Pumpkin Spice Philadelphia Cream Cheese.

It’s 7 in the morning. I haven’t been to sleep yet. Instead, I’m writing about cream cheese, rushing to beat the sunrise, because it will crack my skin and turn me to ash.

I don’t have a choice. According to the news, I’m going to wake up underwater. If I want to tell the world about orange bagel goo, it’s now or November.

Nothing warms my heart more than…a lot of things, apparently. I start off too many paragraphs with some spin on that phrase. It’s time to mix things up.

I was most approving of the thing I spotted in Target’s grocery section, earlier this evening. It was a limited edition Kraft item, and it put an abrupt end to our planet’s four billion year Halloween cream cheese drought. If there was ever a time to know how to spell hallelujah. Ah, it’s in the spellchecker. Good.

Get a load of new PUMPKIN SPICE Philadelphia Cream Cheese, in a tub adorned with a pumpkin and three cinnamon sticks. For reasons known only to Kraft, they used an obviously phony pumpkin for their model. I don’t think the cinnamon sticks were real, either, because look at that one on the bottom. Real cinnamon sticks only unfurl like that like, 1 out of every 50,000 times. I doubt Kraft was that lucky.

I love this sudden boom with foods having “limited edition” runs. I mean, I get it, and it’s true, but it still sounds like permission to treat perishable food like collectibles. Thank God they didn’t go with the more casual “for a limited time only,” or I might feel weird about throwing four tubs of cream cheese into the back of my closet, where they’ll sit next to commemorative coins, baseball cards and other things that are similarly guaranteed to quadruple in value.

Anyway, it’s now 7:45, and I still haven’t seen one single sign of this stupid alleged hurricane. Don’t tell me I drew this for no reason:

Note how I made his hair look like lightning bolts. And how I gave him cloud eyes. Real thought went into this.

When I found the cream cheese, I fully expected it to be “normal white.” If it was a lucky day, maybe there’d be some light orange swirls. Well, nuh uh, it’s actually way better than that. This shit is ORANGE. It’s as close to orange as Kraft could get without making it too obvious that they dyed the cheese. Sneaky bastards knew exactly where to draw the line.

UPDATE: It’s finally started to rain. It’s barely a drizzle now, but if history is any indication, my town will lose electricity when I’m two seconds away from finishing this review.

The color is palatable, at least in the sense that I’ve dipped potato chips into stuff that looks just like this. There is a precedent for food that looks this way.

The smell throws me off, though. It’s not that it’s a bad smell, really, but it’s a smell that reminds me of something else. It’s driving me crazy that I can’t figure out what that something else is. Eggnog, maybe? I’d say freshly baked muffins, but it feels so much more specific than that. I’m going with eggnog.

I wasn’t trying to be cute with the Pepperidge Farm Goldfish bread. It was all Target had left. Remember, the hurricane. Everyone’s in survival mode. They had no bread, and come to think of it, they had very little in the way of pretzels, too. I guess “DEATH STORM” is a carb kind of holiday.

Not kidding, it was bread shaped like fish or no bread at all. And forget about bagels – the guy laughed at me when I asked. Maybe it was my face.

I’m not the right person to judge the flavor. My relationship with pumpkins runs hot and cold, and right now, it’s cold. I don’t want bread smeared with it. I got through a bite, and it wasn’t a BAD bite, but it also wasn’t enough for me to base an opinion on. Which may beg the question, “So why review this cream cheese?”

Honestly, it was pad. It was all pad.

I just wanted to show you my Frankenstorm Monster.

In the words of that guy from the Fugees, from that one song they had, near the middle of the chorus: