Tea

This tea tastes like leaves.

Well, granted that tea is made from leaves, there’s a proper extent to which it would – and should – taste like leaves.  But then, apart from the question of the source of the thing, it should, also, taste like tea.  After all, you wouldn’t expect cake to taste like flour, nor salt like rocks, nor wine like oak barrels and feet, nor shoes like cows. This tea tastes like leaves, and not like tea.  Assuming that you would let pass the fact that I’m not British and therefore by default do not know what I’m talking about when it comes to tea, this tea really isn’t like proper tea at all.

Take Marlboro Blue, for example.  It tastes like paper.  Not like a proper cigarette, which tastes like, well, a cigarette, with the requisite nicotine and tar and added in for the health benefits.  Blue, on the other hand, tastes like someone took a roll of paper, burned it, and rolled it back into a cigarette.  This is, incidentally, a nice complement to the kind of coffee that tastes like someone took an empty cup of a particularly well-brewed coffee, washed it, and then served the wash water.  One might've added a dash of sugar for a measure of mercy, but then you can somehow tell that their heart wasn’t really in it.

Take some people, for another example.  Not that they taste like paper or like leaves, though some of them might, but there’s this nagging feeling that they aren’t really people.  Some people are more like paper, in that they are stories rather than lives; tales rather than experiences, reflections rather than the real things.  In an altogether different way, some people would consider stealing from the blind, some would understand people as things and therefore use them as things, some people would destroy things just for the reasons that they can and that there’re things there, some people would sacrifice what nebulous thing being human means for a host of other less nebulous things, like being rich. 

It might be a question of definition then.  You could identify tea as something made from leaves, a cigarette as something made from leaves and paper, coffee as something made from more leaves and beans, but how would you identify people then?  Saying that they are something made from cells and muscles and electricity and snot would miss the point, whereas saying that they are something made from ideals and principles would be too limiting and unreal.  However – and this is the worst part – if you drop the something altogether you would end up with nothing more substantial – and something truly terrifying, at least to the British – than tea that tastes like leaves, cigarettes that taste like burnt paper, coffee that  tastes like wash water.  Granted, there’s sugar – but you can tell the heart would not be in it.