Brilliance learned on the internet this week:
Scratch haunting things into bananas at the market so when people take them home hours later and the words appear they think a ghost knows their secrets.
Ingenious. Right?
The one problem with this prank is that the prankster is never afforded the opportunity to witness the results play out in real life. You must be able to find satisfaction in knowing that the prank will one day be realized, even if you never see it yourself.
For some, this satisfaction is unattainable. They must see the prank play out in all its glory or its worthless.
Not for me. I’ve always been willing to set things in motion and experience great satisfaction in knowing that the payoff will someday come, even if I never see it myself.
In sixth grade, I sat in the back of science class, removing dictionaries from the shelf along the back wall and replacing definitions with my own. I would cut and tape paper over the original definition and pencil in one that I thought more appropriate.
Noting terribly clever, I’m afraid, given my age. Things like:
Moron: The teacher standing in front of you.
Ass: Stop looking up minor swear words in the dictionary, you loser.
Brown: The color of poop.
There’s a good chance that no one ever saw a single one of my replaced definitions. Those books might still be sitting on a shelf somewhere, gathering dust, untouched. Or perhaps they have been long since been recycled and turned into cookbooks, toilet paper, and Marxist propaganda pamphlets.
That’s okay. I took so much joy in the act of replacing those definitions and found such a thrill in imagining the possibilities of the future.
That was enough for me. Which it why I will be scratching creepy messages into bananas at Stop & Shop today. I’ll never see the fruits of my labor, but just knowing that my actions will bear fruit will be more than enough.
