Boiled Grapes

I’ve been feeling somewhat melancholy lately. I don’t know, maybe it’s the weather. It’s been awfully wintery around here – cold, snowy, cloudy, rubbery, full spittoons all over the place, bouncy mailmen scratching at the window. You know, wintery. I’ve never been one to suffer SAD. For those who do not know, SAD is an acronym for Sad Anno Domini, or Sad in the year of our lord. I have no idea what that has to do with winter, but people tend to get it during this season. I don’t think I have it, since I'm agnostic.

Regardless of the reason for my mopes, when I get to feeling this way, there is only one cure. Boiling grapes. I think Paul McCartney said it best:

When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary dances with apes,
speaking words of wisdom, boil some grapes.

So that’s what I did.

I always boil green grapes because green grapes are grapes of diminished hopes, as portrayed in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Diminshed Hopes. It’s the lesser known companion novel to Grapes of Wrath, which refers to the evil purple grapes, the kind used to make Goofy Grape soft drink. Just add water and you have a pitcher full of wrath.

Can you feel the evil?????

As you can see the boiling has robbed the grapes of their glorius natural muted emerald pigment. The grapes’ brilliance has been reduced to the luster of pickled orbs of flavorless gelatin. If you could feel these grapes you would sense mushiness, not unlike that of the breasts of a long retired wet nurse. Not that I’ve felt up any long retired wet nurses. Not recently, anyway. Ahhh, memories. The smell of these grapes elicits thoughts of rancid green beans, dragged across a pewter tray coated in turnip marmalade. Smell for yourself using the miracle of cyber scratch ‘n sniff. Keep scratching and smelling your monitor on the graphic below until you smell something. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t smell something right away. Keep scratching. And sniffing.

You gave up, didn’t you? I knew it. Quitter. It’s not your fault. That one may be broken. Here. Try this one.

At this point you may be wondering, sure the condition of these boiled grapes is dire, to be sure, but how does that mend an anguished soul? Surely the boiling of grapes does not exude an elixir of ecstasy, does it? No, it does not. But with introspection and a lucid focus on those boiling grapes, tumbling in the torrents of the sauce pan, and later to lie embarrassingly exposed, mutilated and ruptured, on a forlorn paper plate, one sardonically realizes, at least I am not a boiled grape.

I feel so good now.