After months of roommates, friends, acquaintances, and other big strong men threatening to just up and eat the goddamn thing some night when I was out of town, I finally decided to open the comically oversized half-pound Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup I received for Christmas, only to find that, lo and behold, it had gone kind of stale. At least, I think it’s gone stale. It’s hard to tell. I am basing my assessment on the crumbly, borderline chalkiness of the peanut butter, which I remember from a youth of expired Halloween mini-cups as an indication that a Reese’s product is somewhat past due. However, it is altogether possible this is not a matter of staleness; the denser consistency could be an unfortunate necessity of the product itself, a structural precondition for the success of such a scaling up, like how you have to start building insects differently if you want to grow them to car-destroying proportions, gravity being what it is. Maybe it’s necessary to alter the consistency of the filling if there is to be any hope of the chocolate frame retaining its shape. I suppose I can’t know.
My attitude toward what I will call the Big Big Cup—to distinguish it from the less monstrous, standard Big Cup—had changed over time. Initially, I was waiting for just the right occasion to bust it out as a post-dinner-party flourish, but it occurred to me that, having inexplicably written so much about Reese’s products in the past,1 I owed it to myself and to my craft to approach this abomination with an appropriate measure of respect. I had to eat it all, by myself. Not a task to be taken lightly, because the thing is huge. One could pull a muscle. A half-pound may not sound like much, but if you consider that a regular Reese’s cup weighs approximately twenty-one grams, and the regular Big Cup weighs forty-nine grams, then, at roughly two hundred and twenty-seven grams, the Big Big Cup is almost eleven times the size of a regular cup. That’s a lot of cup.
Perhaps this outsized sense of the importance of the task inevitably sealed my fate. Big Big Cup was thus endowed with a glamour, daunting and preposterous. When would I be ready? Could I be ready? How hungry would I have to be? Who would survive, and what would be left of them? I wouldn’t say I was afraid; that would be too dramatic. In fact, I was looking very much forward to the experience, come what may. I foresaw myself suffused and sickened, surely, but animated and inebriated also by the poetry of excess. I would write something, maybe the best something, about the Biggest Cup (probably not actually the biggest cups, but I’m already drunk on poetry by this point in my fantasy), before crapulence swung around to destroy me.
And so at home I bided my time. One can’t rush such things. Though perhaps I should have—for now, halfway through the Biggest Cup, I am hardly inspired to go on, and do not know whether it is in the cup or myself I should be disappointed. Was it ever the giant I took it to be, or just some dusty, crumbling windmill? The first impression I had upon tearing the package was the familiar and not entirely pleasant scent of a chocolate Easter rabbit, the big foil-wrapped kind. I don’t know whether it is simply the smell produced by too much chocolate in a confined space—if that is in fact a thing—or whether it has something to do with chocolate left to languish, but it quickly filled the room. I may as well be in the package with it, this infernal cup. Even in the midst of my confusion, I marvel at the heft of the thing. The thickness of the chocolate around the bevelled edges defies any notion that the cup could possibly be in proportion to its predecessor; again, probably a structural necessity. Reluctantly, I am forced to admit that no growth serum or biggification ray was employed in the production of the Biggest Cup—a marvel of engineering it must be, impressive in its design if not livable in its execution.
There is something appropriate about this anticlimax that appeals to my failure-loving aesthetic sense. It is appropriate in the way that waiting for the right moment to do something—with full idiomatic approval: Good Things Come to Those Who Wait, Fools Rush In, Patience Is a Virtue, and so on—so often results in the squandering or spoilage of that which one has so long anticipated. I could argue that there is a difference between putting off doing what one desperately wants to do, and waiting for precisely the right moment to do something that one does not yet feel prepared to approach, but such a distinction may be a coward’s comfort that nevertheless leaves one gazing up into the darkness, eyes burning with anguish and anger. So, bummed as I am, I cannot help but feel underneath it all a sense of satisfaction at being robbed, as much by my own machinations as by the relentless march of time and the shelf life of even the most denatured of confections. Robbed not only of the prospect of triumph, or of the confrontation about which I had so fantasized, but even of the capacity to understand what it is I have before me: I have in effect robbed myself of the sense of the event by too thickly encumbering it with significance.
Funny that I am all too ready to embrace the soul-killing general lesson of “Don’t look too forward to things, for you shall inevitably spoil them before you have the opportunity to be let down,” whereas if the specific lesson here is “Don’t think so hard about candy bars,” I don’t want to learn it.
1 See Food and Trembling (Invisible, 2011).