It’s “Instructional Guides on Spousal Murder Week” here at The Great Unwashed. I kid, I would never poison Tex and had he realized what I was doing, my loving husband would have stopped me.

I’ve alluded to the fact that our family lives in the middle of nowhere, a place so remote that in a strong wind, we lose cell phone service. It’s an hour and a half to the nearest city, which in the grand scheme of cities, isn’t actually a grand city at all. We’re here for Tex’s job but sometimes Tex’s job decides that a cell phone signal, neighbours and street lights are just too great of a luxury, so we’re sent to places so small that they couldn’t even be called the middle of nowhere because nowhere is a place. The kinds of areas that you can’t say “they roll up the sidewalks at night” because there aren’t sidewalks to begin with.

The accidental poisoning happened just before Tex, Mini-Tex and I were about to head to one such place for a month. Seeing as there are no sidewalks, there are no 7/11s either, thus any snacks must be preplanned events; a challenge for someone like me, who feels it’s their duty to consume delicious goods in their entirety, as soon as they cross the threshold of my home.

As I stared down the barrel of thirty some odd days without cookies, chocolate bars or candy, otherwise known as three of my four major food groups,

This is me at every meal. (Photo Credit : drafthouse.com)

I felt the need to indulge in a big way. This was how I found myself buying both a package of Glossettes and a family size candy bar at a local store at ten o’clock at night.

I decided to be healthy, so I purchased a family sized candy bar of dark chocolate. Seventy percent cacao dark chocolate is delicious and on the same shelf there was eighty percent cacao, ninety percent cacao and ninety-nine percent cacao dark chocolate. I reasoned that if seventy percent cacao dark chocolate is somewhat healthy, then ninety-nine percent cacao dark chocolate is probably like eating a salad

One with avocados because it has the kind of fat that’s so good it fights both cancer AND terrorists. (Photo Credit: http://www.recipeshubs.com)

so if I chose that then I should buy a package of gummies as well to reward myself for being so nutritionally conscientious.

When Tex is feeling particularly tired or unwell, he’s fond of saying that he feels like “a bag of crushed @&&holes”. I’m being kind when I describe ninety-nine percent cacao dark chocolate as tasting like an unexpectedly salty bag of crushed @&&holes. However, in the face of thirty days without any chocolate of any kind, either delicious or disgusting, I ate the whole bar.

Chocolate in large quantities gives me a migraine, as does any quantity of red wine larger than a thimble. Supposedly the latter has something to do with tannins. I’m forced to conclude that the ninety-nine percent cocao bar of chocolate was also one hundred percent tannins because extremely dark chocolate left me wishing I was dead. The next morning I crawled back under the covers at the first glint of sunlight, and begged Tex to either shoot me or bring me an intravenous drip of migraine medication. My head throbbed in a way that left me fantasizing about guillotines. It goes without saying that my husband whom I normally encourage to sleep in on days when he doesn’t work, was responsible for Mini-Tex from six o’clock onwards.

It was only when Tex discovered the detritus from the night before splayed across the coffee table that he figured out that I had unintentionally poisoned myself. After copious amounts of Excedrin, I made a full recovery by the afternoon and having learned nothing from my experience, I was pressing for us to make a pit stop at a gas station on our way out of town to procure more chocolate for the road.

This post is dedicated to Natalie*; I miss you too, thank you for your words of encouragement about my writing.

*Names have been changed to protect the identities of people so organized that they wouldn’t need to hire a hitman to assassinate me for revealing their name to the interwebs; they’d stealthily carry out the act themselves and then cover it up flawlessly.