Once, I took a Columbian woman I’d met at a party out to the Gelateria for our first date. This was when I was living in Miami Beach, and managed to secure a run-down, roach-infested studio in South Beach, four short blocks from the Miami culinary landmark Gelateria Parmalat. I told everyone I took the apartment because of the price, but it’s not like they couldn’t see through my sad lies. It was always about the gelato. Holy christ, that gelato was like sex on your tongue. I mean, the gelato was what people think about when they invoke phrases like “sex on your tongue”. That is to say, its flavor was a flavor that created similes.

If you ever find yourself in South Beach, Miami, around the corner of Euclid Ave and Lincoln Road, I suggest the passion fruit gelato. They’ll throw a little lemon in there too at no extra charge, if you ask them. It’s just that kind of place.

The woman and I sat in polished metal chairs, watching people wander along Lincoln Road, while scooping ice cream out of Styrofoam with our tiny plastic spoons. I bought the woman a rose from a passing flower girl. It cost more than the gelato. We dated some more after that. One day, after a while, we stopped dating. I can’t remember who left whom, like most relationships that end in a fight, but if I had to guess, it was probably me doing most of the walking. She didn’t take it too well. A month after we’d broken up, and two months before she'd actually gotten over it, I found her hanging out on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. “I’m seeing a therapist and he says I need to talk to you about our relationship,” she said. I knew it was bullshit – no therapist on earth would tell a girl to chat it up with her ex – but in the interest of being nice to a person I’d see naked more than a few times, I talked with her for a few minutes before telling her I was on my way to run errands. “Where are you going?” she asked. “Well, I’ve got to hit the post office to renew my passport, then I’ll probably stop by Parmalat to grab a gelato, then-”

I wouldn't get in another word.

“You’re going to the Gelateria?! But I thought that-… I thought that was our place! How can you even think about going there now that we’re broken up?!”

I guess I just smiled, the way a parent might smile at a kid who says they want to be SpongeBob when they grow up. It’s cute, but naïve. She didn’t have a clue. I mean, really. That gelato is nobody’s bitch. You can’t own what ain’t in your cone, if you know what I mean.

So you roll up to the counter and you place your order with one of the four of five gelato-girls working there. Always girls, teenagers really, slinging sweet ice with such professional detachment, it’s as if they don’t even realize the power they wield in their shiny steel scoops. But they do. Maybe better than any of us. After all, they’re the ones with the employee discount, while we’re all shelling out $3 - $5 per cup, like suckers. You can go with the small, medium, or large size cup, but order anything smaller than a medium and you’ll regret it. And you have to eat that shit fast too, because 90 seconds in the Miami sun can foil your gelato experience like a goddamned gang of meddling kids. The sun don’t wait for punks and suckers, so you’d better hurry if you don’t want to be left slurping that sweetness out of your sweaty palms.

I ate that gelato with many girls, many times, but still not nearly as much as I ate it alone, sitting on the “Euclid Oval” (a grassy median at the corner of Euclid and Lincoln), digging out every last bit of sweet brilliance with that tiny, ineffective plastic spoon. Oh lord, the spoon. Would any gelato experience be complete without the tiny spoon? You know, the spoon that only lets you scoop slightly less gelato than would ever make you feel satisfied? The spoon that makes you think, “Someday, when I have a job and more than a little money in my pocket, I’m going to be able to buy a whole bowl of passion fruit gelato and eat that shit with a goddamned ladle,” even though you know doing so would ruin the allure of the gelato – that you can only ever tease your tongue with the idea of such taste, because to be able to bathe your mouth in gelato whenever you’d like would ruin its impact. The eternal gelato struggle is what keeps us coming back for more. It goes back to the sex thing – it’s just never as good when you can have as much of it as you want. Good gelato, like good sex, is about delaying pleasure, like enjoying the weeks leading up to Christmas more than the day itself.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that ice cream, like everything in life worth putting in your mouth, is about desire.

And that goes out to all the punks and suckers.

I'd like to think of myself as an ice cream connoisseur, but, then again, who doesn't?

But nevertheless, I do enjoy ice cream, and I do eat alot of it all the year round. In most countries in Europe (except for the UK) decent quality Italian ice cream parlours are easy to find. In England you really have to find them and they are expensive, so typically I have to eat commercial ice cream. Maybe this is why I really got to appreciate the good-quality stuff, who knows? But whenever its gig time in a foreign country and I pass by an Italian ice cream parlour, I can't resist the icy goodness.

Years of eating poor-quality ice cream has taught me that you can usually rely on chocolate flavour. Even really bad-quality chocolate ice cream tastes half-way decent, although choclate ice cream never really satisfies me 100 percent. If I know I have a good ice cream parlour, and want to sort it out into my mental "Ice Cream League Table", I try the vanilla flavour. With vanilla, the ice cream mixture has nothing to stand behind - either it rules or it sucks - and you can easily taste synthetic vanilla flavour.

The exception to this rule so far is ice cream from "Bertillon" which is an exclusive French brand Glafouk from micromusic Paris_HQ put me on to. The chocolate flavour from these guys rocks really hard - I suggest if you're ever in Paris to buy a cone. It's expensive, but so worth it.

Once I was having some trouble with a young lady I was romantically involved with. I was depressed and decided to hit the ice cream... hard! But all that I could score was a tub of low grade commerical strawberry ice cream. I ate the whole tub and felt really sick afterwards. Ice cream overdose! Since then I can't eat strawberry ice cream anymore. But who cares with lots of other much nicer flavours around.

Ice cream rules so hard, but even frozen yogurt or sorbet has a certain amount of pwnage. I think it's that sweet, cold, melty thing that really hits the spot. It must be a primeval urge of some kind. By the way, you might already know this, but you can put tubs of normal yogurt in the freezer and make your own frozen yogurt. The instruction on tubs of yogurt say that it is evil and not allowed, but don't listen to their lying messages.

Once I was so gutted. I brought an amazing cone of ice cream from a parlour by the Chalk Farm tube station in London. But I had just one lick before the tasty frozen treat splatted horribly on the grimy London pavement before my very eyes. A strong wind came and blew the whole of the ice cream out of the waffle cone. Believe me, waffle cones don't taste that good without ice cream inside them.

I'm looking forward to the 8bitpeoples ice cream van soundtrack to come out in a few hours. The sound of ice cream vans are different in the UK and the USA. In the UK its just pure chimes, usually a cover version of some popular melody (much like German train announcements), like a nursery rhyme or a light, classical piece. In the USA, though, they have original tunage. They still have the chime thing going on, but there's low tech drum beats, too. I guess they use squarewaves for maximum volume output and sound projection. Squarewaves make everyone smile, and the happy melody puts us all in the ice cream mood.

The 8bitpeople crew are actually in the ice cream van business. They have a fleet of ice cream vans in every country the world. Bit Shifter told me while he was drunk that they plan to use the squarewave talents of low-tech musicians to provide the ultimate ice cream seduction for their vans. So, if you hear any of these melodies DON'T support them. They have tested their ice cream recipes on young kids for maximum taste, flavour and addictivity - just like the music in this top notch compilation.

My favorite ice cream is chocolate. I would buy only chocolate. Chocolate with pistachio or chocolate with strawberry, it would always be chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. However, lately, I've been ordering vanilla. I don't know why. Maybe it's my old age; my taste buds are different. I dont know. Or maybe it's because I'm relating more to my mother. Now that I'm more mature and wise, I can see it now. I can enjoy a good, cold vanilla ice cream at any time. When I was a young girl, I read an article in a magazine (I don't remember the name of the magazine), about different personalities relating to flavors of ice cream. For example, people who like chocolate are people who are independant and outgoing. People who love strawberry ice cream are the happy-go-lucky. They are the life of the party and so on. And for those who love vanilla ice cream, they are the ones who are, how can I say this, close to mommy. They are motherly. They are the soul of the family. I still remember that article. It struck me so much. Now I dont know how much of this is true;it may just be a lot of mambo jambo. It does make sense to me, though. Anyway, like I said before, now that I'm older and more mature, I appreciate the mother I once had. I am a lot like her, you know. This sounds ridiculous. I am not comparing my mother to no vanilla ice cream. And it doesn't matter what your personality is or what age you are. Ice cream is one of the best things on earth, so, enjoy it.