It’s a messy process, you see? I know it looks like a cluster fuck, shit, I guess it is a cluster fuck in a lot of ways, but that’s just the process. It’s like the old ‘you’ve got to break some eggs to make an omelet.’ I know you don’t like eggs, I swear you’re the only person I know who doesn’t like eggs, what is it? The smell? Sometimes the texture can be a little off, I’ll grant you that. What? Where was I? Yeah. Messy process, like the omelets you neither like nor eat.
You see I was in a similar situation once, a gang of friends, we lived up in Keelung. Maybe the rain got to us, not sure really. But we formed two cliques, just like those parties back home in the states you’re so worried about. Two groups, but we both worked for this cooperative. We were breeding high end orchids for the export market. Beautiful flowers, but delicate as a mother fucker. The climate up the mountain from the city was perfect, but it did require some regulation. That, there, was the rub. We couldn’t make up our minds about how much to just let the green houses live, windows open to the mountain air, or the hermetically seal that son of a bitch and be all scientific.
Now I get you the stakes aren’t the same as the fucking American government, but shit we were broke as fuck and we’d invested a shit load of money in those orchids, and there was money to be made if we did it right. We couldn’t work out what to do and just like those corrupt cunts in D.C. we had our leaders and our coalitions. The two CEOs were like our presidential candidates and the rest of us allied with the one we agreed with. I was the lowest on the totem pole botanist wise, but I was at least a botanist so I got some credit there.
Like your dems and reps the coalitions held and we more or less voted on things. It was a real hippy outfit and it was run as a total democracy. The founder, who’d retired at that point, was Basque and he’d said that it was common in their lands to run companies that way. I loved it, until we really got into the drag out fights. And I really hated it when the coalitions shifted- just like it’s doing now back in the motherland.
Yeah, the green house issue, right. So right before it we’d elected a new guy to be our leader, he was one of the more slick guys, a digital marketer, not a horticulturist or botanist. Fuck not even a hobby gardner. He thought we should seal up the greenhouse to make more money. Not to help the plants, not to breed more beautiful flowers, but because the sealed nature meant we could sell them for more money.
Problem was he’d been elected by a coalition that was really not down, but the opposition had members that were. The stable groups became totally unhinged. Alliances shifted, everything went tits up and ass over teakettle. That’s like what America’s going through now- and yes of course the stakes are bigger, that’s why it’s so crazy. But like our little orchid company, it will settle down eventually.
Oh and me? I was an open to nature kid of guy, but I’d never been with the slick fucker to start with. I just kind sat back and bred my specimens. I rode out the storm by not giving a fuck, and perhaps that’s the true lesson there. When shit gets weird, focus on appreciating and perpetuating beauty in the world and let the motherfuckers go fuck themselves.
