Author: terribleminds (page 4 of 475)

Speaking more about reviews — I think it’s less fun for me and less enticing for you when I review an apple that isn’t either I PUT THIS INTO MY MOUTH AND ALL MY TASTEBUDS CAME ALIVE AND SANG A CHORUS OF HALLELUJAH or IT’S LIKE SATAN ATE BAD SUSHI AND THEN TOOK A SHIT ON MY TONGUE. This is, in part, a problem with the Internet in general, though I don’t think it started there — the reviews you tend to remember are the ones that are a total pan or a fawning fuckfest. We respond more strongly to love and to hate, and doubly so when we feel the opposite feeling to the strong feeling offered — “Oh, you hate this thing I love? May you fall into a mud hole for a thousand years.” “Oh, you love this thing that I hate? You are the most foolish mortal who has ever walked the earth, it’s astonishing you’re even managing to walk and talk and feed yourself, you huge piece of shit.” Again, this didn’t start with the Internet — but certainly shoving us all into close digital quarters with one another and dropping a comment section below every Hot Take like a sewer system has only encouraged it. And the more extreme a review, the likelier it is people are going to share it or scream at it and both of those things are going to goose the Almighty Algorithm.

(More points to why I like Bluesky — it has its problems, but the nuclear block and the lack of a presiding algorithm are key for me.)

All of this means people are far likelier to dial their opinions up or down online — and that means not just in reviews, but in general — to get the attention. The algorithm detects that sort of aggro-love-hate-arrgh-hnngh behavior, and it promulgates that opinion throughout the digital world. This is the attention economy — the algorithm detects attention or potential attention and then amplifies it, which becomes something of a self-feeding beast, a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I’m not saying this entirely explains our current political situation, but… it’s in there somewhere.

So of course I’m prefacing all of this because I found one of those… mid-apples. The Crimson Topaz (also my superhero name) is a good apple, but will probably never be great and while better than most grocery store apples just isn’t going to explode your dick with how amazing it is. It’s fine! It’s even good. But that makes it less exciting to review, and I don’t know if you can jazz up mediocrity, right? Effusive cromulence just isn’t a thing. It’s hard to make boring be un-boring. How do you make a three-star review exciting? “The plumber did his job, it’s fine,” just doesn’t hit like “The plumber was drunk and ate my houseplants and then shoved his underwear down my shower drain before falling asleep, ass-up, do not hire this guy, he’s the worst.” At the same time, the everything is amazing and everything is terrible mindset just can’t work with a perfectly normal apple like this one.

So! Please bear with me when we go through these sort of middle-ground apples. Pretend I’m yelling it at you, or that the review is lit up in fireworks or something. Maybe sing it! Everything is better in song! Probably!

That said, I think the photo I took of it, above, is one of my favorites, because it’s just a little noir — and in the background you can see the far superior Esopus Spitzenburg ready to shank it with a blade made from its dark stem.

(That apple lands at the blog tomorrow.)

And now, the review.

My review of a Crimson Topaz, from Manoff Orchard, PA, mid-Oct:

This is an apple! You can eat it if you’d like.

The end!

6.1!

Okay, that’s probably not fair to this apple.

Fine, fine, here’s a better review.

This is a perfectly nice apple. This is an apple that will get a good job regardless of how well the economy is doing, provide for its family, retire in half-comfort, and then perish knowing secretly it could’ve done so much more with its life.

We — or at least I — sometimes want a measure of complexity in our apples, which at the base level is why I think sweetness balanced with tartness is interesting. It just does more for your mouth. Thai food is great because of how it brings all these flavors to the party: sweet, sour, savory, spicy. A good apple is that way, too, with multiple flavors bouncing around in there. It’s like rhythm in a song, or pacing in a story — it can’t all just be one thing, all the time. That gets dull quick.

But the Crimson Topaz is… pretty one-note. It’s mostly just sweet. There’s acid in there, there’s a little bit of an edge, but it’s way more Jerry Seinfeld than George Carlin, if you follow me. The flavor isn’t bad — it’s quite candy-forward. You get vanilla and honey up front, but then as you eat it, you get a strong taste of bubblegum — Juicy Fruit in particular — and like, Skittles.

The crunch is flat, but releases a fair bit of juice. Still, the chew lingers too long, like that guest who can’t take the hint that the party is over? You’ve started to wash the punchbowl and yet there they stand, talking about some insipid shit you don’t care about, and you wonder? Do you need to turn out the lights? Put chairs up on the table? Throw a cat at them?

There’s a flavor that lingers once the chewing-chawing-chomping is complete — it’s a kind of savory umami thing, but it’s odd, and I didn’t like it.

This is an apple that is ultimately superior to most grocery store apples and honestly, if you like a sweeter-side apple, you might love this.

I did not love it.

I like it fine.

Just not enough to hang out with it after work, or make out with it in the shrubbery after having a few too many drinks. This lax, lumpen apple is not one I’d seek again, really, but one I’d eat if you handed it to me.

I think 6.1 is a perfectly cromulent score. I would say 6.7 but then some middle-schooler is going to kick down the door to my comment section and do the meme, and that’ll just ruin my day.

Crimson Topaz: More an acquaintance than a friend, tbh

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, Jonathan, Ruby Mac

Ruby Mac or RubyMac? I don’t know. What I do know is, the McIntosh apple — and in many cases this sport mutation of it, the Ruby Mac — is an apple people either super love or super hate, and I always think anything like that is interesting. Something that inspires strong reactions is, to me, going to be an interesting something no matter how you slice it — a book or album or apple or experience with a mix of one-star and five-star reviews is doing to be a more fascinating situation than something with a scattering of three-stars. This apple, I think, is like that for a lot of people — though I suspect a lot of the people who hate it hate some grocery store version of it that has turned into an ORB OF MEDIOCRITY in storage.

Because hey, this apple is fucking legit.

Let’s talk about it.

My review of a Ruby Mac from Manoff Orchard, PA, mid-Oct:

The color of the Ruby Mac — and many of the McIntoshes I’ve eaten — is this kind of muddy sangria red color that I really love. The shape and color of it often remind me less of an apple and more of an heirloom tomato like a Cherokee Purple or a Tommy Parmesan or a River-Drowned Winelump and okay only one of those is real I didn’t feel like Googling a bunch of tomato variants, I already have too much apple information inside my head to be healthy and sane.

The smell coming off this particular PLUMP BOY was intense, perhaps the most intense apple I done sniffed this year — the aroma was not just berry-forward but as if I was smelling the scent wafting off a bowl of crushed berries. Strawberry, yes, but blackberry, raspberry, blueberry, all the berries. So powerful that I had it in my office for 15 minutes as I went inside to get a camera and do some other quick things, and I came back in and my whole office was redolent with the aroma.

That made me worry that it was too long off the tree and was gonna be a mush-slug of an apple, just a mealy tongue-scrubbing mess —

But that worry did not come to (pun not intended until now) fruition.

Because holy fuck this was a good apple.

Crazy juice bomb apple. Like a grenade full of apple juice.

The flavor itself is vinous, which is a word people use to mean it tastes like wine — and sometimes I find that word overused, but not here. It’s not a specifically rich red like, “Ah yes, this tastes like a 2016 Tempranillo grown in the Douro Valley of Portugal under the shade of a large man that smelled strongly of Portuguese egg tarts, or pastel de nata.” It was kind of like, hey, you ever had a really good, really basic red table wine? Like that. It’s red wine up front and then, curiously, white wine on the finish, and all throughout was this really lovely berry brightness.

The texture was soft, like the Jonathan, but not so soft it was problematic, and nowhere near mealy. Honestly the texture of it made it fast to eat — I do think there’s this Venn diagram of HOW LONG AN APPLE TAKES TO CHEW vs HOW LONG IT TAKES FOR THE FLAVOR TO DISSIPATE, and ideally, the chew lasts not as long as the flavor, and that is absolutely true here. The flavor is present and assertive long after you’ve eaten the whole apple.

Really great apple. If you don’t love this apple then I don’t love you okay I’m just kidding come back it’s okay if we like different things.

Let’s call it an 8.7 and head back to camp.

Video review here.

Accidentally slo-mo video of it here.

Ruby Mac: Looks like a tomato, tastes like berries and table wine, baby

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, Jonathan

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 they’ve 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