You don’t expect to notice something like this. But the box for my protein bars seems somehow involved with cannabis culture, to reflect or advance that culture. Particularly the box’s lower right corner—there’s a cannabis influence at work. I don’t condemn or applaud the influence. I’m just taken by surprise when I see it on my box of protein bars. How the texture of society changes.
The brand is Pure Protein and the flavor in question is Galactic Brownie. I can think of only one reason to call a brownie galactic: it’s loaded. The word doesn’t show up much in regard to confectionaries, just expanded consciousness (“galaxy-brain,” etc.). Next to the flavor’s name, and here we’re talking about the box’s lower-right corner, there’s a scattering of multicolored sprinkles, and this scattering lies above a belt of stars, a miniaturized cosmic reach that sets it off. The stars aren’t the fat kind with five corners. They’re a cluster of glowing white sparks, their size fluctuating from one to the other, and they hang at the brink of a purple-black void; the void doubles as the shadow of one of the protein bars, which is rampaging toward us and about to slam into the camera.
The boxes for the other flavors also feature rampaging protein bars. But the ones I see on the shelf don’t have pictures of stars, just of the bar in question, bits of the bar, and foods the bar is derived from. The names are Chocolate Peanut Butter, Chocolate Peanut Caramel, Chocolate Deluxe, Chewy Chocolate Chip, Chocolate Salted Caramel, Cookies and Cream, and Caramel Churro. Toward the end of the line we have Galactic Brownies. That and Caramel Churro are “New Flavors!” The churro’s a stab in a new direction; the brownies seem like one more allotment of chocolate, this time with sprinkles.
I don’t suppose anyone at Pure Protein figured on potheads as a market add. They just needed some hat to put atop this latest batch of product. Chewy and Deluxe had been taken, so make it Galactic. The sprinkles are colorful, and everyone knows about brownies and pot, so stick on the miniaturized cosmic reach and, voila, new flavor identity. For me the gag signifies a departure: that bringing in cannabis can be a neutral move, mere occasion for a reference.
To take the wider view, Pure Protein sure seems bent on generating flavors—I counted 14 in the protein bars section of its website. Maybe new flavors signal to investors that PP’s market is far from tapped, so each addition helps keep share prices from falling. If so we have here a process independent of human volition, a chainsaw that’s working the operator and not the other way round. It’s this process that rattled forth Galactic Brownies from the brain of a helpless Pure Protein employee or contractor.
Time’s melting carnival. A rather decent YouTuber named Captain Midnight pauses in mid-narration of his clip. “I suspect there’s many viewers out there who don’t even know who Burt Reynolds was,” the Captain says, “let alone that for a time he was the single biggest movie star in the world.” The clip concerns a night when late-period Reynolds behaved like a belligerent ass on The Tonight Show. That’s the whole point of the clip, this outrageous moment (a glass of water, a Nickelodeon host’s lap, Burt’s impulse control). But Burt doesn’t get into the title, which reads “When Jay Leno Lost Control of His Talk Show.” Burt’s gone.
I thought the big 1970s stars would have a forever sort of afterlife in popular memory, the way Cary Grant and Jimmy Cagney do. But now I make that “if Cary Grant and Jimmy Cagney do.”