A Not-so-Simple Twist of Fate
All life is twist but which side gets the creme?
Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈
Twist.
Position your sensitive fingertips upon the very edges of those sweet discs. Left hand, right hand, with digits twitching as spider legs gesturing in air before settling to the task.
Hold fast. Now twist.
Twist with delicate pressure, a gentle but firm authority, until you feel the inevitable release of it.
The pop. The suck. The ugh of delamination.
This.
This is the letting go of the proverbial Oreo. The fracture. The rift. The declaration of independence.
Deep breath.
Now open. Open that book of cookie to reveal the answer this action has bestowed upon you.
Cream or no cream? Which side has won?
The sensual fluff of luck is never shared equally between the sides. One inevitably gets it all. This is the way of the world—there is enough to go ‘round but no desire to go ‘round.
It’s just the way the cookie crumbles, right?
The goo goes.
The cream twists.
All this fuss over cream, and fake cream at that. C-R-E-M-E not C-R-E-A-M (the vegans rejoice), but it is faux not your foe. This small lie is not your enemy. Do not fight against fate’s fakery because it’s all a giant and glorious gamble anyway.
Fifty-fifty.1
Creme or no creme, milk or no milk—the twist is the thing.
Just keep on twisting.
Humans twist everything. Stories, lives, budgets, arms. We are the Kings and Queens of Contortion, mangling our regal bodies and minds and lives to fit with some vision we have of the perfect life. The perfect human. The perfect dream. The one with all the creme.
The creme. We want to lick it from the plate of victory. It is the sweetness we believe we are owed after all the shit we’ve had to eat. After what we’ve been through.
Twisted logic being what it is.
Twist twist twist. Creme creme creme. Praying to the Creme Distribution System that the next twist will be our turn.
“Please oh lord, give us the wafer side with the good stuff. The rich stuff. The living breathing energy elixir stuff. Not the dry stuff, not the crumbly stuff, not the dunk and choke it down stuff.”
Amen.
How can we guarantee our twisted reward? And if it is always twisted, what is it twisted with? A tainted spoil? An undigestible lactate? A soul carcinogen we won’t find out about until the end of our story?
“Life,” she says, chewing at her pencil. “Life is an infinitely twisting Oreo.”
Take the mind.
The mind twists. Two halves of the same whole, confined within our boney vase, taking alternate approaches and signals and sighs, all while glued fast by the anatomy of our creme fillings. The stems of our composition. Left and right, handcuffed and hobbled by some Tetris-obsessed creator who deems these pieces to fit because they fit. Walnuts in shells. Creme between cookies.
If it fits so well, oh mighty creator, then why is it so easily twisted?
“I’m conceptual,” says one side, “I’m rational,” says the other. The twist slides the creme between the sheering force of understanding.
Well, the attempt to understand.
Hatred, love, science, faith. Anger eats at the inside of your skull, coming from nowhere, going everywhere. Sadness rushes into the voids. The mind contorts and twists to chase the demons away. Half out half in half off. Mind creme, riddled with synaptic sprinkles leading to a confetti of nothingness.
Right brain left brain, wrong brain here brain. Twist twist twist to insanity. Twisted words. Twisted emotions. Thoughts and moods and modals and analytics and a creme that won’t commit to either argument. Outside forces squeezing as you twist and pull and organize the calendar.
All life is twisting. Our minds spinning the wheel to declare right foot, red dot, left hand, green. Laying down suppressive foam, our loneliness fractures.
What is the creme of the mind anyway? Is it the soothing balm between two forces that should never be separated? Is it happiness? Contentment? Confidence? Belief in science? Belief in God? It seeks equilibrium. Seeks the justice of equal creme distribution lest the conspiracy theories win.
Ratio ratio ratio. Twist twist twist. Headache headache headache.
One twist of the knife, cracking the shell. There shall be no separation, lest the logic evaporate.
Now the body. Twisting and contorting and dislocating to enter this world. Misshapen heads and awkward shoulders, we emerge a twisted wreck to right ourselves upon our new decks. From the get-go, we continue to twist our limbs and organs and skin and bone and seek salvation in the twist of it.
Twisting, twisting—whirlpool of Birth and Death—two halves of this cookie with the whole creme of life between, its recipe never written down.
The twister twists the twistee.
This body. This twist of fat and sinew and impulse. Stop we say, twisting away from the malaise of the couch, the modern day killing floor. All efforts made to stop ourselves shattering and twisting and igniting our creme lest it explode us straight and spectacularly to death.
Too much. Too fast. Too young.
Eat right. Live right. Love right. Worship at the twisted temple of us. Twist it left and right, four reps, two circuits each. Repeat. Increase the weight of life to build muscle and promote adaptation. Twist and twist and twist without pulling muscle. Without straining the gauge.
Log it in the ledger. Count. Tally. Now ache.
This life is unknowable. Unrepeatable. Totally twistable. You work on the body but forces outside your control twist against you, too. Taken out by a texting driver, twisting selfishly behind the wheel. Burned up in your home. Swept out to sea, one hand waving helplessly to the seagulls.
We arch our backs and mouth secret words to the heavens. Twisting to love and lust and likability as the calorific mood is spread thin upon our bodies like varnish on an antique dresser.
We twist each other’s words and actions and intentions. Twist until we disengage and disappear, watching the love lift from our deck, a smudged murmuration in air before leaving altogether. Winner takes it all. The creme leaks like light from a pinhole in your heart.
Your twisted broken heart.
Twisting in the mirror to see the results with modesty exposed and wounds and scars and greying hairs (if any hairs at all.) Phobias and Photoshop. Merging and smudging at the corners of the wafer to spread the youth of it. Creaking toward the inevitable twist of fate that dictates the end time. The clock runs out. The creme is gone, no longer lubricating the joints of that amble.
Life. Gone in one bite.
Wind the clock. Set it back with a twist.
The world, ancient and wise without us, twists and buckles in our grip, squeezed at its center and bulging at the seams.
Hemispheric inequities. The haves and have nots and are nots and more. The fighting and squalls, the dustups and dumps. Twisting to the collapse of the columns and the roof falling in, fissures and fractures and science taking revenge.
We twist to look while not seeing, leaving our soft centers vulnerable to the disease. Some faces smeared with extra creme, others licking at dry wafer. Dirt and deserts and droughts and dumb intelligence with blinkers on. Twisted fingers. Twisted hearts. Twisted economies. Twisted forests and seas and airs and geologies. Twisted justice throwing us into cells we cannot escape.
The bars of our songs crushed and demonetized with the twist of a dial.
The banks teeter. The wicked rise. They twist and snarl at us. Treat our bodies and lives as stale cookies, extracting all our cremes which are now their cremes. All our melodies. All our liquid golds. Trust. Faith. The love we have for each other.
They twist until we are squeezed dry of all our creme, all our humanity. Into each other, against ourselves. Torqued too hard, we groan and shatter, life and hope crumbling to dust in blistered hands. A world torn, a universe spinning into mush.
A gentle unraveling of time.
The world turns, the divide gets wider, the glue cannot hold.
But the world doesn’t view itself as halved, one twisting to defeat the other. The world is indifferent.
Creme or no creme, we’re all getting dunked.
Plot twist.
All life is twist—of wrist, of fate, of memory. There are no guarantees, no gifts, no certainties. The curtain lifts, we twist to center stage and there, with the spotlight on or even off to one side, we make our own sweetness.
So.
Position your sensitive fingertips upon the very edges of those sweet discs. Left hand, right hand, with digits twitching as spider legs gesturing in air before settling to the task.
Hold fast. Now twist.
Twist with delicate pressure, a gentle but firm authority, until you feel the inevitable release of it.
The pop. The suck. The ugh of delamination.
This.
This is the letting go of the proverbial Oreo. The fracture. The rift. The declaration of independence.
Shake it up, baby. Twist. Twist. Twist.
And shout when you strike the creme.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
Go behind the scenes of this post and learn all about Oreology
This week’s amends…
"Go out for a walk. It doesn't have to be a romantic walk in the park... It doesn't have to be a walk during which you'll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself... That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be."- Albert Camus
On Rotation: “Symphonique #6 (Good for Goodie)” by Moondog
Love the poster design styles of Concepcion Studios. Go look at ‘em all.
Via Kottke
In 2020, French TikToker Cyrilschr:
“filled a bathtub with Orbeez–superabsorbent expanding toys–for views, only to then be left with the problem of disposing of them. In attempting to do so, he inadvertently destroyed the plumbing system not just in his apartment complex but his area of town.”
IMPORTANT UPDATE!2
Via Boing Boing
Pushes glasses up. Actually, I read that the side of the Oreo that gets the creme is determined by which side it was first applied to (aka, the bottom). The top slice is laid atop and all are put in the package with that orientation. So if you work out the first one in the pack, they’re all laying that way and should all twist the same side of creme. Theoretically.
According to YouTube comments he faked it. Good commit to the bit though.