You’re going to want to eat some ice cream during your visit. Trust me. There are all kinds of variations so go to a big shop. Baskin Robbins is fine. No need to be too precious about it your first time. Everything gets complicated fast enough. Basically it’s milk that’s been churned and chilled, almost but not entirely frozen. The process has something to do with rock salt? Doesn’t matter. You’ll like it. It’s made with milk, which comes from cows’ titties, believe it or not. You might encounter sci-fi, milk-like substances such as oat milk or almond milk. Avoid this stuff. This is computer food designed by dorks. Go for the real mammalian hit if you’re going to try it.

Important note: ice cream melts, so be about it. The hotter it is, etc. It’s compulsively transitory, qua substance. This somehow makes it better, like life itself.

But then you will probably see something called soft serve ice cream. This is also ice cream but just, well, softer. It gets ejected from a spigot rather than scooped from a bucket. So not as thick. The way you lick it is subtly but definitively different. You can get this at places like McDonald’s and sometimes it has toppings. Easily confusable with yogurt, also known as frozen yogurt, which is not the same as real yogurt.

See? Complicated. Real yogurt is made with bacteria cultures and milk. It occupies the same liminal, mouthfeel space in that you don’t really have to chew it. But frozen yogurt is basically soft serve ice cream without it actually being yogurt. I think it was basically a psyop by Big Yogurt back in the day to get people acclimated to the idea of yogurt, meaning regular, tangy, wholesome-but-not-really-dessert yogurt. Frozen yogurt also comes with lots of toppings. Generally speaking, the more toppings that are available, the less fancy the version of ice cream. Those people are just lipsticking the pig.

Then there is custard, which where I’m from we treat with suspicion. It’s made with eggs. These get pooped out by chickens daily, and we turn them into all kinds of stuff. That’s a whole other letter but they’re also weirdly liminal and creepy but still, somehow, delicious. Life here is weird. Custard is made with these but is still gross. It leaves a sticky film in your throat. But then sometimes ice cream doesn’t have hardly any milk or eggs at all and it’s called sherbert, and it’s mostly fruit and always pastel-colored. It’s like ice cream’s preppy, New England cousin. It’s also delicious, very rarely served with toppings, and springier. But then get ready because there’s also sorbet, which is like sherbert’s preppy cousin who’s been abroad for an entire year and is impossibly smug about it. I don’t think it contains any milk at all; it’s transcended it. Also lots of fruit, no toppings, and usually expensive. If they’ve got sorbet on the menu, ask a local to cover the bill.

But then also you might get a milkshake, which is like even softer serve ice cream. As in you don’t even lick it. You drink it through a straw. If you get it in a restaurant, you might get an additional spoon to scoop out the innards, complicating matters further. Quick logistical note: if it comes in a cone, you’re supposed to lick it. If it comes in a cup, you’re supposed to scoop it with a spoon, unless it comes in a long cup and then you’re supposed to drink it from a straw. A milkshake is just ice cream with even more milk so that it gets swampy and, yes, drinkable. Though sometimes it’s just barely drinkable and this is somehow a sign of its excellence. There are flavors here, and sometimes toppings, but they’re not really toppings. They’re in the ice cream swamp itself. Example: Chik-Fil-A peach milk shakes, but act fast because that one is seasonal and remember they’re closed on Sunday. Real proud of that little middle finger to all the pagans.

Alert: an ice cream sandwich is not actually a sandwich. It’s ice cream that uses a cookie as a containment mechanism. But you eat it like a sandwich. Honestly, if you’re looking for something to skip, this is the one.

But if you go to a Dairy Queen, you can get a trad milk shake, but also you can get a Blizzard, which is their proprietary milkshake-like concoction that’s even thicker and comes with chopped-up candy bars inside. Or cookies. You get the idea. These are a little sus and are mostly the terrain of adolescents and adults who have given up on life. They should put a diabetes warning on those bad boys. And then if you go into a gas station you can also get almost edible drinks, like a Slushy which is a fruit-flavored, chunky ice drink that will stain your tongue. More fruit flavors but not like sorbet sophisticated real fruit but like lab-grown, ultramarine alien blue flavors. No offense. Also sometimes at the gas station are the Icee machines which are basically Slushies but cola-flavored and, to my discriminating palate, much better. These are ingested through a straw but a special straw that sports a tiny spoonlet on the end so that you can scoop out those truant half dozen ice nugget crunchers at the bottom.

A Frappacino is just a coffee-flavored milkshake that costs more and comes with a line. A smoothie is just a milkshake that’s pretending to be healthy. Gelato is just Italian sorbet — sorbet’s sketchier, sluttier cousin. You will have a good time with gelato.

While you’re here, lots of people are going to tell you that they’re the real ones in charge. Be that as it may seem, it’s important to remember what one of our best rappers said about all this: the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

The website Quarter Mile held a contest for letters to send to the aliens, should they ever arrive. This was my entry. No, I did not win.