the musical fruit: movement #26.
song: "comatose," pearl jam
fruit: avocado
holy crap i used to love pearl jam. after a high school existence filled with gangsta rap, i headed to college & was ready for something different. n.w.a. had already broken up, so it was time to move on & i, based on exposure to smashing pumpkins, alice in chains & sonic youth via my younger brother, started focusing my musical obsessions towards guitar rock, mostly of the grunge variety. i bought everything that alice in chains & screaming trees & nirvana put out. i had the singles soundtrack. i even owned candlebox's self-titled debut. after years growing up in nh, i was definitely excited that flannel shirts had finally become en vogue.
pearl jam was the pinnacle though. i had a ten poster on my wall. i bought two copies of vs at newbury comics on midnight on the day it came out, since the early editions came without an album title printed on them. in fact, i still have an unwrapped copy that i hope will one day put my kids through college. i lost my shit when eddie showed up on snl playing a guitar. to this day, "jeremy" is one of my staple karaoke songs, but at some point after vitalogy, i stopped thinking they were so vital & moved on. between the whole ticketmaster battle, the fact that i wasn't yet ready for stark politics in my music & the oft-cheesy songs they started to write, i got bored with them.
recently, i decided to give their self-titled 2006 album a chance & was glad to hear that it's not as lame as their last few albums. at the time it came out, they hadn't put out an album since 2002's riot act (their longest span between albums) & they came back with a mostly-rocking album that's often been described as closer to their early stuff. my favorite song off the album is the third song in--"comatose"--which, other than a minute reprise near the end of the record, is the shortest song on the album. it reminds me of their earlier stuff like "spin the black circle" & "animal" & "porch," songs that make me feel young again. it's as close to punk as pearl jam gets. so yeah, if you have two minutes to rock out, it's the best song they've put out in some time.
holy crap i used to love avocados. i still adore them & eat them often but for a while i was eating an avocado a day, putting them in bagel sandwiches with turkey bacon & tomatoes and chopping them up into grilled chicken salads & guacamoles on the reg. with its unique, multi-colored texture & its nutty, slightly buttery taste, it's a damn delectable fruit & i figure that, since they're essentially healthy & they've been shown to have positive effects on cholesterol levels, by eating them, i'm getting both fruit yumminess & some portion of my nutritional requirements at the same time. plus, most of the ones i eat are from cali, so i figure i'm helping some undocumented avocado worker get money back to his family in mexico...anything i can do fruitwise to help strengthen the global economy is alright by me.
the avocado pictured above is of the haas variety & once i got rid of those nasty brown spoiled parts on the bottom, it ended up being part of a pretty tasty guacamole. i was at a birthday/holiday gathering a few weeks back & there was guacamole on hand & for a brief moment, the conversation turned to guac prep. james call (of missing teens fame) had a hand in the guac prep & he noted that his style was to scoop the avocado right out of the shell, whereas the cute female specimen in the conversation believed in chopping the avocado into slices first before mashing it up. i'm usually a chopper & i usually like to agree with cute female specimens, but after hearing mr call's comments about guac prep, i decided to mix it up with this avocado, so i scooped & mashed it before mixing it in some with some red & green onions, cilantro & lime & going to town with some black bean chips. i polished off a whole bowl of guac by myself in one sitting & in the end, i was left...food comatose.