I can’t stay away from plant nurseries this time of year. Greenhouses full of brand-spankin’ new plants does something to me that’s hard to describe. We are fortunate to have a couple of really fine greenhouse nurseries nearby, and as spring really settles in, I figured one good way to purify my psyche of the MSM’s complete clusterphuque of the so-called president would be a nice long visit to a local greenhouse.
While walking among the billions of new cells chuggin’ all that photon energy screaming into the greenhouse at the speed of light, I began to mellow out a bit. Photosynthesis is PFM* if you ask me. And even the humblest of field weeds can take photons apart and turn them into food.
I can’t think about photosynthesis without recalling I once met a guy in Normal, Illinois who was planning on becoming photosynthetic. He was a huge fellow, not fat, just huge; his nick was “Bear”; he wore a sandy Quaker-like beard without a mustache. Everything he owned was in an external-frame backpack. What impressed me most about that was his record collection; he had one lp, Gustav Holst’s “The Planets.”
Jupiter, conducted by Seiji Ozawa
I’m sure it was an adequate rendition of the music, but what made it memorable to me was the cover. It had the cheesiest cover I’ve ever seen on a classical album. It was so cheesy, I had to have a copy of it myself. Two studio actors, hero and heroine, were dressed in futuristic space-dance leotards, holding little sci-fi ray guns, and were looking apprehensively off to the upper-left corner of the album. There was no background. Just a sick pale pink backdrop of. . . space.
I think the album cover may have also served as Bear’s complete collection of erotica, as the space honey was down on one knee, her other leg trailing off in dramatic fashion, thus presenting the camera et al with a wide open shot of her photon torpedo tube. I’d show it to you, but it’s buried deep under a lot of stuff out in the barn. Maybe another time. Meanwhile, get thee to a nursery.
*PFM: Pure Fucking Magic
