Being 50 (almost) Now Gives Me the Right to Complain About All My Pet Peeves, or, am I the only one who thinks this is strange?

As my children say, “back in the day,” there was a television commercial that always bothered me. It featured an animated fish, a tuna. to be specific; Charlie Tuna, to be exact. Charlie, for some reason, couldn’t wait to get trapped in a tuna net, chopped up in pieces and stuffed into a can to be sold and consumed by humans. His constant rejection by the tuna cannery seemed to be based on his inability to distinguish himself as a tuna who tasted good, rather than a tuna with good taste. The tagline, “Sorry Charlie” has become embedded in our cliché lexicon.

What bothered me back then was the fact that this potential menu item was a thinking, talking, wisecracking being who seemed willing to sacrifice himself. The fact that he was constantly rejected was the only way I was able to consume canned tuna for a long time. He was the first I can remember in a growing line of singing, dancing food items. My children even had toys depicting living chicken nuggets and a fast food character whose body included a huge hamburger for a head. Am I the only one who feels kind of cannibalistic in consuming these products?

Today, the commercials have taken an especially sadistic turn. I have seen chocolate candies actually bitten by fashion models, with the candy swooning and whispering “love hurts.” Most recently, a person-sized chocolate chip cookie attending a child’s birthday party suddenly finds out there is no birthday cake - you guessed it, the cookie IS the birthday cake.

Maybe I am over thinking things here. Maybe my alternate personality as a horror writer is just running away with things. Or maybe, we are just steps away from the scene from the old sci-fi flick in which it is discovered that the alien’s handbook, “To Serve People” is really a cookbook.