Authentic Real Imitation Leather

I am not the smartest ape around. Just ask Larry the mechanic, he won’t even trust me to refill the brake fluid reservoir on INDY, our 1960’s Ford tractor. True, there was that time I filled it with steering fluid by mistake but, in my defense, the cans look similar and my safety goggles got foggy.

That day, Larry just gave me that look, you know, the orphan raised eyebrow accompanied by a “fhumph” breeze noise from his hairy nostrils. Translation: “go back to the tasting room and sell some fricking wine”. It made me think of words, since Larry doesn’t use many.

Language is a beautiful thing and I am so happy I live in a time when I can say : ” May I pour you a sip of our thoughtfully-balanced Meant To Bee Vineyard Pinot Noir”? rather than just spitting out “Arrgh” followed by by energetic hand gestures. But words are funny things, aren’t they? They start out meaning something real, something you could clearly see in your mind or feel in your hand, and then, slowly, they change.

Take the word “Reserve” for example: You know, it used to mean PREMIUM. It meant someone lost sleep over it. It meant a conscious decision was made to put an effort and dedicate resources to a wine because the easy formula wasn’t good enough. Now it means a $5.99 Chardonnay that never saw a barrel and has 24.9% Thompson Seedless juice in it, trucked in from somewhere south of Bakersfield.

Or “Authentic.” It used to mean the thing in front of you matched the story behind it. That’s it. A winemaker was someone who got up at 5am and walked the vineyard with the dog before heading in to process grapes. Now it just as often means the daughter of a hedge-fund guy with an ag tax shelter, launching a custom label named after her cat.

It’s like the fast-food burger commercial, you know the one. You’ve seen it. The poster behind the counter screams “Freshly Made for You”. Sesame bun, toasted just so perfectly it glistens like a galaxy of diamonds. Lettuce so green it looks like it just got off the first class flight from Costa Rica. The patty, oh man, it looks thick and juicy, not a millimeter of gray, stacked with pickles you’d swear your grandma grew in her garden. Tomato slices arranged in geometric precision that would make Euclid shed a tear. It’s so beautiful. It’s practically art. Then your order slides across the counter in a paper bag and what you’ve got is... a compressed disc of Khaki sadness in a bun that’s so soggy you’d think it was prepared in a steam sauna. You question your sanity as you wonder if you should have asked for a side of Prozac instead of fries.

And here’s the part that haunts me: we just keep ordering it.

Not because we don’t notice. We notice. We’ve noticed for decades. We just decided somewhere along the way that pointing it out was more trouble than it was worth. Maybe we just want to be polite, who knows. Maybe we just want to download the app on our dumbphone and the get the points.

This is how words die. Not dramatically. Just quietly, by general agreement, because the alternative requires everyone to hold the line, and it turns out holding lines is hard. Turns out honesty and humility are a high bar. Too high, apparently, for most of us to maintain when there’s money on the table. So we lowered the bar. Then we lowered it again. Then we put the bar on the floor and held an organic Kombucha Kumbaya workshop over it and called the whole thing a “brand experience.”

Larry doesn’t say much. The other day, looking at a bag of “Artisan” Tostitos Black Bean chips as he was wiping WD-40 off a wrench, he looked up and said: “Feels like a lot of things these days are just imitation leather.”