Oranges from Last Week

getting into the...thing

hello. first and foremost thank you for signing up for the newsletter. you’re here and i’m here and while i’m on the talking side of things, it could be giving if you did too, because then we’d make a conversation and that’d be…well, something. i’ve been thinking about oranges, so while i encamp at my desk, Esther Abrami aglow with the warm white directly overhead, i’ll talk about them.

to peel, to feel, to reel within the outer, then gently, the inner shell of an orange that produces the very stillness of a citric smell, almost like titillating the neural motors for a squeeze through the olfactory, goes directly into the brain and asks to be poured in the mouth that gives the tongue a sense of dance in the far wild. the taste of orange- like the summary of life in your mouth. like Debussy’s glee and Salieri’s sadness on your tongue. like approaching herons, morning silence and evening glum. Evelyn Waugh says “If it could only be like this always- always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe.” and i can think of nothing but oranges. you get a farm-grown, freshly squeezed orange in the breakfast and then retire for hours because orange is a numbing fruit, it arrests, it doesn’t let go, it demands surrender. then you snap out of the orange experience, you go about your day and other one-dimensional sweetness and sourness, the bland approach of every other food that goes in your mouth gets you through fatigued days and weeks that form your routine.

then on a weekend, you sit with the folks in tandem or all by yourself, pour some vodka in your shaker, squeeze half a lemon, add some dry sparkling wine to put its excitement at ease and introduce then, the love child of mandarin and pomelo - orange juice to the mix. you take that shaker and you shake it well, gently and immediately. it gives you the sunset, pulls the Brazillian sub-tropics into its agitation, a deeply rich orange flaming in citrus that you pour in your glass and call it a mimosa. almost immediately, it begins talking about all the winding, stimulating things happening to you. It’s sexy, it’s feral, it’s parlous and yet it lies there on the counter for days and hours and weeks and just before it’s about to rot, it pleads with its difficult outer chamber, through that aged zest in the aroma- peel me wild, motherfucker. you don’t want a rotten, spoiled, angry orange. it’s as toxic when let to rot as it is healthy when taken care of. it becomes a part of the house, it stems itself into the woods, concretes, marbles and it watches you when you eat, when you shoot the breeze, when you touch yourself and every dying sac, all its pip rise to tear through their exocarp as if to say - these violent delights have violent ends.

these oranges are lying on the dining table since the last week and they’ve started to give me the eye, and to death does that range! the Al pacino in Scarface eyes, the Nefertiti eyes, the one shepherd in Et in Arcadia ego eyes, the Usul’s Sihaya and suddenly Sirius in Azkaban eyes. long gaze in afternoons and post dinner redemption. how does one go about tending to these oranges? i’ve had one, i’ve had two and now i can’t have any! some say that smell of an orange can reduce stress, which wasn’t the case when i was longing for that kiss that didn’t happen. i wanted the oranges to resolve the turmoil, to deliver the promises. granted, oranges are not a great alternate for lovers, but they’re just about the right metaphors.

there’s much in a tumult until next time.