Friendship and Sugarless Gum

Many years ago, I had an odd habit of randomly interjecting short non sequiturs into conversations. To this day, I'm not really sure why I would say them, I just did with little to no forethought. I think they would come bubbling up most often after a conversation started to run dry, or just before I started to drift off into a day dream. The one that occurred most often was "I love everyone, except the people I hate." Which basically meant that I didn't love everyone. Or I loved everyone until they gave me a reason not to. Did I believe this? Not really, I just liked the sound of it.

One of the more unconscious non sequiters involved me combining (unknowingly) two popular catch phases from the 1990s. Trident sugarless gum and Jolly Ranchers:

Trident Commercial

"chew on this..."

Jolly Rancher Commercial

"a jolly rancher candy is 3/4 of inch by 3/4 of an inch...

My phrase would go something like this:

"Chew on this, the average size of a jolly rancher candy is 3/4 of an inch by 3/4 of an inch, but the actual taste is ..." By then I would usually just trail off as people gawked.

Now trident gum and jolly ranchers are about as far apart as you can get on the candy / gum spectrum. Trident is a soft, lackluster sugar free gum that was explicitly made to help prevent cavities. It supposedly has three enzymes and a sugar substitute in it that weakens tarter and plague (look it up). I believe it used to be called Dentac. Jolly ranchers on the other hand are fruit favored, sugar and corn syrup laden hard candies that could rip out a dental filling if you bit down on them for too long. I remember many times struggling to free my teeth from those hard little squares. Apparently, you're supposed to just suck on them.

Why my brain chose to combine these two slogans, I'll never know, but actually, I wasn't even aware I was combining them. I thought I was just doing the full Jolly Rancher commercial.

Well, when I was stationed in South Korean, two of my friends happened to pick up on this. One was my former barracks roommate, and the other his newly wedded wife (hence the former) that really wasn't supposed to be there. She followed him back from the States after they got married during Mid-tour leave, and later figured out a way to convince the Lt. Colonel that it was a good thing that she came with...

Here's a tip for all you military spouses out there: go to every overseas family support group meeting and make good with the Brass, particularly the spouses of Brass.

Anyway to back the gum / candy silliness. I guess after a few months of hearing me repeat the fractured commercial randomly, my friends must have got sick of it. So they actually went to the trouble to track down and learn the entire Trident gum commercial minus any mention of jolly rancher interloper. I remember one evening after work we were just hanging out in their living room, when the both broke out into the skit. I just brushed it at the time, and we never really spoke of it. Yet honestly, I really appreciated it. It's like someone going to the trouble to play a practical joke on you. Sure it's possible someone could take it too far, but you really only play jokes like that on people you care about.

When things get rough, I often go back to that small florescent lit apartment house with radiant floor heating and the occasional ghost, and think about the friends that cared enough to dig up something as lack luster as an old trident commercial and then perform it just for the sake of doing so... Incidentally, they are also the two that introduced me to UU, but that came years later.

Blogged with the Flock Browser