The Dandelions of '09

Been getting some imperative spam lately. Few are more imperative that this subject line: Answer or get cancer. It rhymes, too! Guess they're selling some kind of supposed cancer prophylactic. Either that or they're touchy about people who ignore their e-mails, and have some wicked voodoo at hand to get revenge.

I was able to include this bit of imagery in a recent article: "... since the beginning of 2009, back when Wall Street was sliding down a giant razor blade into a vat of rubbing alcohol." That painful turn of phrase has been wandering some lonely synaptic byways of mine for a long time. I'm not sure where I first picked it up, but it could have been in high school, as part of the rich word-play (for high school) of the speech tournaments I went to. Maybe.

Time for my annual praise of dandelions, since they are a-blooming, with a high concentration in my yard, such as the one scanned here, picked by my own hand today. May divides suburban homeowners in metro Chicago into two camps. Those sluggards who allow dandelions to sprout willy-nilly in their lawns, and those control freaks who have none because they're goddamn weeds.

Call me a sluggard, then. I suspect dandelions were created so that the likes of my six-year-old daughter could stop every day on the way home from school and pick the yellow flowers, or blow seeds into the wind.