Cinnabons

Listen, America.

Tilt your ears toward the suburbs. Listen to the sound coming from the townhouse in the student neighborhood. It's a sound we should remember. It's a sound to tell stories about. A sound for our children to hear and appreciate.

Th-DNK! is the sound of a 25-year-old man rolling off a couch onto the floor, groaning from the oppressive weight of a Cinnabon cinnamon roll. To the man, the roll feels like a cancerous tumor gnawing away at his guts like a starving rat, but the truth is simpler: The damn thing has simply congealed in his stomach.

Cinnabons are powerful. Like guns, or credit cards, or the synthesized "robot voice" filter used on various pop music recordings, Cinnabons can be used for good... or evil. And when they hit the scene, they hit hard.

670 calories. 49 grams of sugar. 34 grams of fat. Why not just shoot drawn butter into your arm?

Because drawn butter isn't as sinfully delicious.

The ad copy on Cinnabon's website is pretty disingenuous. "At Cinnabon, you're more than a customer. You're our Guest."

To hell with that. We're your Victims, and it's no coincidence that we can't find Cinnabon nutrition information anywhere on your creepy, corporately wholesome site. But we wouldn't have it any other way.

Unlike a lot of other American products, Cinnabons don't beat around the bush. They're not subtle, like the "ethnic flavor" of Taco Bell food. They're not flirtatiously bad for you, like Pizza Hut's greasy hubcaps. Cinnabons get up in your face and yell: "I am slathered with a mixture of fat and sugar! I am bread soaked in animal byproducts and the refined syrup of sugar cane plants! I am here to make an impact on your day, you fat or soon-to-be-fat MUTHAFUCKAAAAAAAH!"

If you've ever frequented American airports, you've probably noticed the high frequency of Cinnabon outlets. Detroit has one. Chicago's O'Hare has one. Cincinnati and Washington's Reagan airport have 'em. And this is just from memory. This is no accident. A Cinnabon may be one of the few proven antidotes to the inevitable stress of air travel.

There's something absorbing and distracting about eating one of these things. They're so intensely sweet, so richly cinnamon-loaded, and so incredibly, obviously and unapologetically naughty that your air-travel related woes simply float away. A newspaper, a coffee and a Cinnabon can turn a two-hour delay into a welcome little break. Air travelers are primal beasts, soothed by a primal pleasure.

With few exceptions, air travel is all about putting people in a constrained area, exposing them to loud babies and tragicomic safety instructions and then shaking them up. This is often punctuated by long waits in the social and cultural vacuum that is the American airport.

Through its intense force of personality, a Cinnabon can transport us from all that. But this dough-based A-bomb, this cinnamon-laced thunderbolt, is not to be trifled with.

On an empty stomach, a Cinnabon can be near-deadly.

It is a fact — albeit a questionable one — that a Cinnabon will expand to fill an empty stomach, no matter how large that stomach may be. From there, the Cinnabon exercises its options.

"Ah," thinks the roll. "Now it's time to turn into a concrete block, or a Grammy Award, or something like that."

And then it's Stomach vs. Cinnabon in a battle to the finish.

Th-DNK. Off the couch we roll.

Modern life has pleasures, and it also has perils. The Cinnabon is both.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)