Generally speaking, I don’t enjoy billboards as a means of advertisement. They’re ugly, ostentatious, unavoidable, and visually assaulting. You’re stuck in traffic, sucking fumes, people are laying on their horns as though it makes a difference and there’s nothing to look at but these fucking billboards, and it sucks. I thought it couldn’t get worse than the recent Pepsi array, what with the migraine-inducing color combos, lame co-opting of election fever, and wholesale use of nonsense-speak, but now, I have to say, I would take a thousand Pepsi boards over the Snickers campaign.

There’s one planted en route to my apartment that reads “GET SOME BLING WITH MASTER P-NUT”, and every time I pass it I honestly cringe. Like, I guess P-Nut is a real dude or whatever, but the image I get in my head is a bizarre cross-breeding of a grossly overweight 90s-style rapper and a testicle. Like, maybe instead of a gold chain, he’s got one huge, diamond-studded ballsack hanging around his neck, or maybe instead of grillz he’s got some glittery man-parts or something, I don’t know, but I don’t like to mix metaphors that way. Seriously.

At least, though, I generally witness that particular nugget of advertising perfection on my way HOME. The billboard that REALLY gets under my skin is on the pike westbound, near Fenway Park. I pass it every morning on my way to work, which, these days, is at or before dawn. Mornings aren’t my best, and so perhaps I’m unduly offput, but seriously, WHAT THE FUCK IS A NOUGAPLEX AND WHY DO I WANT TO PUT MY HUNGER IN ONE??? Is Nougaplex a secret government prison made of sugar and fat? Or is it some kind of amazing handbag, with sharp edges and lasers? Maybe it’s a mental state similar to disaffectation, or maybe it’s kind of like a headlock. However I try to spin it, the whole notion just BOTHERS me because THE WORD SOUNDS DUMB and it’s MORNING.

I have to admit, I probably haven’t eaten a whole candy bar since the tender days of 1993 (post-braces, pre-eating disorder), and even then I was more of a Milky Way girl. So clearly, I’m not the target audience here. But after months spent staring at these shit-brown stories-high pieces of corporate trash cluttering up my city, I would literally have to be starving to death before I’d even consider letting a Snickers bar pass my lips. And even then I might choose death, as a matter of principle.

Anyway. That’s that.