I was meeting recently with someone who expressed his personal loss at seeing Twinkies evaporate from the grocery store shelves overnight.
He and his wife were moderately successful in nabbing a box of Hostess Cupcakes, before that brand's rapture. The absence of the golden brown, creme-filled Twinkies, though, caused a deeper level of angst.
After all:
"According to popular myth, Twinkies are so stuffed with chemicals and preservatives that they will last for decades. Hostess insists that the shelf life is more like 25 days." So writes Bich Minh Nguyen, the author of the novel “Short Girls” and the memoir “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” in a recent (and clever) New York Times Op Ed, shortly after the sugar-plum fairies unplugged the international Twinkies light.
We all believed that Hostess Twinkies would be available during the apocalypse.
And then a funny thought hit me.
Even with all the popular mythologies of Twinkies being with us forever, they didn't quite make it to the end of the world, as we know it - or at least as the Mayans knew it.
Modern man and woman are now approaching the end of the age and we have no Twinkies. In fact, most of the soft, yellow confectionery taste treats themselves have not just failed to make it to the Mayan finish time-line - they've most likely ALL been consumed.
Unwrapped. Un-earthed. Eaten. Gone.
Though the calendar of a culture of warriors and sun-worshippers continues to exist - and frighten people worldwide with a specific Apocalyptic Date (December 21, 2012) the date-stamp on Twinkies no longer means any thing.
Nothing.
It's as if we're boldly being told; "Go ahead, eat the Twinkies whenever you want, today, tomorrow, who cares. Eat, drink and be chemically filled for tomorrow (or at least on a certain date in December) you will die.
And the uncaring salacious hoarders among us, tear off a tiny bit of Twinkie, then they seem to be unable to resist the creamy white filling, lick, slurp, gulp... and the Twinkie is not more.
And the box grows light. They're not going to die, they tell themselves and their fellow Twinkie-hoarders. The cream filling will keep them alive, if nothing else, they tell themselves.
And the Twinkie fades-to-dark under the dusty shadow of a Mayan rock-chiseled calendar, that itself has been scheduled to go out of usefulness in the third week of December 2012.
It just doesn't seem right, somehow that long-lasting Twinkies, in the long run, were not long-lasting enough.
Eat up. They say the end is near.
You'll want to survive the end of the world, as we know it.
Den
Comments