James Preller's Blog

I sat down last night, a book on my lap, a cup of tea on the table, along with an orange sliced into quarters.

And I took a bite and thought:

This is the time of year when oranges disappoint. 

It struck me as a type of Twitter comment, a quippy social media update. In the Northeast, I eat delicious oranges throughout the winter. A habit formed during my halcyon wrestling days, trying to make weight. But come this time of year, not so much. They are  so often disappointing. 

This particular orange lacked in flavor.

Then I thought that readers would see it as coded language. To them, I wouldn’t be talking about the fruit. No, it was obviously a reference to the Ugliest American, the orange one. His grim threats of genocide that had us legitimately wondering if our highest elected official might, in a snit, drop a nuclear bomb. And wondering, too, if there would be anybody with the moral conviction to stop him. Those thoughts settled in my stomach like the bones of a sunken battleship to the ocean floor.

If I posted “oranges disappoint,” it would be seen as not only about Trump, but it would also imply that I once help hopes for him. Maybe was even a former supporter, a three-timer, now (finally) disappointed. 

But nope and nope. 

As Sigmund Freud once remarked, “Sometimes an orange is just an orange.”