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The dream . . .

The Great Eugenius Juicing Experience

Juicing can lead to a much healthier lifestyle giving the juicee more energy, vigour, strength, stamina, joy and money, and sometimes turning him or her orange, depending on the juice. It also contributes to less weight, less anxiety, fewer bad thoughts at 4 AM and, overall, a lessening of the sense of futility one (ie, a non-juicee) may experience when confronting, on a daily basis, the gaping existential void.

Reminiscent of the situation in Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, this Eugene sat by for some time as more and more of my friends became juicees and sang the praises of juicing and the many, many benefits thereof (see paragraph one).  And so nudged into it by peer pressure and a typical North American sense of entitlement that I should look younger and feel better at 56 than I did at 16, not to mention the certain right to immorality, I took the plunge the other day and came away from London Drugs with a Nutri-Bullet, which happily was on sale for $96.00, although what it costs when it’s not on sale is not clear to me as I am not a wise consumer. I am impulsive and reckless. According to my juiced-up friends, one I start juicing myself (so to speak) I will become a better consumer and will begin to make more prudent choices when I engage in retail therapy.

I brought the big box home and sat it on my kitchen counter. It made me feel so healthy! I love the photo of all the leafy greens and fresh fruit and nuts and all the rest of it. I must say, I began to feel much healthier and could feel a renewed vigour creeping into my loins (as they say) just from looking at that picture.

Time (or lack of), fatigue and alcohol prevented me from actually opening the big box for several days, which was unfortunate because immediately after purchasing the Nutri-Bullet I went across the street to Safeway and bought all kinds of leafy greens and fresh fruits and nuts – they can be found in a section of the store I had never been in before, that specializes in non-meat, non-dairy, gluten-free, unfrozen and unpackaged edible substances commonly known as fruits and vegetables.

These I also left on my kitchen counter. I don’t know what I was thinking – that the box might unpack itself and my leafy greens (spinach) and carrots and nuts might just hop into the big jar, ready for me to transform them into a nourishing and sustaining mulch one morning?

That obviously never happened. And it’s too bad it didn’t, because let me tell you, spinach left in a plastic bag on a counter top soon turns into a green slimy goo, rendering the juicer somewhat redundant. (At the same time, it should be noted, my genetically modified carrots will probably survive beyond Armageddon, where they will no doubt nourish and sustain the various cockroaches and rats and politicians who will be the only survivors , but I digress.)

Undeterred, and by now an ardent devotee of the Nutri-Bullet (I have found myself endorsing it to several friends now, both on Facebook and the part of my existence that is other than Facebook, which I believe they used to call “real life”), I found myself lugging home a huge bag of “fresh farm produce” procured from a friend who sells this stuff out of the back of his car behind Caffe Beano. This is the serious stuff that only the real devoted friends of the juice render down into nourishing drinks, let me tell you. Actually, come to think of it, I can’t tell you what any of it is – was – because I don’t know the names and couldn’t spell them if I did. (I think one of them rhymes with “ridiculous,” but I’m not really sure.)

Well, the long skinny things with the big green leaves soon went the way of the spinach, only this time in my sink, and the bag of green stuff that I at least put in the fridge began stinking up my entire apartment – from the fridge, yet! Clearly, in the interest of public health, it all had to go.  I have a small cucumber left which is shriveling down to the size of a big peanut even as I type these words, as well as a zucchini and all I have to say about that is I don’t care for zucchini even when it magically and mysteriously makes its way into a chocolate cake.

And so, to recap: two weeks in and not a drop of juice has been juiced – or in the parlance of juicing, extruded – let alone ingested by this wannabe juicee. $140.00 into my juicing regime, the juicer is still in the box and I don’t expect it to come out of there any time soon. I ended up eating the nuts and opened up a can of cream corn a few days ago but I don’t suppose that really counts.

Still, through it all, I have become an ardent fan of juicing. I think it’s very good for you and I hope this post has encouraged you to become a juicee yourself.

But it seems for me, it’s just not meant to be.

Thanks for reading!

As for the song, what can I say? I love puns!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-pswfTBt78