I'll Wring Your Scrawny Little Necco!

I really don’t know exactly what I’m feeling right now – it’s an unsettling mixture of anger, sadness, confusion, betrayal … I certainly doubt that there’s any word for this particular emotion in the English language; perhaps not in any language, in fact.

Yesterday, I purchased a roll of Necco Wafers, after realizing that it had been perhaps a year since my last one (by far the longest Neccoless period in my life, excluding my first three years). I was a bit disappointed in myself, naturally, but I worked through it and was eventually able to forgive myself by pledging on my very soul that never again will such an oversight take place.

As is my practice, I prepared to begin sorting through the box in order to select the roll with minimal licorice-flavored wafers. Licorice-flavored Necco wafers, on the Acornian Taste Scale, are just to the bad side of lutefisk. They are, without a doubt, the foulest tasting things I have ever put my tongue on, and I’ve dated some rather Bohemian women in my day.

To my astonishment, the first roll I grabbed was entirely devoid of them! Such was my glee that I could not contain myself, and the store clerk was a bit taken aback upon being hugged by a grown man squealing like a school girl upon hearing that Justin Bieber had been spotted downtown. It was perhaps the high point of my confectionary consumptive career.

“My god, my god, what are the odds?” I asked myself. I quickly recalled the formula for binomial probability calculation and came up with p=6.65 E-5, or about 1 in 15,000. Of course, being one who shuns the sound rigidity of mathematics and statistics in favor of baseless superstitions, I figured that I was on a hot streak and began going through the rest of the box.

To my great shock, the second roll I picked up had no licorice wafers, nor did the third, nor the fourth! “This simply can’t be chance!” I said to myself. “But what else could explain this?” I asked aloud. At that precise instant, my knees buckled, and I fell to the floor, overcome by the realization that had just struck me:

I had won.

For the past twenty-some years, I’ve campaigned for the abolishment of the vile licorice wafer; a campaign involving letter-writing, picket lines, hunger strikes, candlelight vigils, and more than a few shenanigans that, for legal purposes, won’t be mentioned here. And at that moment, I realized that my work has not been in vain. The New England Confection Company had, at long last, succumbed to my demands, admitted defeat, and had rid the world of that most horrific of abominations.

I wept with joy.

Alas, my elation was short-lived, for as I tossed the fourth wafer into my mouth, I nearly gagged and rode into a parked car as I was flooded with the putrid sensation of my old waferious nemesis. They hadn’t gotten rid of it at all! Those bastards had only changed the color! I felt akin to Craig T. Nelson in Poltergeist:

You son of a bitch, you moved the cemetery changed the color but you left the bodies flavor, didn't you? You son of a bitch! You left the bodies flavor and you only moved the headstones changed the color!! YOU ONLY MOVED THE HEADSTONES CHANGED THE COLOR!!! WHY?! WHY?!!!

Well, I got home and did a little research, and discovered that Necco went natural back in late 2009, and the colors consequently changed due to the new ingredients. At least that’s their cover story. I suspect … no, I KNOW … that this was a not-so-subtle escalation in our little war. Well, you’ve won this battle, Necco, but this war ain’t over. Not by a long shot.

Game ON, bitches.