Porn redux: What does real Orange Juice tell us about real Sex?

Hi everyone,

It is possible that the single most important thing I’ve learned in the last 60 something years is that if you just pay attention you’ll never have to make up anything.

It turns out real life is infinitely more amazing than anything imagination can conjure.

Throwing cow pies at censoring pornography (by using Plato?!) triggered a hilarious ripple of memory from early in my career. I wrote all this down, at the time, because I knew I’d be telling this story, literally, for the rest of my life.

I started my life-as-a-professor as an adjunct (a temp worker) down at Stetson University¹ in DeLand,² Florida. My next door neighbors that year were a really wonderful young, slightly yuppy, couple in the American Studies department. In the course of setting up their first home they’d accumulated all the requisite paraphernalia to squeeze and enjoy local, fresh orange juice: a 1950’s vintage electric juicer and a tray of those small orange juice glasses, discovered at the local Goodwill.

I mean it was Florida after all and DeLand, at that time, was on the northern edge of orange growing country.

Now, I’d always wondered about those little orange juice glasses you used to get at restaurants. You know those tiny ones? Typically about 4 ounces? They’d always seemed all out of proportion to the amount of orange juice you actually needed to kick start breakfast at a Waffle House, IHOP, or Denny’s. I mean, a big (BIG!) full glass of tangy orangy goodness always seemed necessary on weekend mornings when, dragging myself out of bed, I’d join other slightly hungover student buddies in a pilgrimage to a once-a-week meal out.

Those tiny glasses made no sense until <dramatic pause> until, that is, I discovered Florida’s “heirloom oranges.” I’m talking real oranges here: the original, pre-sunshine state, pre-industrialized, and pre-watered-down-for-mass-consumption, Ur-oranges. You know how California produces wine they never sell out of state? Or tequila in Mexico that never makes it up to El Norte because, c’mon, it’s too good to sell to the anyone else? That’s what these oranges were. You had to know somebody … you probably still do, if they even still exist.

Anyway, Anne and Paul next door knew a guy out in the country who still had an acre or two of these trees and, if you were lucky, you could buy a box from him once in a while.

They were lucky. And they had the gear.

It’s frankly impossible to describe the taste — and the raw physical impact — of real, un-GMO’d oranges. These were wild oranges. Dangerous wild oranges. The flavor is less a flavor than it is a full body electrocution in orange. One sip and your head explodes with a nuclear conflagration of citrus intensity. The world turns blood orange. Reality is overwritten with orange. All previous memories and judgments concerning orange juice are obliterated – peeled from the brain stem and discarded like flavorless old rinds. All previous experiences of orange-ness are obliterated by a new worldview, and higher consciousness, in which heirloom oranges establish themselves as the paradigm, the paragon, the Kubla Khan of all comparison – and there is no comparison: there is only the Pleasure Dome of Heirloom Oranges.

“Oh!” you’ll exclaim, temples throbbing with indescribably delicious orange fire, “so that’s what orange juice is supposed to taste like!” As if you’d been waiting your entire life to taste oranges and now, after decades of mistaking orange shadow puppets for the reality, you were finally exposed to real reality.

It’s a pretty dramatic experience and reality, it turns out, is addictive.

Once you’ve had real orange juice all the commodified economically efficient genetically modified versions taste like warm water with an orange crayon dipped in it.

So, they’re like that….

…

What were we talking about again?