renegade vegetables

I'm supposed to run 8 miles today. It's cold and windy -- not fair weather (and I am a fair weather runner). I will need to wear a hat and a jacket. I hate wearing hats and jackets when I run, so much added weight. I have a hard enough time carrying my unadorned frame, my ipod, a little water bottle that straps to my hand. Too much baggage. I'd run naked if it wouldn't attract so much attention.

I haven't read the newspaper or watched the TV news in weeks. It hasn't been a conscious or philosophical decision, not a spiritual exercise or an act of civil defiance. I just get lazy. The news takes a lot of time -- there is the reading and watching time and then the fretting time and then the forgetting and then the fretting over the forgetting (because how dare I forget how painful life is and how many people are in need while I complain about the weather and deliberate over how many tomato plants to... plant?).

No, it's too exhausting to keep up with the world. And I just don't have the resources.

So I ate my Spargel last night. My asparagus. (I like that all Nouns are capitalized in German. It gives everything a certain degree of importance.) I like asparagus. But I don't understand why it makes pee smell so bizarre. Why asparagus? Why not lettuce and radishes? If anything should make pee smell weird, it's a radish. At any rate, I learned about cooking asparagus that you don't just chop the stalk willy-nilly, you bend it gently and let it break where it decides to break. Then, you don't get the strings. I like that about asparagus -- not the strings, but that it doesn't let you bully it around. I like autonomous, renegade vegetables that break where they want to break. Your knife means nothing, Sucker Face.

I think it was asparagus that Pappaw found growing wild in his Granger garden. He showed it to me one day. It was as tall as my shoulders; I thought it was pretty and had an interesting smell (again with the smell). He said if you didn't harvest in time, it would just go wild and not produce. It made asparagus more alive to me. I felt solidarity. I imagined it with untamed hair riding horses through Montana.

I imagine that would happen with everything -- fruit, herb, vegetable, weed, flower... Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we all stopped mowing our lawns and pruning our trees. What would happen if we let everything go wild? I guess there'd be a lot of bugs.