One of my favorite flavors of candy has
always been banana. I love banana Laffy Taffy, banana Starburst, and even those
little yellow banana-shaped pieces. What are those called again? Bananaheads! I
used to eat them all the time! Mom gave me quarters, which I fed to the machine
in exchange for the holy banana grail. Couldn’t get enough. Of course, the good
candies never actually taste like real bananas. There is this hint of flavor
they encompass that is lost within the original banana. Did America screw up
our banana growing to the point at which I can no longer get bananas that taste
how I like?
After doing some Google research, I
came across a Tumblr post explaining why banana candies don’t taste like
banana: the form of banana that the flavoring is based on was wiped out. Wow,
what a fun fact! Banana-ness no longer exists in the form that it was best. We
blew it, world. I searched for more information on the subject, but none
surfaced. That’s how it is. No more sickeningly sweet bananas.
Humans, though… we don’t like to
give things up. We faked the flavor. Now, we keep it forever. To love and to
cherish. It’s almost as good as the real thing, right? Who knows, the real
thing died.
---
I get really emotional whenever I
listen to music by Radiohead. Especially Fake Plastic Trees. I swirl the
lyrics to that song around in my head every morning and every day throughout
school. If I could be who you wanted… There’s something about Radiohead
that makes you question things. The song is about a kind of fabricated love
that felt like the real thing, but wore out both parties involved. If I
could be who you wanted, all the time… For me, it emphasizes that the
feelings were fake, that everything seems fake, and suddenly it becomes
possible that everything is fake. Emotions are not tangible. You can’t
reach out with a fist and grab them. Do they even exist?
Authorial intent should be the focus
of anyone digging way too deeply into song lyrics, but I’d rather dig for what
it can mean for me.
How much of my life is as artificial
as banana candy? As artificial as Fake Plastic Trees? How much of it is
spent on trying to recall a former feeling? I think about the days that I spend
reading books because I would rather read instead of talking with people. What really
happens in my life? I mean, I tell myself that I do original things like
write poetry and think about original things like when that hot barista who is
kind of my friend but not really will ask me out. That’s my sugar-coated take
on the situation. The truth: I do nothing. My mind doesn’t want to think I do
nothing. My mind makes something up. I read a book recently, by A. S. King,
which talked about the fact that no ideas are original, only repackaged
versions of previous ideas. If that’s true, than everything that happens now is
just as artificial as my reproduction of the day. The real thing died out long
ago, once it was done a single time, and now our lives are sorry attempts to
recreate those experiences. But like those Gros Michel bananas, the originals
no longer exist for us to compare them to.
Nothing is original. Nothing is
real.
---
In the past, there were homosexuals,
pansexuals, asexuals, et cetera with no names to describe them. They knew they
liked people of their same gender or all genders or no genders at all, but when
asked about their significant other, they were like, “Well, you see, I’m…” With
a dot dot dot. Naturally, groups of these people congregated. Soon, they
suggested, “Hey, let’s make a word that means this so that we will feel less
alone.” So they did. They called themselves queer, genderfluid, bi, dozens of
other labels. And it branched off from there. More words. More groups of people.
More defining characteristics. They made so many darn words until our language
could describe every little dash on the spectrum of gay to straight, male to
female, rich to poor. We synthesized up word after word after word until they
sounded so fake that saying them more than twice in a row made you question
your sanity. But humans love fake things. Fake things are our friends. After
all, giving something an injection of piquancy can cover the aroma of whatever
it was before. Bring on the Fake Plastic Trees, if they’ll hurt us less
than the real thing. Yes, we make up things within our made-up worlds.
I guess the point it boils down to
is this: We’d rather things be good than real. If you need to formulate a story,
so be it. If you need to copy the work of those before, that’s acceptable. It’s
a small sacrifice to trade authenticity for perfection. If we see a bridge we
cannot cross, a sadness we cannot overcome, a void we cannot press through, we repeat
ourselves and make up different scenarios to cover the truth. Made-up words, to
make us feel wanted. Made-up plotlines, to cover our situation. Made-up
feelings, so we can justify the existential despair hanging over our heads.
We will choose ourselves over
reality every single time.
If I could be who you wanted,
if I could give you the taste of original banana, then maybe things would be
less of a hologram and more like a palpable universe. Unfortunately, things
just don’t work that way. It’s impossible to be truly real, because everything
has already been done. For the time being, we must exist in our small plastic
world with our artificially-flavored brains jotting down notes. It’s not that
bad, is it, being fake?
I like strawberry flavoring better
anyways.
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