yes, we have no bananas

learning to not fear, fear, that dark bastard.  i've been on my knees before fear my whole life.  sometimes he -- i assume fear is a male, it could be female, it could also be of both sexes and no sex, but since i think fear is often the mirror image of ourselves i think of fear as a he -- takes the shape of a generalized anxiety.  sometimes fear drives a neurochemical spike thru the brain when the fight of flight instinct is set into overdrive.  that fucker has no sense of humor.  i make up for that blighted fact by insisting that life is written by a comedian.  a very black comedy that is funny nonetheless.  e.g. a couple of years ago i had a spike in potassium levels when i got blood drawn for a physical.  high potassium levels can cause heart attacks.  i confessed to my physician that i eat 7 to 8 bananas a day.  i'm addicted to the yellow fruit.  could that be the cause for my potassium to be so high?  perhaps.  so i went cold turkey.  for months.  out of fear.  then one day i thought -- with much guidance from anna on the subject --  out the risks and resumed my banana habit but at a lower rate.  i have two bananas for breakfast every morning.  sometimes three.  i read that there is only one commercial variety of banana left, the yellow banana, out of what were scores of varieties of bananas and if there is some banana pestilence to spread among the yellow banana that would be the end of bananas, forever.  i am fearful of that and of our hubris to diminish the varieties of nature in pursuit of commercial exploitation.  i buy two or three bunches of bananas every few days.  like last friday.  after a long day at work i stopped at the store for some victuals and beer, and bananas.  it is a friday night and the store is packed with mostly young people with their beer and booze at the checkout lines.  and here i am, a middle-aged husband, father and poet, in line like everyone else with my victuals, beer and bananas.  i think i am the only one on the planet to buy so many, so often, bananas.  but then i glance at the cart of the young man behind me.  i expect to find loads of beer and/or booze.  lo!  his cart is stuffed with three to four bunches of bananas!  nothing more.  and i fear that he may possess a similar fear that we are on the verge of a world without bananas because we have, in the pursuit of money, wiped out all the varieties of bananas but for one.  and so he grabs as many as he can while he can.  because bananas may not, like us, make the long run.