Joe and I went to Target the other day to restock on some shampoo and such. In doing so, we noticed the brand Native released a scent line of body wash with the Girl Scouts, and you guessed it—scents of their beloved cookies. On the shelf was the Peanut Butter Do-Si-Dos and Thin Mints. As predicted, it smelled bizarre and objectively wrong. Stepping out of a clean shower smelling like a treat your dog would immediately want to lick up is probably the last thing I’d ever want to smell like. The Thin Mint one wasn’t that much better. That flatted chocolate cookie perfumed with a lick of spearmint, smelling more like a chemical grown chocolately toothpaste rather than the natural spicy refreshing mint you could hypothetically get much easier into a bottle product. I think it’s the french philosopher Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation that describes how current society has accrued a version of reality entirely replaced by cultural symbols and signifiers instead of itself. That we live much in a hyper-reality, where all things are derivative of the thing itself. We are only every referencing a reference of the thing. Maybe the Marxism could weigh in here with how commodities destroy and divorce any of the inherent value of space, time, and labor and render it all into a product, serving as the symbol Baudrillard speaks to. And I think the Native x Girl Scout cookie collab is a pinnacle example. It is so derivative of a derivative, we are stuck in a world where peanut butter cookie scented body wash is something that is manufactured and sold in arguably one of the biggest vendors in the US. Like for real, there’s all these people in a chemical lab (who are probably paid more than me) going “how do we get the Carmel Cartwheel scent into this body wash” and now, its right here for me to buy at this Target in Hadley !
Anyway. I was thinking about the composition of a Thin Mint. The thin bready cookie doused in a coat of chocolate with these gentle notes of mint inside them. Pressed out and packaged into these thin sleeves in the box. There’s gotta be like 40 cookies in there or something. 20 to a sleeve, something wild like that. On my drive to the see eclipse in totality in Vermont with a few friends, Thin Mints were the only thing I had to eat that day aside from a few pistachios, grape leaves, and a bagel early in the morning. Some bad choices were objectively made that day. Yep, I was popping back, not the Girl Scout brand thin mints, but one of those Trader Joe’s organic thin mint knock offs, way in and way out. By a thin margin, we were racing against the clock to see the eclipse in totality. And going near 70 on Vermont backroads, we probably missed totality by 5 miles. We failed to make it more or less by 2 minutes. On the side of the road in nowhere Vermont, we watched the 99.5% coverage go by with our glasses and headed back to Massachusetts, not defeated though, a bit silly. While still very exciting and very eclipse-strange, we were still pretty pumped and pretty changed. And between the 15-20 thin mints, the roughly 7 to 8 hours in the car, and the eclipse-altering universe we had entered. I had one of the largest “menty b’s” of my semester later that night. Something that had already dawned on me prior but I was always staving off to ignore reared its ugly head— and like a thin mint, I had been pressed too thin.
I think if hydraulics could speak, it would say press on! It doesn’t think about what’s in its way, it just knows to compact. I think about the hydraulic press that cinches each Thin Mint cookie into place at the Girl Scout Factory, over and over and over again. When I would get too high (now weed makes me too anxious), I watch How It’s Made, a show that focuses simply on the production of various goods, items, and machinery. There you are in a camera, on the factory floor with some viscerally-neutral sounding man voice-overing a huge hydraulic press, squeezing the cooking batter into place, before its sent to the massive bake ovens at the end of the conveyor belt. You wonder where these factories even are, who confronts these massive hydraulics machines every single day, are they locked in 2008 How It’s Made Season 10 forever? The blur man in the blue shirt in the back to the left of the hydraulics action shot makes you wonder… how are you? Is this what you imagined you’d be doing? Are you happy? What’s it like to operate the machine that cinches and presses thousands of thin mint cookies each day? They never interview the people on the factory floor. Its such a shame! And when the cookies come out of the oven, and the cookies dry from the chocolatey coating through those massive air tunnels, the best part comes… the colossal and mind blowing rapid movement of those air tight tinsel sleeves getting bagged with 20 cookies or however many each. Flying by like sparklers on a holiday with your fingers too near the edge and you are afraid to be visually afraid because its not a cool look in front of your friends to be afraid of a silly thing like a sparkler, it looks like several flares rods popping off a sinking ship, or mirrors bypassing any of their supposed reflections, one by one in a rapid cacophony of product and cookie and capital. Something about the pure repetition lulls me. I really hate that.
I was a kid, I had so many adults in my life tell me, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles anytime I felt just shy of my sanity, or something would break, or not go the way it should. I think there is, often, something very freeing in that. The crumble of a cookie, as it be. Free to go wherever. Falling on the floor in whatever which way it pleases, into the couch cushions, onto a sidewalk becoming some squirrel’s cocaine, or a chocolate chip dropping into your white bed sheets when you are binging old seasons of The Bachelor for a whole Saturday and speaking to no one. But I wonder if anyone asked the cookie if it liked to crumble, and my guess is that it probably doesn’t. Like the rest of us, it would say ‘yeah it sucks when I lose parts of myself into park grass to be stepped on or sat on in dirty couches or hardwood floors that get licked over by a cat’.
Has anyone thought of a Thick Mint cookie? I guess that’s what I’ve been told. To build a thicker skin. I mean, they made a Double Stuf Oreo, so its completely possible. Has anyone wanted a thicker Thin Mint? Yeah, I don’t know, the discourse seems to be absent. Maybe I could try telling the hydraulic to press down a little less. I think that’s a bit of a thrill, watching How It’s Made. I’ve always thought I could outsmart the hydraulics, laying in bed, Jedi style in my mind thinking Make It Stop! Like I could catch the powerful machine in a lapse, on its off breath, the music of the humming falling off beat, maybe, just maybe it wouldn’t press down as hard just this one time. But like the khakis voice man from the How It’s Made show says “each press will press 100 cookies in a minute”. So if all the hydraulics know is to press and press and press then it’s sort of up to me to not fixate on the Thin Mint. To see somewhat beyond it.