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Challenging times
By briantologist | July 30, 2004
It’s not often I get to utter the phase, “I discovered something exciting while purchasing butter the other day,” which makes it that much more satisfying to say. But as it happened, shuffling through the dairy aisle, I remembered we needed butter. I was headed toward the generic store brand, visions of what I’d do with the $0.28 I saved dancing in my head, only to find myself … challenged.
Um, where to begin? The stag, proudly locking eyes with me, as if to say, “Go ahead — Buy the butter! IF YOU’VE GOT THE PLUMS!” The fact that, despite the package clearly containing a pound of butter, it’s half as thick as the other butter boxes? The fact that I’m suddenly confronted with The West’s favorite brand of butter, and I’m so fucking out of touch I’ve never even heard of it? Christ.
Clearly I had no choice but to accept the challange and buy it—
“BUY IT YOU FUCKING PUSSY!!! BUY IT GIRLY BOY!!! QUIT BENCH-PRESSING KLEENEX BOXES AND TAKE SOME REAL FUCKING BUTTER HOME, YOU LITTLE BITCH!!!”
—but I had no idea L’Buerre du Challenge had more surprises up its buttery sleeve. I got home and cracked the box open, only to find four sticks half the length but twice the girth of our regular wussy-man butter.* Naturally our butter dish, obviously meant for inferior dairy products, was pitifully unsuited to handle a butter cube of this magnitude.
And now, a moment for everyone to make “Full Metal Jacket” Vietnamese hooker jokes.
Okay. Moving on. I could practically hear the stag laughing at me as I tried to cram the butter dish lid down around this newfound hunk-a hunk-a burnin’ butter. But it was I, friends, who had the last laugh — not at my tiny, crazed ungulate adversary, but with him. For I accepted the challenge, friends. I spread that fucking butter on my toast, and I’ll be goddamned if it wasn’t … pretty damn good.
I mean, I don’t know exactly what the limit is on how good butter can be, though judging by the Challenge Butter website, it’s way the hell up there. But people, I feel privileged to have gotten the chance to try this strange butter, especially considering that Oklahoma is clearly not in the distribution area shown on CB’s website, illustrated here (at bottom) by a golden buttery sheen blanketing the Western half of the nation. I can only assume that magical stag has singled out my loved ones and me as worthy of his consideration. Along with, possibly, the other eight million people in our fair state.
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* — Not to be confused with wussy man-butter, and if you had any idea of how difficult it was to hold out for that long without using the words “Man-butter,” dear Christ, you’d be in awe of my restraint. How do you handle an anecdote that’s essentially one big overly involved dick joke? Restraint? Subtlety? Or acceptance and revelry?
Topics: Fucking Awesome, Hoo! | 6 Comments »
July 30th, 2004 at 5:46 pm
Were any three butters hurt in the making of this? Gosh… I hope not.
July 30th, 2004 at 6:12 pm
Will someone please tell me the Three Butters/Matt Clayton story? Because I don’t know it.
July 30th, 2004 at 6:17 pm
Umm, I live on the West and if that’s my favorite butter, that’s news to me. I’ll keep an eye open, I need to be challenged.
July 31st, 2004 at 5:52 pm
I will totally accept The Challenge should I ever find that stuff here. I didn’t know there was such variety to the flavor of butter.
Praying hands and Challenge butter… Damn, Tulsa really has it all!
August 1st, 2004 at 2:19 am
Damn. I have to look for Challenge Butter in OKC.
I don’t think the Three Butters story would be very funny in print. It was a whole Native American rite of passage type thing. I’ll let Clayton decided if it should be posted.
August 10th, 2004 at 11:12 am
I have been buying Challenge here in Stillwater for a while, but this weekend I finally had a problem with the girth. It is too big to fit into the corn on the cob butter/salt holder! Barnacles!