Chicago Shady Dealer

Help! The Moldy Banana I Accidentally Left in Storage Has Achieved Sentience

By Jacob Johnson
July 23, 2016

Look, we’ve all been there. You open one of the boxes you stored before you left last June, and your nose is suddenly met with the pungent whiff of something organic you’ve unintentionally left incubating in there all this time. Whoops! Here’s an in-depth guide on what to do if the banana you left alone for months has somehow managed to attain consciousness. (Note: these steps will also work for sentient grapes, apples, and kiwi, but not for melon, oranges, or pineapples).

If your former midday-snack from the dining hall has been miraculously transformed into a gray pile of mush that repeatedly attempts to communicate with you telepathically, chances are it’s been exposed to Mucorales Illustratum, a rare kind of mold that appears to prefer the damp, economically uncertain climate of college storage rooms. When this happened, a kind of symbiotic fusion occurred, in which fruit and fungus merged to become a higher life-form, with a definite degree of self awareness. No doubt, your former banana will have a lot of questions for you. Here are some sample answers to the most frequently-asked questions I have received over the past few years:

12. Q: Who at is my Ipurpose in life?

A: Great question! You are a pile of decomposing banana mush that has, against all odds, somehow become sentient. Congratulations!

2. Q: What is my purpose in life?

A: Wow, another excellent inquiry! Right now, you’re on a backwater planet orbiting a completely ordinary star in the middle of galactic suburbia, so your purpose can be pretty much whatever you want. Nobody cares!

3. Q: Is love real?

A: Eh… probably not.

With that out of the way, it’s time to start planning the demise of your telepathic moldy banana mush. While it may be easy to grow sympathy forto take a sympathetic angle to the state of your months-old slime, remember that there’s only room for one self-aware species on this planet of ours, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be that thing.

As you may have guessed, telepathic banana mush can be pretty hard to kill. Just scooping it up and throwing it in the garbage will only piss it off, which runs the risk of it mind-controlling your friends and making them pledge allegiance to the almighty “Banana Lord... Talk about uncool! Your best bet is to take a large bottle of industrial-strength Febreeze and keep spraying the thing until its pained, horrible screaming finally leaves the inside of your mind.