Vegetative State
Every region has something unique about it. The Pacific Northwest has rain and coffee and suicidal depressives. The Midwest is notable for its humidity, NASCAR office pools and marked lack of topographical variety. The South is known for grits, moonshine, not wearing shoes, hating the black man and mosquitoes large enough to carry off your young. We all have things to set us apart.

In southern California we have earthquakes, smog, traffic, really good Mexican food, urban/suburban sprawl and every decade or so we put on a first-class race riot. We know how to have a good time.

But for some reason whenever people will visit out here, the first thing they notice are the palm trees. Palm trees. Oooh, palm trees. Look at the palm trees, wow, they're PALM TREES. Oh my God, is that another palm tree?! How many palm trees do you have out here anyway? Ooh, another one! Is this Hollywood? Hollywood has palm trees. Can you see the Hollywood Sign from here? It's hard to see through all these palm trees... and the smog. You know that orange smog-colored sunset is really striking as a background to all these palm trees. Here, take my picture next to this palm tree.

Frankly, I can't get my head around the fascination. I know I'm desensitized, being surrounded by the infernal things all the goddamn time, but really, what is so special? I would have thought that the national interest would have died out with Magnum, P.I. I'm still talking about palm trees, not Tom Selleck. Although...

They're not as big around as I am. They're infinitely tall and utterly straight, so there's no climbing potential. They bear no fruit that I know of. They provide no shade unless bunched together in the thousands. They shed no leaves in fall. In fact, they have no leaves to shed. The fronds they do have are the same dusty gray-green color year round. When the Santa Ana Winds blow they will drop dead fronds. Don't get the wrong idea about palm fronds, though. In their natural state, we're talking about 3-6 foot long sections of brown, dead tree falling from a great height, usually propelled by gale-force winds. They peel off whole sections at a time, kind of like a better-tasting artichoke (OK, I haven't actually tasted palm tree, but could anything taste worse than artichoke?).

And dead, falling palm tree is the hardest substance known to man. They would use it to make un-pierceable body arm, but the technology has not been invented yet to bend and mold this stuff so that humans can use it.

Not only is it really hard and really heavy, but just as a bonus the edges are serrated for some reason. Every year at Santa Ana time (like right now for instance) we have to watch for two things: 1) Wildfires and 2) Death From Above in the form of falling chainsaw palm fronds.

Confession time: this never makes the news, but thousands and thousands of people are killed or maimed by falling palm tree parts every year. They keep it hush-hush because they don't want to drive the housing market down, the last thing artificially propping up our enfeebled economy. The housing market and illegal immigration; without real estate speculation and human labor exploitation no one in California would have made a cent in the last 5 years.

If the palms trees are so dangerous, you're asking yourself, then why stay, Pops?

They won't let us leave.

Not the government, I mean the palm trees. They watch us every minute of every day, silent sentinels waiting to rain destruction upon us at the first sign of skittishness. They have been known to obliterate eastbound U-Haul trucks in under six seconds.

Ubiquitous, clichéd, obvious and useless. Sure, every once in a while you'll get a nice picture, but most of the time you just get bitched out for interrupting their "private lunch" with friends. Well you know what, if it's such a "private" lunch, don't have it in a public place. And look, I didn't make you a public figure, you did that when you decided to enter The Business. You can't treat your fans that way. We made you, we can ruin you.

That time I was talking about Tom Selleck.

Palm trees suck too.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 4.6


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 9:16 AM