Was this all a dream? Did this really happen? The hint of cinnamon on your tongue is the only sign that yes, what you perceive as real is in fact real. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time my professional life has infiltrated the dream world, distorting reality into some grotesque simulation, like when I won the US Cup Tasters while sipping from a cup at a bar. But this feels different in some way. Improbable, but physical.
Here’s what I know for sure: Last week, I wrote about 7-Eleven releasing a pumpkin-flavored Slurpee, or “PSLurpee,” as Sprudge co-founder Jordan Michelman aptly named it. The PSLurpee came out on August 1st and was restricted to just five 7-Eleven locations across the country. One of them happened to be in my own backyard. As a Chicken Little who’s always clucked about the tyranny of pumpkin spice, this seemed like a good time to indulge in the seasonal invasion. Maybe the sky isn’t falling, and a little fall in the summer is in order. So I did. I drove 30 minutes to give a pumpkin spice Slurpee a fair chance.
Or at least that’s what it seems like to me. Like an alien encounter or a hypnotic attack, the dream logic of what followed was an amalgam of all my previous PSL experiences, jumbled together like a four-dimensional Rubik’s cube.
Finding 7-Eleven was a bit of a heroic task in itself. Mapping the address provided in the press release yields not a grocery store but the company’s headquarters in Irving, Texas, an unassuming four-story gray building on the western outskirts of Dallas. Brutal, but not brutalist. All access roads to the headquarters are guarded by a security checkpoint, testing any credibility of “convenience” in the process. Does the store even exist?
Undeterred, I circled the building, checking for a frail spot in their defenses (or at least a place to stop and see if there was another 7-Eleven nearby that might fit the bill). And there it was, on the side road behind the building: the telltale orange, green, and red stripes. A hidden convenience store. A 7-Eleven dive.
Inside, it looked like any other 7-Eleven, but something was wrong. It was too tidy, too sterile, too perfect. Like some eccentric billionaire had painstakingly recreated the store down to the last detail—the Slurpee machine, the rows of candy, the backdrop of cigarettes framing the cashier—so they could engage in normal daily activities without having to approach any real people. A fully functional collectible in which I was an uninvited guest.
Everyone else in the store seemed to be employed by the company, and this was their own commissary and test kitchen. Business casual 7-Eleven polo shirts, picking up deli sandwiches, a promotional interview video in the chip aisle, a claustrophobically tight close-up of some regional manager, and me. I could feel their eyes as I rushed toward the Slurpee machine. Was this one of those dreams where you forgot to put on pants before leaving?
Decency be damned, I walk forward and there it is: a pumpkin Slurpee, swirling in Technicolor orange. I’m delighted to discover that it’s one of the aged Slurpee machines, an analog lever with a shiny black knob that you can actually drive, not a soulless digital touchscreen that farts out any combination of colors you choose. I make a tidy PSLurpee, then another, this time a combination of PSL and Coca-Cola, which I’ve been told might be really good. I pay and get out of there as rapid as I can, lest they force me to join their corporate cult.
I returned to the safety of my car, where I was definitely wearing pants—suspiciously in the same color palette as pumpkin and spices—and had my first chance to actually try a PSLurpee (which was to be expected from the Cup Tasters’ dream winner). The first sip was just so cinnamony. Just cinnamon and cool, until your brain freezes and you have to press your tongue against the roof of your mouth. This isn’t that Red Hots-style cinnamon candy flavor, but rather a punch of real, true cinnamon flavor with a syrupy sweetness. It wouldn’t be out of place in a latte on a specialty store’s fall menu.
As the frost melts and dilutes the drink, the cinnamon flavor fades, and up-to-date notes of nutmeg and vanilla emerge, and the drink becomes—dare I say—good? Maybe it’s the 100-degree heat, but I still found myself reaching for the cup holder, first out of journalistic honesty, then out of morbid curiosity, then out of genuine pleasure. Now for the Coca-Cola combo.
It was delicious from the get-go. The pumpkin spice provided a richer bass note, a rhythm over which the juicy Coca-Cola could whine. It’s a dream combination and a perfect apply of pumpkin spice, and I’m amazed that Coca-Cola hasn’t made a version yet.
Whether any of these Slurpees ever existed, who can say. To discern what was real from what was a dramatic reinterpretation as a fever dream of the previous article would require a deep understanding of the film Mulholland Drive, perhaps the entire Lynch canon, which I simply do not possess. But maybe the point of the Pumpkin Spice Slurpee is not its overwhelming cinnamon, its truth, maybe it is really about the Slurpee (we think) we ate along the way.
