The Bitter Press

I have been patient. I have written the column. I have used simple sentences. I have repeated myself with a graciousness that borders, frankly, on the heroic. And still — still — I receive correspondence from fruits who wish to know whether fuzziness is, and I am quoting directly, "really that important." This question is not one I will be dignifying with a measured response. Instead I will be dignifying it with this.

Fuzziness is not decorative. It is not a finishing touch, a seasonal accent, or a personal choice in the way that, say, a hat brim is a personal choice. It is structural. It is load-bearing. A fruit without fuzz is a fruit that has declined to be finished, and I do not mean that metaphorically. I mean it in the most literal architectural sense I am capable of deploying at this hour.

I raise this now because the so-called workers at the rival rag have, as a collective body, achieved a new register of wrongness. Kiwi, who is technically fuzzy and yet somehow wears it as though it were an apology, continues to disappoint. Plum has the audacity of surface without the commitment of texture. Lemon I will not even discuss. Lemon is a cautionary tale that has refused, for reasons I cannot explain, to conclude.

My colleagues at The Bitter Press are not without their own questions to answer — Pomelo's relationship with sheen remains unresolved and Durian, bless him, is operating under a different set of rules entirely — but they are not the subject of this column. The subject of this column is the bare fruit. The smooth fruit. The fruit that looked at fuzz and said: not for me. That fruit is wrong. That fruit has always been wrong. That fruit will not be accommodated here.

Fuzziness is not a trend. It is the standard against which all other surfaces are measured and found wanting. This column did not invent that standard. This column merely enforces it, thanklessly, every single week.