I bought a little 99¢ bag of Nutter Butter Bites at Walgreens.

One of my New Year's resolutions concerns junk food. If I’m going to eat it, I have to enjoy it. So I focused all my energy on my teeth and tongue.

I savored that Nutter Butter Bite.

I crunched, I tasted, I felt it go from crisp to grainy to mushy, I absorbed the peanut butter flavor into every pore of my tongue. My eyes were open, but I barely registered anything. My ears didn’t notice the street sounds. Everything was on autopilot except the attention I paid to the junk food.

My mouth is so small compared to my body. A little wet red-and-white pocket, usually hidden away behind a pink seal a couple inches wide. My mouth is absolutely tiny compared to the street I’m walking on, the neighborhood, the city. It doesn’t even register on the scale of the state, the country, the planet. And it is utterly insignificant in the great scheme of everything.

But the whole vastness of the Universe, its inconceivable limitless magnificence, had to force its way in and step around that Nutter Butter Bite just to register with me at all.

• • •

I don’t carry my Palm Pilot with me anymore.

I have a semi-obsessive-compulsive habit of checking that I have everything with me. It used to take the form of a light touch of my back pocket, then my front pocket, accompanied by the mental mantra: wallet. keys. wallet. keys.

Then I got the Palm Pilot and added a tap of my jacket pocket. wallet. keys. palm. wallet. keys. palm.

Then the iPod. wallet. keys. palm. ipod. wallet. keys. palm. ipod.

Every time I stood up from my seat on the train, I’d swat at myself like a man attacked by phantom gnats. When I finally became the last person on earth to get a cell phone, back in September of 2005, it ended up pushing the Palm Pilot out of the pat-down – I guess four is my limit.

I picked the Palm Pilot up recently, for the first time in months, and noticed that I’d taken the trouble to record my 2006 New Year’s resolutions. It was a cruel thing for 2006 Dave to do, and I need to figure out a way to get him back.

“Write a play.” Nope.
“Gym 2x/wk.” Nope.
“Designate one day per work wk when I can visit vend. machine.” Nope.

This year I tried something a little different. Junk food has to be an experience, not just a rote part of my day. If it means saving up time and money so I can sit and enjoy the hell out of one of those expensive 80% cocoa fair trade chocolate bars with the pandas on the label from Whole Foods, then that’s in the spirit of my 2007 New Year’s resolution.

I got the idea from that other holiday that celebrates broken self-promises to give stuff up: Lent.

I’m not Catholic, but I did once give up chocolate for Lent. I didn’t quite make it – there was still a week to go before Easter when I collapsed into a Snickers bar. But that Snickers bar was a beatific experience in itself, made all the more wondrous by the period of abstinence that preceded it. It pumped pure liquid joy to all my extremities.

This dug up something of a religious quandary. Pious austerity could be used as a way to live more decadently.

My self-denial became a way of enjoying my sin more, an enhancement of experience, like popping mushrooms before watching The Wizard of Oz, or getting stewed before a family reunion.

• • •

A couple years ago, Starbucks introduced the “Chantico,” a little cup of drinkable chocolate. Press releases announced that it was named for the Aztec goddess of the hearth, but there wasn’t much that was godly or wholesome about it. It was steamed cocoa butter and whole milk. My friend Jen said it was like drinking a brownie.

I am both proud and ashamed that so many people who tried the Chantico immediately contacted me to ask if I’d had one yet. When I told them I hadn’t, they regarded me for a silent and bewildered moment before finally saying, “You’ve got to try it. You of all people.”

I had my reasons for waiting. I wanted it to be perfect.

It wasn’t easy. There were days when I thought I would explode. But I knew it would be all the more special when the time was right, and I’d be able to give myself to that Aztec goddess with no regrets, knowing I was ready.

I wanted her to respect me.

My thinking was that, to get the maximum chocolate impact from a Chantico, I should go on a chocolate fast. Let the cheap stuff drain from my system. The cocoa butter uppercut would be all the more powerful coming after a feint of abstinence.

But willpower was elusive, and every time I gave in to a stale Twix bar, I pushed back my Chantico.

Until one day it was gone.

The baristas stopped pulling the Chantico sometime the following year. And I had never courted her.

The Nutter Butter Bites are no substitute for the Chantico, which, for my foolish pride, now holds a status all the more legendary in my heart. But I shall not take them for granted.

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