Green Bananas
People who eat green bananas are weird. The fruit is not quite ripe, I submit — the toughness of the skin is telling! _Wait, I’m not ready yet. I want to live up to my full potential!_ But the eater is hungry and impatient. the skin is bent-cracked split pulled. Upside-down. Assuming that monkeys know bananas better than us, we are going about the act __all wrong__!
But that’s not even the worst of it.
The pale residue — it’s hard, firm, you could say, and you really have to bite and chew. the taste is pleasant enough at first, if underwhelming. Banana. Only slightly tart, with a hint of bitter mouthfeel (if such a thing is possible?). Swallow.
The phantom residue clings to your mouth dry-hairy coarseness that no amount of water or milk can disperse. As if the fruit hadn’t been fully separated from its skin, and took bits of skin-adhesive with it, leaving traces for the eater to ponder.
If they even notice.
—
Pico Iyer on Traveling, from “Why We Travel: A Love Affair With the World”
>We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate…. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again–to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”
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Titles for pieces to write sometime:
Notes on Watching TV in a Ger in East-Central Mongolia
The Sheep Trap Plot
Fly-icide (in progess)
On Urbanization and the Eating Habits of Town-Center Dwellers in Delgerkhaan, Hentii, Mongolia
from my field notes: “To write: POEM: _I want to kill you, goat_” it came to me when I heard myself yelling this at a particularly stubborn goat (I was herding).
__Maxcax__: _v._ To desire meat
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It lurked in the shadows, behind every counter, beneath every menu waiting for the opportunity to take hold of our GI tracts and wring them for all we’re worth. I made it for 1.5 months without getting really sick. The others weren’t so lucky.
But come, my day, it did…
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Quote (title of finished piece?):
>What a fucking ridiculous place
–KJC