Out Among the Tomato Vines I Thought...

 So I was standing and looking at my tomato crop. Looks good. Nothing ripe yet but lots of fruit and still plenty of blooms. The vines are a little spindly it seems but that thought takes me somewhere else and I start thinking about ideas and how that's like they are sometimes. There's blooming, there's fruit but things are a little spindly. Maybe this idea could be a song, a poem, a story, a book, a screenplay, or a movie. If you want to buy this idea or even a couple of tomato I'll include a Venmo link at the end. 

In my idea there's a guy who lives in a small East Texas(this may sound familiar) town. It's in a time way before you could Google something or order something you wanted from Amazon or could look up a YouTube video about how to do something or use AI to make a funny picture for the internet. If you wanted to know something it was brought to you by that one TV channel which was probably black and white, a little green transistor radio that was about the size of a serving of the serving of meat we all need to eat about once a week if we are going to quit needing hospitals and complaining about the quality of healthcare and save the planet or it could be found at the library. As time passed and horizons broadened this guy starts to get out in the world a bit, chasing things he's interested in and meeting people.

So say he's interested in growing tomatoes. He meets someone that grows tomatoes real good, gets a few tips, grows a good crop then a bad crop, learns something, meets someone else that grows tomatoes, quits, starts over just a whole process that takes years. 

Then one day he meets a guy in a tie dye shirt who has a real good collection of reggae records. You can't just walk into Target and get tie dye or get a reggae record so here goes the process again till of course our guy has some real good reggae records and has seen Steel Pulse, Third World and Burning Spear all play live. 

Our guy meets someone that cooks a real mean home made egg roll, meets some one that plays harmonica, learns to weave baskets and pretty soon he's doing these things also. 

Of course while doing all this other things happen, there's marriage, raising kids, a couple of careers, helping his brother in law get sober, has a bunch of grandkids and so much more until one day the man just sits back and takes it all in while listening to his real good collection of reggae records and comes to the realization he's at the top, he's done everything he wanted to do in life and that this is the peak. Often times we say, "that's as good as it gets" and that's kind of an excuse for something less than perfect but this REALLY IS AS GOOD AS IT GETS. 

So our hero starts kind of a backwards journey. He looks up the tomato grower, the tie dye guy with the reggae records, the egg roll maker, the harmonica player, the basket weaver, all the many others and at this point someone cues weird sci-fi music played on a theremin, which by the way can be had as a build your own kit pretty cheaply or for the price of a high grade Chinese made electric guitar and he starts to notice some weird stuff. 

All these people that had been so inspiring seemed less colorful, less able and missing some integral part of themselves. Our man realizes that he has stolen or absorbed some kernel of each self leaving the person a husk of what they formerly were wandering helplessly  through a dull life.

Upon this realization, this is the age of where either the bad guy wins or you can't tell who the good guy is our guy becomes a beam of light through the universe. The beam of light collides with other worlds, other civilizations and more and more internal kernels are absorbed until the man is just a rage of color and light that becomes everything.  

Of course once Hollywood gets in possession of all this they will add some grow juice so things won't be so spindly, will stand on their own, we will have ripe fruit and a real good reggae record collection. 

https://account.venmo.com/u/Carl-Wallace-23