Life Is Difficult, Squash Is Easy

There is absolutely no relationship between Chantix, the quit-smoking drug, and summer squashes.  There is not one.  Chantix is manufactured by Pfizer to rake profit from the guilty minded, hen pecked, or miserably sick smokers that inhabit our priggish, health conscious world, and summer squashes, under the right conditions, break through their seed cases, munch on the little stored fuel within the seed, and grow.  We plant them for our own enjoyment, but they don't grow for us, nor do they seek to control us in any way.  Summer squashes do not care about us, but their lack of concern is a perfect lack of concern.  Summer squashes should not be compared to a dead-beat parents or anything like that.  If I hover above one, checking out its stem for signs of squash vine borers and craving a cigarette, the squash might be able to detect my tension via the ultra fine filament-like hairs that cover its entire body, but if it detects anything, it passes no judgment, not one way or the other.  For the squashes are not humans, though we do both have vascular systems and sexual organs.  Anyway, there is a lot on my mind.

As you can see, when you want a cigarette, many things can look like a cigarette, even a perfect zucchini.  It does help that the blossom looks like a flame!  Flames, by the way, are awesome, and if I do quit smoking, I will probably start lighting fires.  Right, where was I?  Squashes.  In order to bust through a craving this morning, I headed out into the garden with my French-made pocket knife and harvested about six little squashes.  I didn't harvest them because I have plans to eat them.  I harvested them because I needed to draw my blade through something.  My hands needed to be doing something satisfying.  I am good with my hands, but lately I have become unconfident.  This is why I admire the plant kingdom.  Plants do not have confidence issues.  I am not one of those ordinary jack-horses who consider plants to be mere vegetation.  I have far more respect for them and, if you ask me, a more highly developed understanding of what they are and what they do than the average Joe does.  So it's not because I under-appreciate plants that I say they have no confidence issues, but because they have dispensed with the need for an emotional life.  They do or they don't do, and in some ways their life model is vastly superior to ours.  A squash would never be so gruesome as to invent guilt.