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An Ode to… Granola?

I’ve recently rediscovered granola bars.

Not that they were lost to me, exactly. I didn’t miss granola bars while they were gone, or anything. I wasn’t pining for granola bars. In fact, I barely even noticed. I even thought I was ‘regular’. Thought.

But a couple of weeks ago, while scrounging for a tasty snack, I stumbled across a granola bar. I hadn’t had one since I was a kid, and my mom was on some health kick or other. And frankly, I couldn’t remember how I felt about them. I always used to get them confused with rice cakes — they both sound like they’d taste like petrified packing peanuts, but one of them was actually tolerable. I could just never remember which, so I decided to bite the bullet — or ‘bite the styrofoam’, if I was wrong — and give granola another try.

And frankly, it wasn’t bad. (So yeah, remind me never to eat rice cakes. I’ve apparently been repressing the horrible memories of those things by confusing myself into thinking they were something else. So they’re probably even worse than I’m imagining. How, I’m not sure. Putrid petrified packing peanuts? Pickled putrid petrified packing peanuts? Platypus piss-puddled pickled putrid packing peanuts? Puke-peppered —

Okay. I’ll stop. Sorry.)

Anyway, that first granola bar was pretty good. Crunchy. Sweet. Only barely cardboardy. So, a couple of days later, I had another, and then another. And now, just a couple of weeks into this whirlwind granola adventure — yeah, I need to get out more; shaddup, dammit — now, I’ve got a whole box of those crunchy, tasteless bars in the kitchen cabinet.

(Well, to be fair, a whole box minus one. I mean, I’m not gonna just let the things sit in the cupboard, now, am I? They’re here to be chomped, dammit, and I’ve got just the chompers to do the job.)

I find it interesting, though, that my particular brand of granola bar (heh — two weeks of the things, and now I’ve got ‘my brand’; jeez) is the ‘official‘ granola-based snack of both the Professional Golf Association and the… um, the…er, the tennis player thingy. What is that one again? The Professional Tennis Association (PTA)? Nah, that doesn’t sound right. Professional International Tennis Society (PITS)? Yeah, I doubt it. Pro Union of Tennis Zealots? Anyway, the tennis thingy. You know what I mean.

Look, the point is, an ‘official’ granola snack is not something that I would’ve thought pro golf or pro tennis really needed. I suppose I don’t picture Tiger Woods or the Williams sisters stuffing their gobs full of granola before a big tourney. And lord knows I don’t picture them expunging the stuff over the next three days. I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.

Honestly, I’d think granola would be the last thing you’d want lining your stomach when you’re out there lobbing irons onto the green or scurrying after drop shots at the net. Or maybe next-to-last — after all, they’re not rice cakes. But it’s still gotta be like playing with thirty pounds of wood chips in your stomach. I have a lot of trouble believing that the people actually on the tour spend much time with the sponsor’s product. That’s all I’m saying.

And that’s all I’ve got for tonight. I just spent an hour waxing less than poetic about granola bars. Actually, it’s got me a little bit hungry now. Hell, I’d go eat one of those things now, if I thought I wouldn’t be up in the middle of the night getting rid of it. But that granola is powerful stuff — I’d better wait till morning, just in case. Nighty night, folks.