Submitted to McSweeney's Internet Tendency on September 13, 2023 - Rejected
Today I once again managed to ruin breakfast for everyone. I did something that
according to my daughter was so mean and stupid that she couldn’t eat another
bite. Here is what I did:
I filled her glass with orange juice instead of apple juice.
Pure hatred rained down on me as I tried to explain the reason for this heinous
attempt at breakfast based taste-icide.
I did it because we were out of apple juice.
Madness ensued as I was basically trying to poison her. EVERYTHING she ate or drank
after that tasted like oranges and had to be thrown away immediately.
Siblings had to be shouted at for siding with me on this issue. Obviously the
world had gone mad.
Do I not know that the taste of oranges is basically the worst taste that has ever existed?
Unthinkable is the idea that this foul taste would become so popular that a
drink with this exact taste would be mass produced and consumed
by millions every day at this very meal.
Surely no one would be crazy enough to put this awful tasting concoction on
the menu of their breakfast diner, let alone put it at the top of the 'drinks' section of said menu.
Unfathomable is the notion that the drink could become so popular that people refer to it using only the first letters of the words that make up its name and that there might be other people out there who know what the combination of the letters O and J stands for and would promptly hand the speaker of that combination a container filled to the brim with the vitriolic bile.
No McVities executive in their right mind would choose the taste of the Devil’s phlegm-caked, lava-spewing asshole as the primary flavor of the standard variety of their soft, round chocolate cakes.
There was a reason Adam and Eve were given an apple. It was because the next best thing, an orange, tastes like Hitler chopped up and left to rot in the scorching sun for a week, only to be shat on by a million dogs who have had lesser-known Nazis for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a year. Or liquorice or something.
You know that famous manufacturer of computers and mobile phones? There is a
reason it is not called Orange. And that reason is that oranges were responsible
for killing the dinosaurs, inventing the atomic bomb, shifting tectonic plates to
cause earthquakes and cancelling Firefly.
And don’t get me started on Orange, the French multinational telecommunications
company formerly known as France Télécom. They probably only rebranded to
Orange because they wanted their name to reflect their user experience which
according to my nine-year-old’s expertise as a user of orange - the fruit- is
simply the worst!
Never should orange juice ever be served again at our breakfast table, unless,
of course, when it’s not breakfast but any other occasion.
Finally, things that aren't exactly oranges but that are orange enough to be reminiscent of the ‘real’ forbidden fruit should also never be served (tangerines),
dunked (basketball), played with (orange cats), looked at directly (the sun),
voted for (Donald Trump), or watched (Orange is the new Black, The O.C., Orange
County Choppers, Moulin Rouge because red is basically orange for French
people).