out in Jersey, where morals are looser.
I just wanted to try these things out, but this place was a big distributor, and so I had to buy something like 24 packs--I guess you might say a carton. I tried to give the candy cigarettes away to everyone in the office, but met with little success. Candy cigarettes represent all that is evil, all that is indulgent; worse, they didn't taste that good.
They were just these cylinders of wintergreen. People asked why I didn't get the cool bubblegum ones which came with powdered sugar in the middle--sugar which could be blown out so that it looked like smoke.
What a fiasco.
DLoft and Veronica went to Brazil, and they brought back some chocolate cigarettes from there. Excuse me, they brought back some rolinhos chocolate ao leite. The best part is the box. It's bright orange. On the front of the box is a black-and-white photograph, kind of grainy, of a little white kid grinning and making a thumbs-up gesture. On the back of the box is a little black kid grinning and making a thumbs-up gesture. I wonder if store owners figure out which way to display the boxes based on the skin color of their clientele. But I shouldn't. To hear Veronica tell it, Brazil's got a lot less racial bullshit going on than America does. No wonder those kids are grinning.
[I have since sent off all of my candy cigarette wrappers to the very nice cardhouse website, where they can play with lots of other people's candy cigarette wrappers in faux tobacco harmony.]