The Case of the Overheated Watermelon
It started, as often things do, with a single word.
Actually it wasn’t so much of a word as it was a sound.
In fact it wasn’t a sound so much as it was a scream. And it came from my wife. And it happened after a watermelon decided to heave and sigh and hiss and slowly sputter its innards through a self-inflicted fissure as it sat on the kitchen counter at our vacation rental in Playa del Carmen.
Chances are that you might have shrieked too as red sticky goo flew through the air to settle on whatever surface might stand between the hurtling object and the floor.
The boys, too, joined the chorus as I rushed to see the cause of the commotion, the commotion being the ignominious demise of a previously healthy and soon-to-be eaten melon. Now it wasn’t anything more than a science project gone wrong as it bubbled and gurgled a strangled aria.
Wide-eyed I caught at least a few seconds of the melon’s death march. And the next day, now, as we sit on the cusp of the new year’s beginning, I muse about yesterday’ vision and wonder of its metaphor.
What I suppose happened with the melon was that it overheated. Sitting alone on the kitchen counter, cooled by the granite below but temperature rising because each time we head out of this vacation rental toward the beach or Mayan ruins in Tulum or to eat more ceviche we go “green” and turn off the lights and the ac. And so its inner-thermometer veered into the red zone until it couldn’t handle the pressure and it literally blew up.
Much in the same way that the real estate market did. Or the mortgage market did. Or anything where subjective valuation was encased within an individual’s or institution’s yearning for more.
And more led to more and more until finally there wasn’t any.
More that is.
And what we derived from the derivatives was indecipherable gibberish. Which is really what it was at the start except that beneath the shadow of the scepter of Orwell many minds were trained upon the mantra that “more is better.”
Sometimes more is better. Like the first few caramels or the first cold Coke. But the thing about more is that it can go wrong if more makes all the decisions without reason or discretion. Without adult supervision.
2010? I believe it will be a good year. I think it will be. Indeed, I hope it will be.
It will be! And actually to go full circle to the start of this post things sometimes don’t start so much with a word as they start with a notion or a thought or an idea. Overheated watermelons may engage in their melodramatic dirges, but let them do what they shall and rather than weighing us down let us find subtle meanings ourselves and move forward toward the rest of this day and into the new year.
And also let us laugh. Because what that watermelon did on that counter was ridiculous.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment