Fruit

It’s kinda quiet here today. The copiers are going off down the hall and though there is still the intermittent humming of the florescent ballasts no one seems to hear but me, overall I’d say it’s gonna be a slow sort of day.

I tried to eat an orange this morning. I say I tried because I was unsuccessful and wound up throwing all but one slice away. If I have but one flaw (which would be a lie, I know I have many far worse than this) it’s my intolerance for lousy fruit. I have no patience for a dry orange or a mushy apple, no hunger for a green banana or a hard pear. For the most part fruit and I get along like my cats get along with my kids. We co-habitate and at times find each other’s company beneficial, but most of the time we just avoid each other.

When I was younger, it used to be that it was only the deceptive fruits and vegetables I disliked. You know, the raisins that hide in chocolate-chip cookies pretending to be a toll-house morsel, or the jalapeno pepper hiding as a common bell pepper: the ones who rely on trickery to get you to eat them. In those days I would choke down bite after bite of hard cantaloupe or dry melon, figuring that since I already bought, peeled, sliced, chopped, etc., I was already too heavily invested in the produce to not eat it all.

I have since changed my mind. These days I take a bite and if it’s no good, I throw it away: the whole thing. Some times all I have to do is sink my teeth into a mushy apple and I throw it away, I don’t even take a bite. I can tell just by the way my teeth break through the skin whether or not it’s an apple I’m going to eat. The same way you know how it’s going to taste the moment the spoon sinks into the cantaloupe; all hard and watery.

Where I sometimes run into a problem lately is with obligation fruit. Fruit that requires a particular time commitment to eat, fruit, like say, an orange. Oranges are dangerous fruit in that the more time spent peeling it and getting rid of the tasteless white chunky stuff, the more obligated one feels to eat it. Because oranges can take a considerable time investment, even when they’re lousy, which almost all oranges here in Washington are, I will usually choke down a few slices in the fervent illusion that the next segment will contain the required amount of juice/taste needed to finish. In the end, I wind up with a big pulpy ball of orange matter in my stomach and the feeling that I wished I had stuck to my guns and thrown it all away after the first bite.

These days I don’t eat many oranges anymore, best just to avoid the whole hassle.

Gladys just brought an unused fruit platter from this morning management meeting into the break room. I think I’ll head on down there and see if there’s anything good. I gotta say I like fruit platters though. No investment = obligation, no peeling or coring, just small squares of fruit that if I don’t like, I can turn my head, aim for the garbage and spit it right out.