by Myles Tanzer

“Nothing is certain but death and taxes” and, since 2007, “trend pieces about miracle fruit parties.” Oh yes: “The miracle fruit party” is the trend piece that just won’t die, despite that there have likely been more feature stories about miracle fruit parties than there have been actual miracle fruit parties.

The Wall Street Journal went big in 2007 with an A1 story that explained that the berries are “a slightly tart West African berry with a strange property: For about an hour after you eat it, everything sour tastes sweet.” Then NPR couldn’t wait to tell all of their listeners about it. The New York Times waited a full year and first wrote their “berry trend piece” in 2008 with a story called “A Tiny Fruit That Tickles The Tongue.” This part of the article is pretty smutty:

Nearby, Yuka Yoneda tilted her head back as her boyfriend, Albert Yuen, drizzled Tabasco sauce onto her tongue. She swallowed and considered the flavor: “Doughnut glaze, hot doughnut glaze!”

It rolls on and on. All this hot trend action — shouldn’t I have a miracle fruit party myself?

It’s so persuasive! “The new party drug: berries,” wrote the Globe and Mail in 2009. “Every Wednesday night Three Sheets offers to mess up people’s taste buds but good at a ‘flavor tripping party,’” wrote the Atlanta Journal-Constitution”; “Never before had I seen anyone smile with lemon juice dripping down their face,” wrote the Montreal Gazette, both in mid-2010. And even a few weeks ago: “Miracle fruit berries sweeten sour world” was a recent piece by a “horticulture instructor at Trident Technical College” in the Charleston Post and Courier.

Worried that this trend was in danger of petering out, I decided to take action to save it. I ordered the berries in pill form from Amazon and they arrived within the same week. My group of friends usually congregate on Wednesdays for our usual mid-week slosh-fest so I figured it would be a good day to try them out.

We huddled around my tiny East Village kitchen and “slowly rolled the berries around” in our mouths, just like the package said. I cut up some of our edibles in the mean time.

“I feel like we all just took acid!” one of my friends said. He was right! There was definitely that sense of group experimentation of the unknown that only drugs can give a group of friends. (This drug comparison crops up in about 30% of “miracle fruit” trend stories.)

The zinc-tasting tablets dissolved in a slow cough-drop-like way (not in a fizzy way). We then picked up some fruits from the cutting board and tried our first bites.

The lemon tasted like the sweetest lemonade in the world! The limes tasted just like a slice of Key Lime Pie from a great southern diner! Raspberries were way sweeter than ever before — tartness completely removed. The assortment of sour gummies? Sweetest candy we’d ever tried! (This assertion appears in about 100% of “miracle fruit” trend stories.)

The standout was by far the spoonfuls of cream cheese we eagerly scooped from the container. It tasted like a perfect bite of cheesecake.

The granddaddy of all trends had come and rocked our world. We worshiped at the throne of The Mighty Trend Piece and came out with near bliss. And we can safely say that this magic trend piece will never die, because there’s a need to overshare about it.

A friend had to run quickly to a local bar, No Malice Palice, and immediately texted back: “just had a slice of lime with a Tequila shot. Holy shit!” He tried to explain to his bar friends what was going on but they just thought he was crazy. So thank goodness there are all of these articles out there to convince the non believers.

I’ve never seen a more bald admission that the big New York newspaper is for and about white, well-off people, even as it acknowledges that this is so. “There have always been, and will always be, barriers in real estate, lines that certain buyers will not cross…. But as people of means continue to crowd the city, those lines have been shifting.”

*No, not really, they won’t. We’re only talking about white people moving from 96th Street to 102nd Street. In Manhattan! Brave, brave white “people of means.”

“Whenever you handle a firearm, whether you are a novice or experienced, always treat firearms as though they are loaded. If you are going to carry a handgun on your person, use a holster, not your waistband.”
 — Chandler, AZ Police Detective Seth Tyler urges citizens to take more care with their sidearms in the wake of an incident in which a man accidentally shot himself in the penis with his girlfriend’s pink handgun. [Via]

Let’s talk about love. It is patient and kind. It is lighter than air. Its power is curious, making one man cry out in anguish while causing another to lift his voice in a musical fashion. It hurts, scars, wounds, etc. And yet, with everything we know about love — it never stays, its ending is always accompanied by pain and regret, the heartbreaks it engenders often last a lifetime — we continue to seek it out, blithely convincing ourselves that this time will be different, that there is actually a real, enduring love out there and not only will we find it but, against all evidence to the contrary, we deserve it. And that, I think, is why we’re so desperate for love. When we are loved, we are briefly able to ignore how deeply unworthy we are as people. Our pettiness, our baseness, our selfishness, our vacuity — all these things go out the window when we are the object of someone’s affection. Even though we know it is only temporary, those moments of being special, of being valued, of being at the center of someone else’s heart, are the most precious moments of human existence. No wonder we crave it so desperately; it is the only thing that assures us we are worthwhile. Also, it makes our partners think that we are much more attractive than we really are, which is a nice bonus.

Photo by mozzercork

“A wife who gets too chummy with her husband’s best friends undermines his ‘autonomy and privacy,’ and may inadvertantly be causing hubby’s erectile dysfunction.”

One thing you don’t want to do probably is go a-thieving in a total surveillance society. The Metropolitan Police have set up a Flickr account with pretty pictures of a few people who have apparently gone robbing in North London at some point before or after these images were captured. It’s the modern version of the “WANTED” poster, but en masse. Of course, some people have taken to Tumblr to do this vigilante style. In less dramatic imagery of the day, people have apparently taken to the streets with brooms to tidy up. Awww! And more to be found here.

In other, totally unrelated news from London, the headlines at the Guardian this morning include “Senior London officer says authorities will consider using rubber bullets to quell rioting” and “Lloyds bank axing 1,300 more jobs.” (As a result of the takeover of Lloyds by HBOS, announced in 2009, nearly 45,000 jobs have been eliminated.) Combined, the two entities have received more than £40 billion from the government since the recession.

Oh, one more: “The Prime Minister flew back into the UK from Tuscany where he was on holiday to take personal charge of efforts to quell the rioting.”

That thing we used to laugh about has finally come to pass, with the nuptials of Lauren Bush (the daughter of Neil Bush, who is brother to Jeb and George W.) and David Lauren (son of Ralph Lauren, formerly Ralph Lifshitz): “The bride will take the name “Lauren Bush Lauren.”

Is that Drake, in the pink shirt, tan sweater vest and bow-tie, dancing next to Jaleel White in Cee-Lo’s new video? It almost could be, right?

“On Thursday, a group of Buddhists traveled to Gloucester and purchased 534 lobsters, about 600 pounds worth, from a wholesaler and dumped them back into the sea in a prayer ceremony in which the crustaceans’ bands were cut and blessed water was sprayed on them…. Yesterday, lobstermen from the fishing vessel Degelyse said they had traveled to the site of the ceremony, laid their traps, and hauled up exactly 534 lobsters, according to a local blog, Goodmorninggloucester.org. And then they brought their haul right back to market.”

I went away for three days last week, up to a cabin in the woods that is owned by a couple I am lucky enough to know who have not been going there much lately because they just had a baby. It’s in Catskill, New York, where Cus D’Amato taught Mike Tyson how to box. It’s very secluded. You can’t see any other houses. So it’s an excellent place to go to be by yourself and write apology letters to people from your past who probably don’t even remember you. It is definitely a cabin, as opposed to a house. Very rustic, no frills. It was built in the ’60s by someone who was obviously not an architect, and its tilted beams and cracked foundation have had me wondering, on past visits, whether the place might suddenly collapse on my head. There’s no heating or television or telephone. (Though it does now get cell-phone reception, which is new this year — they must have just built one of those cleverly disguised fake-tree phone towers nearby.) The walls are thin. There are screens on most of the windows, but lots of bugs still get inside. And some animals, too. A years-long battle against the squirrels who like to make nests beneath the roof and chew through the plaster has, I’m happy to report, apparently been won by the humans. (Congratulations, humans! Oh, and on the birth of your child, too!)

But on Wednesday, I was visited by a bear.

It was around noon. I was standing in the kitchen, looking out into the woods through the window to the porch, when I saw a dark shape moving slowly toward the cabin through the trees. It took me a minute to be sure what it was. But sure enough, it was a bear. A black bear.

Needless to say, this was very exciting! There are few things in life that I enjoy more than watching wild animals. And bears, as any reader of the Awl will surely know, are some of the awesomest wild animals around. A large part of me was very happy to be seeing what I was seeing. But another part was less happy. One of the reasons that bears are so awesome is that they’re so dangerous. We all know the stories: from Grizzly Man to the horrible attack on the British scouts in Norway this past weekend. Bears kill people.

I have seen bears in person before. Up around Catskill, even. (And once, when I was little, at a scenic lookout point in Glacier Park in Canada, I saw a bear jump over a stone wall onto a picnic table where another family of tourists was having lunch. It opened its jaws and roared to scare them — which worked very well; I’ve never seen people scatter so fast — before settling into eating the food they’d left.) Generally, though, my previous bear sightings have been through the windows of a comparatively safe-feeling car. Here in this flimsy-walled, thin-windowed cabin, it felt quite different.

At first I thought the bear was a cub. Which is little consolation, because when you see a bear cub, you assume that its instinctively defensive mother must be nearby — and displeased and made extra defensive by your presence. But as the small-looking bear came closer and closer, rubbing its head against the branches, eating the blueberries that grow at the edge of the yard, it got to looking bigger. It was not a cub. It was the size of a large German shepherd — except of course much thicker.

I was enrapt. I didn’t want to take my eyes off it. But I crept into the living room to make sure the door was locked. (Then, imagining the bear crashing through a back window, reconsidered: Would that slow my escape? I calculated the distance up the hill to where I’d parked the rental car, and thought about the fact that I was wearing flip-flops. Still, I decided to leave it locked.) I picked up my cellphone and dialed my wife at her office as I walked back into the kitchen.

While it was ringing, I thought about the video I’d seen recently bout how to survive an attack by a black bear. You’re supposed to fight, as opposed to playing dead — which is advised in the case of a grizzly attack. I scanned my surroundings and made a mental note of the location of the largest knife in the knife rack, a meat cleaver hanging above the stove, and, being that these things were so glaringly short-handled, a set of barbecue tongs and a spatula. (Ha ha ha! “No, not the spatula!” says the 300-pound bear.)

The phone rang until voice mail picked up. My wife was away from her desk or on the other line, as is always the case when you’re making what you think might be the last phone call of your life.

“Hi,” I said, after the beep. “There’s a bear coming through the woods toward the cabin.” I could hear the giddy trill in my voice. “Umm… I hope he doesn’t try to come in! Call me back!”

I watched as the bear ambled into the yard, which is not a big yard, so I had a good close look at it. It was so cool. I would have taken a picture or a video, if I knew how to use my phone to do anything except make phone calls. I am embarrassed to admit how stupid I am with tech gadgets. Oh! I know how to send text messages. I could have sent the bear a text, I guess, one minute before I was supposed to meet it at a restaurant for dinner, telling it I was running late and would “B there in 5!” when I knew it would B more like 15. But, as is apparent, that wouldn’t have added much to this blog post.

It was clear that the bear didn’t know it was being watched. It was just doing its own thing, sniffing around, checking things out, pawing at rocks and logs. It had very small eyes, and a long snout, and the golden fur on its underbelly was matted and twig-strewn. It hung out there for ten minutes or so. Maybe thirty feet away, through the window.

My wife called back. “I don’t like that,” she said. I told her I knew where the spatula was. She made fun of me. We got off the phone quickly. I didn’t want to be making any noise. “Don’t get eaten by a bear,” she said.

Then the bear came closer, right up to the edge of the cabin, where I couldn’t see it. I didn’t like that. Didn’t like the thought of feeling a tap on my shoulder a minute later and turning to see it standing right next to me. It had appeared to be moving in the direction of the front of the house, so I went quickly back in to the living room, and looked through the window of the door. Nope. Couldn’t see it. I ran on my tiptoes back through the kitchen, to another window with a view of the back yard. Pulling the curtains to the side, I peeked out and was both relieved and startled to see the bear sniffing around the stairs there leading up onto the porch. It was ten feet away from me. I stood very still.

It turned its head, though. It had seen me. We stayed there looking at each other for a moment. I wondered what it was thinking. “Who is that bald guy?” I guess. I was thinking about how this bear kept looking larger and larger the closer up I saw it. Which shouldn’t have been surprising, I suppose, but the lesson of perspective was driven home by a recurring mental image of my viscera in the bear’s mouth.

Then the bear turned around and moseyed back into the woods in the direction from which it came. It wasn’t in any hurry.