Here's a short story about oranges (and oceans). 🍊
Set Sail on a Sea of Citrus
Synopsis: A sea of oranges swells and those who rides its rolling waves of citrus are content.
Cast of characters:
There's a spent force on the sea of oranges and it bobs up and down lost. That object is amongst the rolling mass of orange—a hundred billion of the things piling over and over. The spent force can't help any of it, the oranges carry it far and wide. The waves, the tsunamis, the crushing forces of the orange riding over crest after crest and plunging down as a lifeless planet of orange.
The anomaly is a lemon. 🍋
Imagine that. One lemon and a hundred billion oranges. The tides are strong and the pull and thrust is from that Orange Moon up there and this probably isn't Earth. But it may as well be all the same. Ish. There aren't any humans around (but there are plenty of citrus fruits). Oranges and lemons—scurvy? Not on this ocean. No one gets that here! The spent force of a lemon thinks this:
"Holy Moly... I'm a lemon on a sea of oranges as if a needle in a haystack!"
The lemon has questions:
- Why am I the only lemon on a planet of oranges?
- What reality is there?
- Isn't the whole point of my existence that someone gets scurvy?
Well, the lemon is wrong (as lemons so often are). A yellow object amongst orange is visible from a billion miles away and we all know it. Not that it matters. The orange sea rolls. The tides sweep and there's a certain magnitude to watching citrus in motion as the pulverising waves sway with their occasional pulp. The odd hundred thousand pips. The lemon emerges from time to time. Over months it moves one side of the globe to the next. It's launched into the air 100 times daily and peaks at 200 feet! But the lemon is irrelevant.
The rolling oceans of orange are what matter. The horizontal pressure-gradient, Coriolis , and frictional forces are the evidence. The citrus force is what pushes one orange downwards, the next one up. It's an orgy of orange and gravity is the guiding force for these citrus. The ultimate cup of OJ is this Planet of Orange Oceans (as humans may well call it), but as it stands for now it's a planet of orange expressionism. The waves go up. The waves go down. The pulp is pulped, the juice flows into rivers, it turns into tsunamis, these crash with great magnificence into the occasional lemonade stand set up by hopeful entrepreneurs who instantly regret that stupid decision. Best stick to Earth, sunshine!
Other than the occasional chancer, a sea of oranges is about enchantment.
The sound of the oranges pelting into the surf. The accessible abundance of orange juice (with bits). The lack of scurvy. Those enormous rolling waves of citrus that peak your interest and make you say "grandiloquent" as you're pretentious but allowed to be in the face of such natural beauty.
Downsides include the pulp.
Mashed oranges together and there are many hundreds of millions of orange juice (with bits) and the pulp is jammed up at awkward angles on stray bits of land. There's not much land on this planet. There are plenty of oranges. But let us remember the lemon. 🍋
A lemon comes to these foreign lands and its purpose seems unsure. But if you suck on a lemon it protects against CS gas, it's true. A fact from the 1968 Parisian student riots that seems lost on this planet of oranges maybe even a billion years in the future that's not even clear.
What is clear? The lemon is indifferent. As indifferent as a wall is to a calendar.
The wall cares not for the calendar.
The oranges care not for the lemon.
The lemon is amongst the oranges. The purpose of difference. The orange ocean, it rolls. The lemon is lost and yet peaks. You behold it for citrus sake. The lemon is bitter. But that's identity crisis for you.
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