sprouts, le Bonheur

Just got back from Greenfield, Massachusetts, home to Wilson's department store, which hasn't changed one lick in thirty years, and Mohawk Office Equipment Co., where you can find Dick, who is very likely the only remaining master typewriter repairman in all of New England.  Dick tells good stories about his honesty and his 48 years repairing "machines."  I picked Emily up at Potpourri Plaza at noon in Northampton, and we drove through the unusually warm January rain while eating a Domino's pizza in the car.  If you are into typewriters and cluttered old shops, you should take a ride to Greenfield.  If you do go, be sure you get there early because Dick is semi-retired, and he goes home at one.  Here are some sprouts I started the other day.

   
Fuck.  Sorry.  Those are not the sprouts.  That is a screen shot I took the other night while watching Agnes Varda's film about adultery, le Bonheur.  A happily married man falls in love with a woman who works at a telegraph office, and then he proceeds to have a blissful and consequence-free affair with her until the very last moment of the film—spoiler alert—when the wife's empurpled body is dragged out of an otherwise bucolic little stream.  All of this, naturally, has nothing to do with sprouts.  Sprouts neither have affairs nor enjoy cinema, though they do enjoy sitting in the dark, if sprouts can be said to enjoy anything.  

      
You must pamper sprouts, but the pampering is worth it.  Twice a day you must carefully rinse them in room temperature water, taking care not to snap their delicate radicles in the process.  A snapped radicle can be an entryway for rot, though nothing is really so dire in the world of home sprouting.  The truth is the other way around: it's really nice to have such tender and springy little creatures—and in such abundance—growing inside of a jar within your home in January, especially when the world outside of your home is brown and dingy.  These particular sprouts are only about two days old.  They sleep in the dark, in a mock underground setting, for about seven days, at which time, if they are fully leafed out, the sprouter exposes them to an afternoon of sun so that their tiny, embryonic leaves can transform the sun's photons into chlorophyll.  Here is the cheating husband, watching his friend—not his mistress—nurse her youngest child while her other children watch greedily.  Note the very nice Dahlias and the bottle of lemon soda in the foreground.

It was completely by accident that sprouts and le Bonheur found their way into one unified post, though it was not by accident that I took fifty billion screenshots of le Bonheur.  I take screenshots while I watch compelling cinema.  In any case, one could argue that an infant is A LOT LIKE A SPROUT.  One could argue that, but I wouldn't want to hang out with that guy at a party.  At parties, it's much more interesting to gossip.  You know...who's fucking whom; who's been acting CRAZY lately; who's weird and getting weirder; and the ultra popular, who was seen drinking alone at the dark end of an even darker street.  Now that's entertainment.  Talk about sprouts and French movies, and someone is bound to hurl a basketball at you.  Here's a close-up of the little sprout suckers.

I suppose there isn't too much more to say.  Check back in another couple days to see the progress.  The people in le Bonheur will still be repeating their perpetual ritual, but the sprouts will have developed.