Midnight Crisis

Context: Nessa and G. doing internship applications, one day before the deadline. They decide that Facebook might be a good start and provide good inspiration for the “describe your personal strengths” part. They are eating oranges and they type.

G: An orange is like a person.

The juice represents the tears of suffering. Squeezed by malicious hands, scheming evil. In the late hours of the night.

The seeds represent the waste, the anonymity, the meaninglessness of it all. Taken from the flesh, with cold steely knives, only to be left in the rotting trash piles of Naples.

The shell, outer layer, is the thick carapace of hypocrisy. Of social conventions that bid you to say hi, and bye, and thank you, and thank you very much, while our livers distill the dark, black bile of bitterness... wishing we could instead cut their livers open with our thousand daggers of bubbling sarcasm.

And the flesh... the flesh is all that's left after we've all been harvested and processed for juice.

All that remains is the price tag and bar code.


N: Stop writing about Renaissance theories on my wall. Thank you.

A person is like an orange. Instead of having a deep structure, as for example, onions do, a person is thick-skinned. Like an orange.

Like an orange, a person seems simple. It has an exterior that does not resemble in any way what's inside, and that hides the unexpected. You never know whether an orange is sweet or sour, if you look at its skin.


G: [grabbing the computer] For example, today I was just there sitting on the dinner table, chilaxing, and then we were supposed to ya know, eat them oranges. And we got yer ol oranges, and looked at em, and said, aye, yeah, they're all orange. But you know. Who would have thought. We thought we were looking at an orange. But then, we get em oranges, we open em up, and voila, we get RED ORANGES.

That ain’t no right man. What the heck is A RED ORANGE? What is that? Is that like bright red, or something, is that a color?

NO, no, its gotta be a fruit, i mean, no, its not a color. What the heck is a color, its not even a thing, ya know.

I was there, holding a thing, it was a fruit you know, a Red Orange. First one I had ever seen.

Who would have thought? I wouldn't.

Okay, yeah, back to your point.


N: [annoyed, gets back the computer] That’s touching. Thank you. I am, as I said, touched. Inside. Not like an orange would be touched by a person.

Ok. A person is like an orange.

One day, I grabbed a bag of oranges. It said “Sweet Oranges” on the label.

See? A person is like an orange. LABELED. By the society. Who the hell cared that those oranges were not all the same, some sour, some sweet, some more orange, some thick-skinned, some fat, some skinny, some suculent, some dry, they were all the same in the eyes of the society. And the society has no idea.

Ignorants.

I wonder if oranges label other oranges just like people label other people. They might. Imagine two oranges talking to each other, of course, about a third. “Hah. Have you seen that one? Just because she’s bigger and got to be right under the sun at the top of the tree, she thinks she’s on top of the world.”


G: Okay okay okay sorry I just gotta add somethin' real quick.

You know, I’ve seen many oranges down there, in our tropical homeland, and many a proud orange boasted under the sun:

“Aye lads, look at me!
Look at my shiny armor of protein!
What a great…”

And then it was interrupted, its insides half chewed by a bird.Yeah, that’s about it.


N: Yeah. SEE? The good ones die first. All the time.


G: You see what happens?? The proud orange gets eaten by a bird. Do you see? That’s the moral. Pride.


N: A new La Fontaine is born. But then, I wonder, why aren’t there any orange people in the world?

[30 seconds later]

N: What the hell is that sound?

G: Has the roof of your mouth ever been itchy? It happens to me all the time. Then I have to rub it with my tongue and it makes this noise...I thought it happened to everyone. [sad face]