Article: 261424 of talk.bizarre
From: soren@delerium.engr.arizona.edu (Soren Ragsdale)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: Care for a peanut?
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 1995 16:10:44 -0700
Organization: U of A Poultry Research Labs
Lines: 49
Message-ID: <soren-0112951610440001@yuma7.rescomp.arizona.edu>
Status: O
X-Status: 

"I'm glad I have a friend like you", I told Greg last week.

"Really?  That's nice to hear.  Thanks."

"You're welcome.  I was just thinking, you know, if I had some bad
peanuts, I mean some _really_ bad peanuts, and I wanted to know what
they'd do to someone if he ate them; it's in exactly that kind of
situation that I'm really happy I have a friend like you."

"I see.  Which peanuts might these be?"

"Well I really don't have them anymore, but I remember them.  I grew up in
Sandy Spring, Maryland, and spent virtually every weekend with a friend of
mine over in Rockville.  He lived just up the street, maybe fifty feet
from the park.  It was a nice park.  Lots of trees providing shade for the
jungle gyms and swingsets and monkey bars and all that.  This wasn't your
ordinary park with a few trees - they were all over the place.  In my life
I have ran head-on into three of them due to their density in the park and
my speed coming down that hill.  But that's another story.  Anyway, this
park had a carousel.  Sort of an odd one - you can tell the designer
didn't get out to parks much, or at least not out to this one - as he
designed it like a big satellite dish turned upright like a bowl with a
pivot at the center to turn on.  The problem, of course, was (with all the
trees around) that every fall the dish would fill up with leaves and as
there was no way you could tip the carousel over you'd have to scoop the
leaves out with your hands or maybe a stick.
Anyway, during the summer - just at the time of year when (if you don't
have air conditioning) it's even hotter inside the house than outside,
some bad kids from the neighborhood managed to lift a ten pound bag of raw
peanuts from the grocery store and they ended up putting them in the
carousel just before a rather large thunderstorm.  The carousel didn't get
used that often, so it was a while before anyone noticed the peanuts.  By
that time, due to the strong and almost metallic smell of rotting raw
peanut mingling with rusty iron it was too dangerous to approach, much
less actually _touch_ the things when you're scooping them out.  And you
couldn't get anywhere with a stick because by that time it had basically
the consistency of oatmeal.  So they just sat there.  And sat there.  And
eventually nobody wanted to go to the park anymore.
Those are the peanuts that I'd give you to eat, because I always wondered
what they'd do to a guy if he ate them."

"Oh.  No thanks then - I've already eaten lunch."

-- 
"As I understand it, that's why America is a great 
country.  Nobody has to eat sausages if they don't want 
to." -Daniel Pinkwater, "Lizard Music"
Soren Ragsdale - soren@delerium.engr.arizona.edu
http://www.emerald.net/soren/home.html