In 65 years of active plant-raising I’ve never seen anything like this morning’s Great Disappearance.
Fact: Exactly ten days ago I lovingly transplanted 17 lettuce seedlings, then about 5 ” tall, raised from seed, into a row. 30 centimeter spacing, drip-irrigation, compost pre mixed into the bed.
They were doing fine last evening at 6:13 PM.
And this morning ten of them. every plant starting from the left end of the row, WERE GONE!
Now, with 29 kinds of birds, snakes, mon-geese, foxes, weasels, and jackals, I know what you’re thinking. “Weasels ripped yer flesh!’ so to speak. And to tell the truth, I’d be happy for that prosaic explanation. I have a hundred more lettuces waiting as replacements, and shit happens.
Yet this is not Ordinary Shit’.
Listen, when a plant is eaten by someone/something there are traces. They are either eaten in place, leaving chewed remnants, or pulled out of the soil (crows, parrots)
But that is not what happened to my lettuces.
Examining with my best reading-glasses, and as carefully as one un-rolls a goddamned Dead Sea Scroll, I clearly see… um.. nothing. No trace that a plant was ever there!! No disturbed ‘hole’ in the ground. no cut-off stem, and not even any surviving roots in the potting-soil 2″ cube they came with.
Now Quantum Mechanics proves that nothing is Impossible, just that ‘evaporation’ of a macroscopic entity is absurdly Improbable. Even a flea, or a single-celled microbe will not disappear even once in the expected lifetime of the Galaxy. You can look it up.
And an even stranger point, which just now occurred to me:
In principle, dis-allowed disappearance, such as happened to me this morning, is no less improbable than its inverse: Disallowed Appearance. (Cue eerie violins and Rod Serling from behind the pomegranate bushes.)
As such, I should be no less shocked to see lettuce where yesterday there was none, than to awaken to find ten healthy innocent plants whose wave-functions suddenly collapsed and slouched toward Andromeda overnight.
Yes, I wish I had pictures to show. I do have witnesses, as if that helps me in Court.
And anyway, documenting ‘Nothing’ reminds me of the famous oil-painting titled ‘Cow eating grass’ A blank canvass; the viewer asks ‘Where’s the grass? A: ‘The cow ate it. Then: ‘So where’s the cow? A: Why should she hang around after the grass was all gone?’
Meanwhile, I’ve been in actual shock since this happened. Kinda destroyed my faith in humanity. Lettuce. Whatever. Not believing in anything anymore, I guess I’m off to law school. If the building is still there at the listed address when I get off the bus.
Oh, I forgot the ‘gaslighted by Aliens’ part:
If you haven’t encountered this currently en-vogue new verb, apt in the fake age of Drumpf, I’ll just advise checking WIKI. From a film many years ago. I will add that ‘Whom the aliens seek to destroy, first they drive crazy’.
And somehow the Andromedaries behind this caper will feel more cosmically ethical if they can convince me that, no, I never really planted that lettuce; that it was only a dream. Aha, they forgot my high-functioning habit of writing everything down; dates, amounts, etc.
And all I can do is vow never to do anything like this dirty trick to any exo-race, even from the Crab Nebula.
That’s about it. Suggestions?
