| rev:text
| - In the Fall of my eighth year on the planet, a giant rat crawled into the garbage can outside our house during a rainstorm.
You know what happened next. It died is what happened. Drowned in his greedy - or perhaps desperate - search for some tasty garbage scraps. When found, several days later, the dead rat itself wasn't the problem (it was already in the trash after all!). The problem was the microbes and maggots that had already begun to forage what was left of this poor guy (or gal!), causing the familiar and disgusting smell of rotting rat flesh to waft into the air.
My dad, being the Dad in this situation, did what he had to do. He scooped the maggot-infested remains of this enormous rat up with a shovel, wrapped it in several trash bags, walked across the street to the parking lot of my elementary school, and performed a precise long toss hammer throw into the school dumpster, where the rotting smell would mix with all the other rotting smells of expired milk, half eaten chicken nuggets, and soggy tater tots, until Friday morning, when the trash guy came by to take that rotting trash to another place.
Walking into a grocery store, I often think of the foragers that make use of our scraps, both human and "other", and how lucky I am to be able to walk into said grocery store and buy something new and shiny and good. As the grandson of Holocaust survivors and the son of a rural man who raised himself up out of poverty to do things like put food on my table and properly dispose of rotting rodents, I have gratitude for the position in life in which I find myself.
So, it is with this perspective that I walked into Fresh Market Madison with low expectations: a bunch of fairly ripe conventional bananas. Nothing more, nothing less. I would have accepted not ripe enough, or even too ripe. But edible is what I was going for here.
And vitamin K.
To my disappointment, every single banana in the store was, how should I say, "pre-ripe". Green, in fact. So I started examining, each banana closely, wondering how an entire store full of bananas could be so... so... Unripe. Yet, here I was. Grabbing the bunch with the most amount of yellow hue, I hopped on my BCycle and headed to work, looking forward to a healthy breakfast.
Sitting down at my desk, I carefully picked a banana that at least seemed a tiny bit ripe. I was wrong. Unwrapping it from its protective sheath, this banana was hard as a rock, inedible in every sense of the word. Still, I said a prayer, and took a few bites. In that moment, a sandy, slimy foam covered my hands and the corners of my mouth. I could barely taste the banana itself, instead being disgusted by the film that now coated my teeth and gums. The confusion that followed was swift and unforgiving, as I spat out the banana and made for the restroom, where I could wash out my mouth with soap and water.
Returning to my desk, I did the only thing I could do, wrapped that bunch of bananas in some trash bags and tossed them the garbage, where the foragers can begin their work. Tomorrow, those bananas will be chucked in the dumpster where they will remain until the trash guy comes and takes that rotting trash to another place.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)