A perfect day for banana fish & reimagining society post COVID-19

In trying to think of a title for this post I was trying to find something perfect. I went for a JD Salinger short story title, the bananafish story. It turns out it’s also the translation of a title from a Shoji anime/ manga, which is a bit ‘sexy’ and aimed at Japanese teenage girls, which the photo of the handcuffed boys above might suggest.

There is no moral to that very, very story except that it is something of a metaphor for looking at things differently and changing your paradigms, challenging your preconceptions. So from classic American bananafish stories set by the beach to Japanese detective sex stories, seemingly set in S&M dungeons (forgive my naivety if there’s no such thing) maybe it’s time to look at the world differently. I mean a banana having something to do with fish! How entertaining! How dandy! A bananafish having something to do with sexy shoju manga - well that’s probably up there with sausages jumping into hotdog buns and perhaps rather obvious.

Do you know, I started writing this blog thinking about how we should jump into investing more in wind turbines, solar panels and other renewable energies (all that hippy shit I think about during the lockdown). I was thinking post COVID-19 crisis, of ways of investing in the future rather than looking bleakly and nostalgically to the past. I was thinking of other boring things like investing heavily in battery technologies, lithium and sulfur based ones and the such, that sort of thing.

But instead I’ve been side tracked by sex stories. The suggestion being perhaps that you may spend the day at the beach, in your skimpy bathing suit, exposing your legs, and your neck and your back, and the base of your bottom, enjoying the sunshine and the sand between your toes, with thoughts of exotic fish shaped like bananas, knowing that other banana shaped objects are lying on the floor, or in drawers, connected not to a fossil fuelled, carbon polluting and global warming, power sources, but to the very sun that is heating your skin!

Be it the wind that caresses the waves and your thighs and through your hair, and social distance aside, hello there, - hang on a sec who is that taking a dip in front of you, water droplets falling from their chest. Where was I? Oh, thinking of the future. Absolute fantasy at this stage of course as I sit watching COVID-19 news on Australia’s ABC breakfast news, writing a blog and getting carried away with thoughts of returning to the beach, the waves crashing - you can use them to make power power, as well as the tides - and the scantily clad bodies coming in and out of the water, bulging at whatever points your eyes, and preferences are drawn to. Who would have known bananafish would give you such warm and fuzzy feelings.

See there’s nothing to be scared of when you challenge your paradigms, think of a better future. Just use your imagination, it can be fun, freeing. Bananafish, renewable clean energy drawn from the sun and saved in batteries of various descriptions and shapes and sizes and for various purposes. The built world, the human world, is simply a product of our collective imaginations. We decide what it will be like. We can dedicate our energies to bananafish, shoju, and clean energy fuelling our economic recovery, or we can cling to some outdated notions that coal and oil will save us from our economic woes.

Fear should not dictate our lives. Hope, inspiration, innovation and imagination should be what we hold onto. What drives us forward. Pandemics, crisis, wars, famine (why should anyone on this Earth die because of a lack of calories?) are all major disruptions, scary, isolating, devastating, and part of planet earth. But also a they provide a chance to reset (famine aside, that should never be allowed to happen on a civilised planet, nor war I guess!).

Think of other disasters in history, going back to the Black Plague, millions died, yet it was the start, the very beginning at least of peasants getting fair wages. And not so long after there was the renaissance and the blooming of minds like Leonardo de Vinci, rediscovering ancient history, Rome and Greece,  and drawing on the great minds of the Arab world, bringing the East and West closer than ever, even if ancient distrusts and misunderstandings remained (to this day).

Think of World War Two, cities destroyed, millions killed in concentration camps, the spectre of an a-bomb wiping more cities off the face of the Earth. Did we turn to the past? The reparations that followed World War One, no we supported West Germany to rebuild, set the stage for Japan to come back as a peaceful participant in the global economy. Waited out the dictatorships of Poland and other Eastern European countries sealed up by the USSR. The USA turned factories building tanks, fighter jets and battleships to ones making fridges, microwave ovens and washing machines.

When you rebuild after disasters you have the chance to be reborn, to start from scratch, to plan a better future without some of the fetters of the past. Catch the bananafish, imagine the world of the next 200 years, beyond your own life. Imagine it with electric cars, wind power, solar power, totally free from oil dependency, drawing endless energy from the rest of the universe, getting to Mars, colonising water-filled moons off Saturn, Neptune or Jupiter (one them has them I’m sure, just can’t be bothered googling it at the moment).

When faced with death, think of life, of what’s really important, of how you and I, and all of us, want to live the precious moments remaining of our lives. It could be minutes, days or decades, but it does have an end. Don’t cling to outdated notions of ‘freedom’ being the money you have in your house, your job, your possessions. The Egyptians used to think you could take all of that shit with you. Hiding it away in desert caves. You take nothing with you. There’s a certain freedom in acknowledging that. Free your mind, make some positive change. Never waste a good crisis, learn from it, use it as an opportunity to change, all those things you used to be scared of. Acknowledge your fears, but walk in front of them, leave them as a shadow following behind you, never leading you.