Look at that baller-status crop job. I mean, fucking feast your eyes on this clear example of my Gen-Y technological capabilities. Someone should pay me for this shit. Original artwork AND crop job by Ariel Barnes. And yes, my teeth were THAT fucked up as a child. Two-time braces champion. Thanks for investing in me, Mom and Dad.

Doughnuts Fried For Our Sins


(Inspired by vague memories of true events)

Scene: Sunny San Diego, California. V.G. Doughnuts (AKA Doughnut and birthday cake heaven). I was probably seven?

My family and I rolled up to the doughnut shop after attending an excruciating Sunday mass. I interpreted this as a long, religious gathering where an old man told us what’s right and wrong, talked about dead people, made us donate a few bucks to an unspecified group called “the poor,” and then forced us to shake hands with people I didn’t know or cared for. Early 90's fashion called for an ugly, embarrassing flower-printed dress identical to my sister’s. We are not twins, so it wasn’t even that cute. I don’t know when my parents completely ran out of creativity in dressing their daughters, but we had a lot of the same outfits for this reason.

While strolling into the doughnut shop, I had two things on my mind: a fat, chocolate doughnut and petting the puppy sitting on the patio. My mom ordered my usual: a glazed chocolate doughnut. She delivered it to me on a brown paper napkin with a spork. I used this blessed spork to scrape off every ounce of chocolate icing and shovel it into my mouth. That’s right. I was such an asshole when I was a kid that I didn’t come to a doughnut shop for the doughnuts, I came for the icing. I licked the doughnut all around to complete a thorough job. All that was left was a sugary bagel lathered in spit. I tossed it to my brothers like throwing scraps to a dog. At the time, I thought I was doing them a favor by letting them have my leftovers. Now I realize that they probably didn’t want a mangled doughnut with kid spit all over it.

Sometime, throughout my long twenty-four years of life, I put two and two together. I realized that my parents used doughnuts as a bribery to get their kids to go to church. It was a lubrication in getting us out the door and into the car. Doughnuts were kind of like a, “thanks for sitting through that long mass, but we want you to grow up with morals or whatever and don’t know how else to teach that” sort of thank you. After another suicidal New York winter, I’ve had an epiphany. When you have to endure something horrible, turn to doughnuts. Every doughnut I eat is a step further away from jumping out the window of my fifth-floor apartment.

Doughnuts are the reason for the season (specifically winter). They are the way. Follow them in their hole-y light and you shall reap the rewards of their doughy goodness, and also not feel so depressed.