Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

I don’t think you should name pets people names. It’s weird if your dog is named Jerry and not, say, Commander Poopypants or something. Lucky, Scoot, Scout, Patches, Batman, whatever, these are all very fine names for dogs, but then you have people who name their dogs like, Susan, or Gary, and nobody likes that. Nobody wants that. It confuses us all. Why are you telling Susan not to shit there? Asking a neighbor for a poop bag because Gary deuced in their yard? Just out there at night yelling for Jeff like you know some guy who is lost in the woods instead of who it really is, your dog. “Don’t eat that, Rachel,” you say to your weimeraner as she tries very hard to eat weird mushrooms.

The same is true for apples and vegetables. Nobody wants to eat a tomato called Gordon. And yet, here I am, eating an apple called Jonathan.

My review of a Jonathan apple, Manoff Orchard, PA, mid-Oct:

This is a real chasing the dragon situation — except today, I think I caught the dragon. To rewind and remind:

Blah blah blah, I generally didn’t like apples because, obviously, I’d eaten the bad ones like the rest of us. I’d had cardboardy suck-ass Red Delicous apples at lunch and they are the Fruit of Woe, so I thought, unless they’re in a pie, no apples. An apple a day keeps the doctor away because the doctor is like, “Fuck them shitty apples.” But then blah blah blah, I went to Colorado later in life with my father after we’d kind of… gotten over some of our issues, my wife-to-be was there, it was really lovely. And while there we were driving through Fruita — a town on the Western slope known for it’s SPONTANEOUSLY-GENERATED TRACTORS just kidding, c’mon, it’s known for it’s fruit, it’s right there in the goddamn name — and we stopped at a roadside fruit stand and my father bought us apples.

And we ate the apples there.

That apple was a Jonathan apple and it was a revelation.

Sometimes, though, revelations aren’t permanent. We forget them, because, I assume, our monkey brains get overstuffed and concerned about other things, like for instance we get irrationally annoyed when people name their dogs people names instead of Lord Pawsington Tailweather or Doctor Chaos, like you have all these cool fucking names and instead you went with Jerome, what the actual shit are you doing, you marry a Jerome, you don’t leash and walk a Jerome, unless that’s a thing you do with your husband, and that’s fine, no shame, no shade, you and he should explore whatever sides of yourself you feel comfortable exploring and–

Okay, I’m off track again.

Point is, I ate this gorgeous, glorious apple and realized apple could be amazing — and then I kinda forgot that again. Like, I still had the memory of eating the apple, but the deeper connection to apples didn’t stick. I did not go seek out more apples. And occasionally I’d look for a Jonathan apple and never found one.

Now, though, my local orchard has ’em.

And I got one.

I had a Jonathan apple… I think last year or so out in the Midwest, and I don’t think it was much of a revelation, which worried me. And I’ve had one or two others before that and, nope, still no revelation.

Then I ate this apple.

And it might be my favorite apple so far this season.

It was this beautifully ripe thing, just a hair shy of soft, still a lovely bite, an absolute candy gusher of juice, not bright so much as assertively sharp, still sweet in balance. Even just smelling the apple like a perverted ol’ apple-sniffer gave you the sense memory of walking through a rose garden — but blessedly, it doesn’t taste like roses, which can (for me) be off-putting in an apple. (Rose flavor tastes like grandmas smell, I dunno, don’t at me.) This might be one of those apples where we’re tempted to look for complex, complicated flavors — cherry pipe tobacco mixed with the ennui of a baby whose soul is too old for its chubby little body — but really, this is just an apple’s apple to me. It offers us quintessential appleness.

It’s an absolute classic, this apple. Even the skin was pleasing to eat!

HELL YEAH WE FUCKIN DID IT

Jonathan, lovely.

Revelation, re-revealed.

We’ll call it a 9.1 out of 10 — I would’ve gone higher, but it has a person name, and I just can’t abide that kind of shenanigans.

Remember: no kings, and fuck ICE.

Watch the video of me eating this delightful apple.

Jonathan: tender wonder boy apple, three cheers for Jonathan the apple

Reviews so far this year: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette, Black Gilliflower, Red Delicious Double Feature

Palpatine voice: Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Delicious, the Red?

That’s right. We’re — er, we’re meaning I’m because you’re not here with me, it’s just an us in theory — reviewing the Red Delicious apple.

Not one apple.

But two of them.

The first, from a grocery store. The second, from a local orchard.

Yes, it’s quite possible I hate myself. I do it for you! For you, my dear sweet Apple Snack Gang. Never say I gave you nothing!

(By the way, would you wear an Apple Snack Gang t-shirt?)

First, though, it’s worth talking a little bit about why the Red Delicious sucks moist open ass. The Red Delicious was a popular, reportedly-once-tasty apple whose sport mutations were chosen to reproduce its beauty (meaning, how likely you were to choose it because ooh it so pretty, it so red) and its heartiness (meaning, how likely it was for the apple to survive transport to stores farther and farther from the tree it came from).

From this New England article:

‘“It turns out that a lot of the genes that coded for the flavor-producing compounds were on the same chromosomes as the genes for the yellow striped skin,” Traverso explains, “so as you favored the more consistently colored apples, you were essentially disfavoring the same genes that coded for great flavor.”’

Which is to say, the Red Delicious is the original poster child for enshittification.

It’s not entirely fair to say capitalism destroyed this apple — some of it is literally due to the earlier challenges of getting food to places where it doesn’t necessarily grow. (Though even there, capitalism certainly has its teeth in — food deserts are often chokepoints caused by big corporations.) At the same time, the Stark Bros, who were not the original growers but who were the original marketers of the Red and Golden Delicious apples, were making money hand over fist promoting and selling these trees and their fruit. And hey, it really worked: the Red Delicious was the most popular apple in America all the way until the 2018 somefuckinghow, which explains why most people didn’t give half-a-shit about apples, because a lot of the time the apples they were getting in their school lunches or at a hotel buffet were these red, dead demon-lumps.

You couldn’t get rid of the things if you tried. They popped up everywhere.

Not unlike, apparently, the tree to start:

See, and if you’ll forgive me my own capitalist promotion here, one of the many seeds (ahem) that went into planting Black River Orchard was the fact that the original Red Delicious tree was a pernicious, persistent, pest-like intrusion. To quote the article above:

‘In the late 1880s, Iowa farmer Jesse Hiatt stumbled across a mystery apple seedling in his orchard. Despite his repeated attempts to stop the interloper from taking root, it continued to spring up year after year. Hiatt eventually gave up and dubbed the apple “Hawkeye” in honor of his home state.’

The Devil was clearly down there in the roots and the muck, pushing this demon tree up through the ground, reddening the apples with every mutation. EAT THE SHIT APPLES, the Devil cackled from down below.

And now we’re cursed with this fruit. Even still, one of the Top Five Apples in America. We cannot be rid of this damned spot.

You know, I almost called it ‘the McDonald’s hamburger of apples,’ but honestly, at least a McDonald’s hamburger tastes like something. The Red Delicious is what, then? The enshittified internet of apples? The LG microwave of apples? The retirement benefits of apples? Something that was maybe once good but has long since gone to shit because of unfettered unregulated money-grubbing greedfuckers?

Anyway. This apple has long plagued us. So let’s eat a couple, and see what happens, yeah?

My review of two Red Delicious apples, the first from Giant grocery store, the second from Coco’s farmstand, mid-Oct:

Look at that photo at the top. Or, if you want, watch the video where I eat both of these sonofaguns —

Actually, let’s get a little closer here:

Right out of the gate it’s easy to see that these are two fairly different apples — they’re different shapes, different colors, different beasts entirely.

(For reference, the one from the local orchard is on the right, the one from the grocery store is on the left.)

(I also like that in the photo at the top of the post, it looks like the apples are two buddies, sharing a look at the splendor of nature, each unaware that they are about to watch the other one be eaten by a bearded giant.)

On the right, the local Red Delicious has brighter lenticels in a larger starfield of them. It’s shorter and squatter, too, and has more actual green and yellow in it. The grocery store apple on the left is more what I’m used to with a Red Delicious — taller, broader shoulders, a deeper Merlot red, Homer’s winedark sea, all empurpled and shit. It’s more classic.

But hey, beyond that, the important thing is, how did they taste?

Well, Bob, they tasted like nothing.

Mostly nothing, anyway, and when they did taste like something, it was mostly shit. Sad, wet shit. These are the apples of depression. They taste like depression. They are woe-based fruits — fruits born in some soggy lightless bog, the kind of place your mind wanders to when you’re in the existential grip of the deepest, emptiest abjection. Bleak. Cheerless. A void.

But, we should be more granular.

The shared traits between the apples are these:

The skin, for an apple that is reportedly hearty-and-hale, was thinner than expected. Like a mere insult could pierce it.

The taste in each came with a lot of juice, but mostly as if that juice were water someone pumped into the apple to make them plumper, as one might do to a chicken. It was apple-scented, apple-tinged liquid, as if someone whispered the word apple over a glass of tap water.

Neither had much of an odor beyond “Elmer’s glue.” It was evocative of that — a child’s glue, a glue stick, paste. That kind of thing.

Both finished their speed-run through my mouth with considerable bitterness. Not a nice bitterness. Not a Campari kick. More like you were licking pennies or sucking on driveway gravel.

Where they diverged, beyond appearance:

The local orchard apple had more upfront sweetness, but again, when I say sweetness, I mean a pale horse of it — it was like having a sweet drink that had all the ice melt in it and then you drink the ice melt and you can still identify the ghost of sweetness in there, but it is no longer a living presence.

The grocery store apple arguably had more flavor as I ate the rest of it — and arguably the more interesting flavor, but I say interesting in the way of the old Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times. It was interesting in the way it’s interesting when the Dave Matthews band tour bus accidentally dumped 800 pounds of shit and piss all over a sightseeing tourist boat in Chicago. It’s interesting, but that doesn’t mean it was good. The flavors were really quite odd — so odd I don’t even know how to quantify them. It felt like my tongue, in its effort to decipher these flavors, was trying to do the gymnastic act of solving a Rubik’s Cube in my mouth, except the Rubik’s Cube was made of all of the old stuff you pulled from the back of my refrigerator. “Is that the taste of a honeydew melon rubbed with the grease of old baloney? Is that a soupçon of Windex sprayed over the patina of autumnal grasses, grasses grown dusty with the mold of a fading season, crusted with uncollected pollen and probably also microplastics?” It was weird and bad.

Only bonus is, the weird-bad taste went away fast, once again leaving —

Nothing.

Texturally, the orchard apple was crisper, juicier. The grocery store apple had a deeper bite to it, but also felt old and withered in the mouth.

Neither of these were good.

It’s not exactly that either were heinous abominations cast upon the earth by a cruel and merciless God who felt that the Deluge was not enough punishment for us, no. Honestly, that would be more interesting. The greatest crime these apples offer is that the Red Delicious is not merely a liar, but rather, a dullard. It’s an empty promise, an insipid, wearying fruit — it’s the psychic vampire of apples, the Colin Robinson, your absolute worst co-worker, the slowest guy on the road when you’re trying to get somewhere, a button that doesn’t do what you want it to do no matter how often you push it. It’s just… nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing good. Nothing particularly bad. Just a great big nada, naught, nichts, zip.

If I had to compliment them, I would simply say they were refreshing. In the sense that they were juicy and watery and were I thirsty, I’d be a bit quenched. I’d hate myself. But I’d be quenched.

I’m going to collectively give these two a 1.3 out of 10, just because I’m mad at how booooooring they are. The orchard one was better.

Red Delicious: Pathetic red sacks of flavorless spit

Reviews so far this year: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette, Black Gilliflower

I just had a fruit fly in my coffee and that is bullshit, but one supposes that is the price I pay for eating apples in my office like a freak. Anyway, I just ate an apple that tastes, emotionally, like having fruit flies in my coffee, so let’s just jump right to it and get it done.

My review of the Black Gilliflower, aka Sheepnose apple, from Scott Farm (VT), mid-October:

I’ve had this apple and I’ve liked this apple and my experience this time was so wildly different that I’m feeling gaslit by the entire existence of apples.

And did I mention I have fruit flies eagerly working to drown themselves in my coffee this morning?

(As noted yesterday, context matters for reviews, so maybe I am perhaps bitterly affected by these little bastards. My mood, ruined! The reviews, forever altered! Alternatively, perhaps I am bitterly affected by the bitterness upon my tongue from this fucking clown-nose of an apple.)

(More on that in a second.)

Reportedly, this apple originates in America in the 1700s — in Connecticut. We won’t hold that against it. Though this apple may also have been brought over by settlers? The history here is murky. There is also some suggestion that this apple is one of the parents of the —

Wait for it —

Waaaaaait for it —

RED DELICIOUS APPLE.

Aka, the Fruit of Deception, the Judas Apple, the Dark Orb.

If that’s the case, it tracks: because there’s a flavor in this apple today that I have detected in Red Delicious in the past, and hint hint, the word rhymes with “bitter” wait crap I fucked that up sorry let’s try again, the word rhymes with “shitter” or “glitter” or “bitter” fuck I fucked it up again sorry, sorry.

Today, I bit into this thing and still got a sweet, subacid thing going on with, as some have described, a hint of clove — and also a curious absinthe smell. And that should already have given it a reasonable review, because none of that sounds precisely bad, yeah? Thing is, the chew was dense, like chewing a library book — not pages from a library book, but like, you shove the book in your mouth and start eating. And it dried out my mouth pretty quickly, too, as eating a book might.

The flavor abandoned me quickly.

Leaving me with wet paper mush in my mouth.

And then came this lingering bitterness, which is a flavor I’ve had with Red Delicious, too — this long-lasting, tongue-scraping alkaline sting, just sitting on your tongue like a puddle of shit that oozed out of a bad battery.

So, I had a second Black Gilliflower available — a name, by the way, that absolutely evokes some kind of dark fairy pact, doesn’t it? We went down to the ring of toadstools, and left a satchel of child’s teeth there in the center to appease ol Black Gilliflower — Gilly, who will piss on your crops and burn them dead if you don’t do her right with the teeth. Gilly, who, should you throw in a few extra teeth, might bless the harvest with the frothy green milk from her turnipy teats.

Anyway, I ate the second one.

And it was way worse than the first!

It fucked my mouth up. It was olive brine and gym sweat. It was a teenage boy’s unwashed laundry pile. And the bitterness that lingered was almost numbing. And not in a fun Szechuan peppercorn way but in a “my tongue is shutting down because it hates this” way.

So I’m pretty sure these were very poor representations of an otherwise pretty solid apple, but the review gods must be appeased, and I’m not reviewing the memory of a better apple but rather, the apples I ate. I’d say the first one was a 3/10, the second a 0/10, so we’ll even it out to a probably unfair but too bad 1.5 outta 10.

I must’ve offended ol’ Black Gilliflower.

I will make amends and try again.

AS A SIDENOTE, guess who procured for himself not one, but two Red Delicious apples? One from a local orchard, one from a grocery store.

I’ll do a double review, see where we land with that most accursed apple in our fruitsack, the Liar’s Heart itself, the Red Motherfucking Delicious.

(Oh, and the books at the top: Spread Me, by Sarah Gailey, which is the best thing she’s written, and that’s saying something, plus the excellent Fiend by Alma Katsu and Sam Rebelein’s The Poorly Made and Other Things, which I’ve yet to read but am assured it will be delightful.)

Video review: here.

Fruit flies: still in my coffee.

Black Gilliflower: Perhaps unrepresentative of its ilk, today it tasted like licking the bitter tears and streaked greasepaint off an angry, drunken clown’s messy woestruck face, frozen in the rictus of revelation, the moment the clown realizes “I am a clown, what did I do in my life to get here, and there is no way to turn back now, no chance to undo the mistakes that culminated in me turning into not merely a metaphorical clown, but an actual literal holy shit clown with the honking noses and the big stupid shoes, oh fuck”

Reviews so far this year: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette

Why is it that sometimes you eat well-regarded apple but find it terrible? Or, the reverse: an apple that sucks is, to you, in that moment, good?

There are, of course, a lot of things going on. Some of it could be objective — that was a bad season for that apple, the weather was weird, there was some kind of apple disease present like cedar rust or fireblight which are both real things and not fantasy diseases, the apple’s been too long off the tree, the apple’s been not off the tree long enough, someone did not properly wassail the tree with the proper songs and blood-a-sprinkling.

And a lot of things are subjective. You wanted a sweet apple, got one that was tart. You got one that tastes too much like apple or not enough like apple. Context plays big with food — you were hungry, you were thirsty, you didn’t really want an apple, the day was cold or warm or you just broke up with your boyfriend or your boss just tried to replace you with an AI toaster oven.

Sometimes life is a filthy lens through which it’s hard to see.

The opposite can be true, too — those rose-colored glasses can make an otherwise uninteresting apple taste big, bold, refreshing, the best thing you’ve had in years. The best apple I can remember was a Jonathan apple in Fruita, Colorado — was it really the objectively greatest apple I’ve ever eaten? Probably not. But it was a good day, that day. Colorado was beautiful. My father and I were really getting along after years and years of definitely not getting along. I had my wife — not yet my wife at that point — with me. The apple was a filter for all of that.

So, you just never know why a thing resonates how it resonates. Apples in particular. Different years, different growers, different time frames, different storage applications and durations, different you, different me. Sometimes an apple you love one year won’t be one you love the next. And that’s fine. Things change. Life is chaos. We are a different person every time we wake up, the dial turning a tick this way, a tick that way, every morning a chrysalis from which we emerge.

What I’m trying to say is, let’s review an apple.

My review of Orleans Reinette from Scott Farm, VT, mid-Oct:

French apple. Over a hundred (!) alternate names. (I read off just a handful of them on the video of me eating the apple, if you care.) Earliest trackback to them seems to be 1776, so let’s assume the entire Revolutionary War was fought over these. A war over apples? I’d write that book.

Lotta people love these. Online, you’ll find “delightful treat” and “will blow your mind” and “I had to change my pants, for such a vigorous shellacking did I give them upon biting into this Edenic fruit” and I might be making that last one up but you get the drift. This apple brings the enthusiasm.

And that’s where I’m a little disappointed in eating this one.

It’s pleasing enough in appearance — I found the russeting to be kind of fascinating in that it felt almost fuzzy, like a peach. Not rough, but still soft. Squat, almost donut-shaped, or like a donut peach, and no I swear this isn’t a peach because that’s the second peach reference.

It bites like you’re calving a glacier.

Then there’s this peary-pistachio (Perry Pistachio is also my detective name, nice to meet you) thing going on followed by a softly citrus kick. There’s a faint scent of florality to it, which is nice. Is florality a word? I don’t think it is, but it should be. Anyway. All these flavors, though — well, most of it beyond the rearview, though.

It’s chewy. And the skin in particular remains in your mouth, eternally, like the restless dead, like an offended specter, just haunting the shit out of your teeth forever and ever, ever-chewed and existentially angry.

So, I’m going with “kind of disappointed.”

I feel like a 4 outta 10 is where I’m going with it.

Orleans Reinette: Squat, chewy, weird, but not all bad, the Paul Giamatti of apples, I’m just kidding, Paul Giamatti, come back

Reviews so far this year: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent

Well, fuck this apple. I mean, don’t fuck this apple — here at Apple Snack Gang headquarters we do not condone apple-fucking. We love apples, but we don’t love-love the apples, you know what I mean? So put your pants back on.

Anyway, I’m just gonna jump right in here:

My review of this piece of shit Opalescent apple, Scott Farm, early-Oct:

You ever meet a well-meaning person who sucks? Sure, okay, they’re bright-eyed. They’re not a dipshit. They get the job done, perhaps even excelling at said job. They were on Student Council. They were in all AP classes. And yet, their eyes are kind of glassy, their gaze somehow both desperate and empty? At the end of the day you really don’t want to spend any more time with them than you have to because there is absolutely nothing interesting about them and it feels like just by being near you they are wicking away your time, your attention, your very existence?

That was this apple.

This is a beautiful apple.

And it is largely devoid of flavor.

It’s got a few characteristics worth talking about:

First, it is genuinely a pretty apple. Very shiny. Very red. For some reason, on Pomiferous it is also described as “very greasy,” which is a curious description I’m not used to with apples. GUESS WE GOT OURSELVES AN OILY BOY. Except this apple wasn’t oily or greasy in any way? But red. Waxy. Bright. It is a well-produced apple. Good job, nature gods. You got the look down!

Second, that skin is thin and yet deeply resilient — it’s not tough, but rather, pops like you just bit into a natural-casing sausage. It’s like chomping through a fucking kielbasa. As I’ve noted before, my family doctor some years ago gave me a prostate exam and referred to my butthole as having, and this is a true story, “good snap.” I would describe this apple as having good snap.

Third, the flavor is almost something. It has the desire to be more than it is. It kind of starts out with this strawberry whiff, as others have found, but it’s also one of those unripe too-white-on-the-inside strawberries you really only want to eat dipped in a fucking shitload of sugar. Then it’s gone. It’s like someone painted the apple with a light veneer of lemon juice and powdered sugar — but it’s gone three seconds into the chew.

And then it’s just a wad of flavorless, unscented apple. You know how some people buy unscented deodorant? This apple is unscented deodorant. It’s the gum in a pack of Garbage Pail Kids, except with flavor that dies even faster. It’s like licking very pretty wallpaper. Except that wallpaper probably tastes like something.

The flesh is blah blah and the grain is whatever who cares. Fart noise.

I’ll try another in my batch to see if maybe that one was just a little stinker. I’m to understand that this may be one of those apples you really, really need to eat right off the tree, and after that it’s a series of diminishing returns. (Other apples are shit right off the tree and only gain with a week or a month in storage. What a world of wonder are these mad fruits!)

Either way, I hate this apple not because it’s bad, but because it’s boring. It’s like a calculator. Like Elmer’s glue. Like a Reese Witherspoon movie. It’s just there, taking up space on the counter, in your mouth, in the world.

I think 2.4 out of 10 is a perfectly dull score.

Watch me eat it here, if you dare.

Opalescent: Meh

Reviews so far this year: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel