Down the Throat: Grave Babies' Crusher
“taking those sweet notes and breathing them acid”
Everything about Kombucha is wrong.
Probably.
The word itself, KOM-BU-CHA, which has a Japanese feel (wrong), but has a Chinese origin (less wrong?), and if nothing else a Russian popularity (least wrong).
The notion that it is tea. Although it can be. Sometimes. Sort of.
The whole fermented food thing. Left in a jar somewhere with a breathable canvas dust sheet protecting the SCOBY from infection, while the whole bacteria/yeast culture eats sugars and spits out vinegar; taking those sweet notes and breathing them acid.
That it still costs nearly four dollars a bottle. Or that potentially curing cancer (does it still do that?) could be purchased for as little as four dollars a bottle.
(That's probably worth it right there.)
The shake before opening sentiment, because settling is natural but so is fizz, and the popped seal hisses open in the rush of air as half the contents bubble up and over the lips of the glass container, coating fingers sticky and sour and sweet, like guilt. Like guilt or private shame.
(Masturbation, anyone?)
The drinking experience. That tart burn draining down the throat in a slip swallow of something with the texture of a jellyfish made pure mucus with tendrils that catch on the teeth and sting the gums.
(Woe-betide all the fruit flavors which cling to the tongue like a rotting compost bin.)
Drinking Kombucha is like speaking a dead language, all delays and unknown pronunciations. All foreign spaces and structures being forced into new contexts.
But after drinking a bottle of Kombucha, that effervescent feeling of thousands of molecules of air bursting through the body beings to run its course. Suddenly you're lighter, fresher, healed! Rejuvenated! If only you could stand to drink this stuff all the time, you might actually live forever . . .
What a wondrous notion! What a way to be alive. The liquid drink of death is some magical panacea of eternal well-being! Who the fuck saw that coming?
Yep, listening to Grave Babies' Crusher is pretty much exactly like that.
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