Eat the strawberries.
Like some kind of Buddhist punchline, the stinger to the ultimate cosmic joke, that line keeps ricocheting around the inside of my head: a stray karmic bullet that's expending eons of built up energy by bouncing around my skull and turning my brain to salsa.
For the past three months, I've been coming to this coffee shop or that bar like I'm working two jobs, jobs where I imbibe mood-altering chemicals and make trite observations about the world for spiritual and monetary gain. In that time, I have smiled thrice: once when I closed my old bank account and shoved what little cash I had left into my pockets, once when my cat wagged his tail at me last week, and once when two drunk frat boys got into a fist fight over some blonde who didn't give a damn about either of them and left the bar before first blood was spilled. Eat the strawberries. Zen Buddhists have got a sick sense of humor, which was lost on the frat boys. It's certainly lost on me.
I haven't eaten any strawberries or any other type of fruit since I came out here to get away for a while. Every once in a while, I remember the food guide pyramid that gave me headaches in second grade before I got my glasses. Two to four servings of fruit per day, right there on the right side of the second tier. Or those old fruit commercials on TV, sandwiched between Tony the Tiger and Hasbro, an apple, and orange, and some grapes telling me with their claymation voices that they were as tasty as candy, and better for me! Not that it mattered. My tastebuds must be deformed, or my sweet tooth never came in because sweet things have always disappointed me, candy and otherwise. Most of the time when I find myself eating sweets, some small part of my brain is churning away to figure out if I'm enjoying this thing in my mouth because I'm supposed to or if I actually like it. It never fails to leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Anyway, all the strawberries I could eat are genetically modified and chemically enhanced, the fake fruit of industry. I guess if you're hanging from a breaking vine over an impossibly deep ravine with two man-eating tigers ready to mouth your head if you do climb up, eating a little more industrial sewage before your experiments in free-fall wouldn't be such a big deal. Of course, my death will be much slower, minus the tigers, the cliff, and probably the strawberries too. The rotting taste of cancer cells, multiplying out of control in my throat and chest like a biological model of our national debt, slowly necrosing and blocking out the slim shadow of my self from my meaty corpse is probably what awaits me. A thoroughly modern death, if you please.
My grandfather died of cancer, lungs and throat, wasting away in a private room at the apex of the hospital that he helped to build and run. I remember slipping into his sterile room, the windows sweating from Taipei's humid summer air. My socks whispered over the linoleum floor as I approached the tube-ridden body on the bed with my well-wrapped offering of expressly forbidden beer. The plastic bag rustled and fell to the floor, and a can of sweet barley poison sprayed mist into the light streaming through the curtains. I watched him drink, slowly, so slowly, wondering how the beer tasted in his ravaged throat, with parts of his tongue missing, wheezing through knots of his own substance gone renegade. Two weeks later, I carried his ashes at the front of the Buddhist funeral that he never wanted. Afterwards, I came back to the States to go back to school and there was more smuggling beer, but this time for the living.
If I'm lucky, that's how I'll go: my suffering given solace by loved ones smuggling me beer and cigarettes, bitter and toxic. No strawberries, please.

02/03/2008

Author's Note: Eat up.

Posted on 02/04/2008
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