Because I can’t taste you anymore.
At least, not in the way I used to.
Several months ago, I noticed that
trusted flavors lacked their usual zest.
Garlic, yogurt, onions…all tasted bland.
Granted, I’ve never been much of
a cook…Well, food tasted blander
than that.
At first, I thought I was imagining it.
But as time passed, I realized it was real.
Food had lost its zing. It was just plain, tasteless.
Sure, at times a hint of peripheral flavors slipped through the vague ingredients.
I was able to detect gobs of garlic, onions and even burnt toast. Sweet foods tasted sweet but not in a savory way.
All the flavors smushed together into one muted lump that confused my brain.
While I was eating a piece of cake, my brain sent a note.
Hey, you. That’s supposed to be chocolate you’re eating. But I taste nonspecific sweet, not dark chocolate sweet. What’s up with that?
I don’t know what to say. It looks like cake. But…the sights, textures and taste of foods just don’t jive.
I knew what I was eating but there was a communication problem between my tongue and brain. After being BFFs for so many years, suddenly they stopped talking.
My brain sent another note one night while I was eating pepperoni pizza.
Hey, that’s cheese. Isn’t it? And spicy pepperoni with garlic. But all I taste is a hint of spice. Not a specific spice. Again, totally generic and bland. What’s up with that?
Well, I’ve got this stuff in the sensory area of my brain. Lesions force the neurons to take the scenic route, on the back roads, to where they need to go. Instead of the short cut they’re used to.
Oh, yeah, 2001. Now I remember being zapped with electrical impulses during the Sensory Evoked Potential Test.
Hey, I was zapped. You just reacted.
Well, it sucked just the same. But what’s that got to do with the taste of food at a Chinese restaurant?
Sensory, my friend. Senses, lack of taste…
You’ve always been a bit tasteless but never with food.
Well, now we’ve come full circle, or rather full oval, the actual shape of my head.
Just do me a flavor. I mean favor. The next time you eat chocolate cake, smother it with hot fudge, mint chocolate chip ice cream and whip cream. Lots of sweet stuff. Maybe if you inundate your tongue with a potpourri of sweets, you’ll get dessert justice.
Thanks Brain. Now I know why you’re in charge. But you still have my ass to answer to.
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The Children of Violence, a Generation of Lost Innocence
Filed under Commentary, Random Thoughts by Lauren on April 16, 2013 at 5:14 pm {20 comments}As a child in the sixties, my innocence and the innocence of the nation, was shattered by three assassinations, one, years before the others, the others, just several months apart.
My generation could no longer hope for the clichéd, happy resolution at the end of a story. Our world, once a pocket of predictability, had changed. It was no longer a blasé place with innocuous consequences. The evil characters and scary plot twists in films had migrated from the movie screens to our backyards.
Fantasy and reality had synthesized into one glaring truth. Society was damaged. Evil had infiltrated our communities; our futures determined by uncontrollable forces, our lives affected by unnecessary wars that benefited corporations and by violent sociopaths with their fingers on the triggers.
The blood that had spilled from our larger than life heroes, and lesser unknown heroes of the Vietnam War, spilled into our national consciousness and created a generation of lost innocents, once content with the bland, black and white stories of suburbia portrayed in the TV show, Leave it to Beaver, and the Cleaver family, the perfect American family with uncomplicated lives.
The colorless, black and white images of the fifties gave way to blood-stained Technicolor images of the sixties and seventies, of students murdered on college campuses and soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.
From Vietnam to Kent State to Jackson State, my generation was traumatized by indiscriminate shootings of, and by, our protectors, and the victims who fell from the force of their guns. On the ground, spurting blood, a generation of innocent lost to senseless violence.
For my generation, many of the tragedies we witnessed on TV were a result of social change in society, with the exception of the deaths of our three larger than life heroes, whose murders we watched on TV sets in our living rooms, footage replayed night-after-night in prime-time.
This generation of children today, unlike my generation, never had the luxury of black and white simplicity. They never had the peaceful pause of silence before the next raging storm. Their innocence was taken from them soon after they were born by the violent images they see on TV, perpetuated by sociopaths who emerge from the shadows with their fingers on the triggers.
The murderers of innocence should heed the words projected on the wall of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Photo by Chris Roan