Press.

The pink citrus juicer, that trivial kitchen object, fashioned in a color that perhaps refers more to marketing than to function, still smells of pulp and sourness—a mechanical altar on which oranges, grapefruits, and even the occasional lime yield their internal essence under the pressure of the human hand, their fibers and acids spilling over the edges like an acid bath that slowly corrodes the plastic—and here, right here, begins our wandering towards a supposed connection, a hypothesis of sensible connectedness, with the tragic figure of a human being, whose skin glows unnaturally brown, as if life itself has been caressed by a UV lamp until it evaporates irrevocably, like a forgotten moth in a light box.

Chemically speaking—which already suggests a rickety bridge—both the citrus juicer and the sunbed user bear the stamp of oxidation: one in the form of ascorbic acid, the vitamin C that slowly degrades into a useless substance when exposed to air (and therefore to time), the other as a living organism that overdrives its melanin production in a desperate attempt to maintain some semblance of vitality while UV radiation wreaks invisible, cell-dividing damage on the tissue, inevitably, mercilessly, like the promise of aging that suddenly takes shape in sunbed light—and so we could say, with great intellectual dishonesty, that both are burdened by the same thermodynamic entropy, that great universal law that says: everything that lives or moves decays.

Philosophically—if we still dare to use that word in times of influencers and supplements—the citrus press is a tool of extraction, a metonymy of modern man, who, without an eye for the inner self, functions solely to extract something from the other: juice, energy, color; while the sunbed user voluntarily allows himself to be seared in an ironic ritual of self-improvement that results in destruction; like a narcissus in a tanning salon, addicted to his reflection, tanning in slow motion, like a morally bankrupt orange, who still thinks that shining is the same as blooming.

Apocalyptic, then—dark as an Earth without an ozone layer, awash in ultraviolet radiation that mutates the last vestiges of a once arrogant, citrus-juice-owning people—we can imagine the citrus juicer lying in a cupboard somewhere, useless, pink-washed to a ghostly beige, long after humanity is gone, the tanning bed itself burned down into a sarcophagus of plastic and twisted metal, and somewhere, in a metaphysical joke, a dried-out skin patterned like sunglasses' rims lies crumbling to dust. Nothing that once had meaning remains—except perhaps the smell of citrus, which lingers inexplicably.

And yet—or perhaps because of it—we must conclude, with reluctance and relief, that there is no real connection between the pink citrus juicer and the tanning bed addict, except that they happen to be in the same nightmare of modern trivialities. They are like passing thoughts in the mind of a bored god: related in their existence, but incompatible in essence. Like everything else, really.