Ice Cream!

I know the calendar says it's still spring, but as far as I'm concerned summer is officially upon us. The pools are open, the little bastards are out of school, and the delightful sound of ice cream trucks is in the air. Wait, did I say delightful? I meant to say worse than being fucking strapped down and force to attend a 6-hour music festival featuring Yanni, Kenny G, and a third musician that hack internet comedy writers associate with being bad.

I usually work at night, so I'm home all afternoon, which means I get the honor of hearing one of those godforsaken trucks drive through my apartment complex at least once a day during the summer. The reason why I'm guaranteed to hear it every single day is because the garage that the trucks come from is two minutes away from where I live.

You see this horrible machine? I live right next to their spawning pool.

The most common song that the trucks play is It's a Small World After All. I can only determine that a team of Nobel Prize winning scientists in the field of awfulness worked around the clock for six years to engineer an even more annoying version of that song, because the one that plays from the truck punctuates every verse with a horrible cartoon whistle or "boing" sound. It's like taking a chocolate sundae that's already so ridiculously sweet and rich that licking it will make you vomit as all of your teeth fall out, and then dumping an entire bottle of grenadine on top. It's so horribly cutesy that I'm turned off to the entire idea of children's entertainment. If I ever have a child I'll only show it Kevin Smith movies and Oz reruns. The Kevin Smith movies will guarantee that my child will never like cutesy shit, and the Oz reruns will guarantee that the kid will become gay and never have to worry about kids of its own.

Another song that plays from the trucks sometimes is an eerily haunting version of the Russian music from Tetris. I really can't overstate how eerily haunting it is, I really can't. It sounds like the music is being whispered to you by a chorus of ghosts clad in white with disfigured faces. Once I woke up hungover from drinking ten Miller High Lifes and a large bottle of Smirnoff Ice (God, I'm such a fucking man) and I heard that song playing and I was so terrified that I wrapped myself up in every blanket I could find and buried my head under the pillows for five minutes, praying the evil undead chorus would stop.

It gets worse. One morning I had a nightmare where I went to a kegger in a basement, and suddenly had the crazy determination to grab a sharp object and start slitting the throats of random beer drinkers. It was really loud and dark in the basement, and I killed about ten people before anyone noticed that something was up. Then I looked down at my blood-covered hands and screamed. To this day I'm 98.3% sure that hearing the ice cream truck song in my sleep was what drove my brain to temporary insanity. I had a relatively healthy dream afterwards about playing quarterback, so I can only assume the truck went to another neighborhood to terrify a new group of night shift working Americans.

The point is, while I would never resort to committing arson or terrorism by burning down the ice cream truck garage and strapping C4 to every single mobile misery device and watching them all go out in a fully morally justified inferno, would anyone be that mad at me if I did it? I know the judge would sentence me to 20 years in prison or whatever, but I have a feeling he'd give me a congratulatory pat on the butt on my way out the door.

How these things still exist anyway is beyond me. Driving the truck requires an insane tolerance for the exact same 20-second jingle playing nonstop for 8 straight hours, and it gives you access to a giant mobile freezer area. How could anyone but serial killers work this job? How has a business model that encourages children to enthusiastically run into the street not been sued into oblivion yet? I have no idea, but I do know beyond all doubt that summer is the gayest season of all.