Potato Rising

Morning Thoughts #287

Shellshocked soldiers of your inner world now huddle together at a veterans club, day drinking and storytelling. Can’t move out of it, dispirited identity. Trenches of dug-out victim status. You defended yourself against that peculiar world you were born in.

Digging was especially necessary for those like yourself, born hillside. Your forefathers would have surely seen it as a place fit to build up. From good land, the urge to tower above rises when not actively suppressed. But alas, we were taught differently.

What it was for us, the privileged and unlucky. More ground to work with in covering us up. Greater depths we made accessible to hide from the accusatory onslaught. Last remnant of a winning line, tempted toward conceding.

Here’s the lining: We’re not entirely out of the grip of youth either, planting somewhere deep its last burst of strength.

A generation of potatoes, you, me, and our people. Hoarding within ourselves last memories of classic America. But potatoes can feed large populations in times of great famine, and their loss can be the cause of such episodes.

Still underground and not yet ripe, waiting to be dug, not knowing that we aided the wielders of the shovel that planted us down here to begin with.

Tubular flowering, what the next and most necessary revolution will look like.