You are not smarter than a banana

Hello, you miscreant spreaders of turpitude on Appleton’s turpitudinest campus. I hope you all are having a fine term. College is definitely one of the most school-related periods of your life and the odds are good that you will never spend this much money on anything again.

What, you think you might ever be a homeowner? With your degree, you better have rich aunts and uncles falling dead from your family tree every week if you ever want to find out what it feels like to poop on three different floors of the same house—no, the roof does not count as a floor. You have a long way to go before you can tell anybody at Thanksgiving that things are going as well as you could have dreamed. Heck, you have a long way to go before you can tell anybody at Thanksgiving that you have a steady job. Try not to think too hard about the internships that you are somehow still unqualified for, despite having a Bachelor’s degree and the constant energy of a twenty-something that will slowly fade over time as your body begins to rot from the inside out.

Maybe you think I am being pessimistic. Maybe you think you have an inkling as to how your future will turn out. Maybe you have the utmost confidence that, God willing, you will own toilets on three different elevations one day. Not just some three-bathroom, 1.5-bedroom split-level like you see on House Hunters. An Honest-to-God Three-Story Home with a faux-granite island in the kitchen and remote-activated window shutters so you can stop worrying about clothing yourself after showers and stand in your truth. Maybe even throw a few bidets in the mix if you consider yourself among the enlightened members of this poop-papered world of luddites.

Unfortunately for you, my prediction skills vastly exceed your little guesses thrown into the wind. Allow me to introduce myself. Do you remember the birth of the newest Royal Baby last year? Good. Do you remember the anticipation of the birth, when grown adults spent actual brainpower on determining where the baby would land on an already-outdated and useless binary? Do you remember when some other grown adults cut into a banana to try to determine whether the baby would have a penis? Do you remember when that banana was right?

Darn tootin’. I am back, baby! I am the Psychic Banana and I am smarter than you are! I can predict your future better than you or any other prediction service ever will. Watch me work my magic and try not to have your gourd blown to pieces when I hit the nail on the head.

When you graduate, you are going to move back in with your parents for six months before moving to a cockroach-filled apartment in the city with an acquaintance from Lawrence you had two classes with. It gets fuzzy after that, but a year later you move back out to the suburbs to take a job you end up hating after two weeks. I can read your future and I am the only religion you will ever need. Chomp on my bod and drink my banana blood!

Since I made my way back to the mainstage of predictions, everyone has been asking how I spent my year on hiatus. Some people thought I became overripe and turned into psychic bread. Some people, citing me getting cut in half like Darth Maul, thought that I got thrown in the trash. Other people thought that the Queen ate me. Not so fast, buckaroos. Think again. In reality, I spent the last year chilling on a yacht parked in a harbor near Cannes. When you are riding the high off the biggest prediction of your life, a yacht three spots over from Leo DiCap’s usual hangout seems pretty appealing.

Oh, you never heard anyone call him that before? I do. We became best buds after I gave him the hookup on that primo French potassium. One hit and you might just wake up from a pleasant mid-afternoon nap with healthy levels of electrolytes in your system. We still text from time to time, in that minimal-contact way that all adult “best friends” do. It only gets colder from here, friends!

After a year of chilling in the sun, the game starts calling again. There have been some other goons on the scene and I am sick of them making the rest of us true fortune-tellers look bad. Horoscopes? Are you kidding me? I can tell you with absolute certainty that you can learn more about a person’s personality from the way they organize their bananas than you can from a collection of dead, unfeeling dust-spots and rocks in the sky. Your dumb primate brains might be fooled by those long-form fortune cookies, but as a psychic banana—nay, THE psychic banana—I know better than to entrust my future to someone who spends their time in the office chatting with the crossword guy. Of course, I kid. All but two of the people who wrote crosswords in the United States were laid off decades ago. Now they spend their time writing riddles on freelance pay for all the people with murder-dungeons across this great nation.

Maybe you think I will leave chiromancy alone, that I have even an ounce of mercy in my heart for all those handsy-hand folks making a living by causing strangers to freak out about whether or not their hands are sweatier than the norm. Not a chance. This psychic banana is stone cold. I can tell any of you that your “love line” predicts anything but your actual love life. If anything, there is an inversely proportional relationship between love line length and crippling loneliness. “Maybe if somebody feels my hand up for a few minutes, I can find meaning in life!” A better way to predict your future can be found by holding a banana in your right hand and standing still until you are overcome with emotion and start sobbing in your kitchen. In that moment, you will know more about your own future than anyone else ever could.

Ouija boards? Listen, no letter-loving dead goobers are going to adequately inform you of the dangers of your future. They had their chance to leave a prophetic legacy before they shuffled off this mortal coil. Any of this divination garbage is the equivalent of J.K. Rowling retconning her work long after anyone in their right mind stopped caring about it. Running your hands across a board of letters might be fun if you are a killable teenager in a scary movie, but I hold more truth in a single ounce of my peel than some cheap game made by Hasbro.

Sure, go ahead and try to predict every detail of your sad, sad future. You might like the idea of horoscopes, tarot, hand-reading and all that garbage, but you know that part of its appeal is that it will never be fully accurate. You like those tricks because there will always be plausible deniability and some room for improvement. If you really want to know what your future holds, step into my office and hear all about it from the banana that frickin’ nailed it on predicting the gender of the royal baby. I never needed a degree to know what my future holds. I am a bigger celebrity than you will ever be.