READING 4︎︎︎ Andrew Lipstein, Something Rotten

Mambas do not believe in the accidental

There are three stacks in a standard pack of Mambas. Each flavor lives in its own neat column, wrapped and subdivided, like small scrolls of candy sealed for later reading. I ate a yellow, then another, then a third—at first thinking it was strange, charmed by the repetition. As though the world, in a minor act of alignment, had given me a winning hand. But of course, it was no coincidence. Mambas are sorted. What seemed like good fortune was only confusion.

Mambas are not like other candies—Skittles or jelly beans—that tumble together in a single democracy of color. Those are designed for the dip and draw, that little rush of luck. I reach in hoping for purple and get orange instead. A system of chance, or at least the appearance of it.

But Mambas resist this. They do not mingle. Each flavor remains intact, sealed off. If you want variety, you must create it yourself. Open all three inner wrappings, dig through the waxy layers, redistribute by hand. It becomes a kind of labor, this pursuit of difference. A small act of re-sorting, just to make things feel a little more alive.

What pleasure is denied in these structures? Or perhaps: what anxiety is soothed?

I think, for no particular reason, of how some streaming platforms have returned to releasing episodes once a week. A return to pacing. The refusal of excess. One episode, like one yellow, then another. Epicurus, who knew something about desire, suggested that pleasure is not found in abundance but in the absence of pain. But one wonders if he ever tried to open a Mambas pack with one hand while pushing a stroller uphill. Even the mildest hunger becomes philosophical when there are wrappers involved.

Georges Bataille wrote of pleasure as “an expenditure,” an excess that resists containment—not something to be managed or meted out, but something that burns itself up in the moment, wasteful, radiant, unrepeatable. But here, even indulgence is folded into order. The candy stack, the viewing queue—little pleasures engineered to behave.

Mambas do not believe in the accidental. And yet some part of us still hopes—for what? A green, maybe. A wild card.