-----Original Message-----
FROM: Helga The Help
SENT: Apr 1 2005 12:00AM
SUBJECT:Runner Up: Newsletter 4/2/05
Dear Heart of the Nation,
I am Helga the Help, the Internet’s most compassionate pre-operative transsexual, and I would like to share with you a sad story about lunch. A few weeks ago I bought a sweet potato and as I was getting ready to eat it I noticed that it didn’t look, well, quite right. It was almost as if the potato had a chemical imbalance. But instead of cruelly discarding it like everyone else, I set it up in a little hospice area of my office and aimed my brightest fluorescent light at it to help it recover.
Weeks passed. I left the lights on day and night and even connected a tube from the faucet to provide a steady stream of hydration and nourishment. Nothing. My potato was just in a permanent vegetative state.
More time passed. The potato began to get bloated and turn strange colors. I was like – totally heartbroken. What started off as a simple lunch turned into something more and I felt like I was married to this potato. Finally, as strange acne-like growths began to appear on the potato’s skin, I could take it no more – I disconnected the life-giving tube from the potato.
As word got around, crowds began to form outside the esteemed LiquidGeneration office building. The checkout clerk and bagger from whom I bought the potato came urging me to replace the tube and they weren’t alone. The farmer who grew it and the undocumented worker who picked it came to urge me to let the potato live. It was, after all, their child. They appealed to the building management company and even to the Chicago Water Department who refused to hear their case. Unrelated people would try to run into the building carrying top soil thinking that the potato could just be planted back. It was a sad, sad scene.
But I was strong. I knew that even though the potato could not tell me its living will, it would have never wanted to be kept alive like this…like a vegetable. So I held my ground. The building manager flew back from vacation to sign an order to have the building flooded but – as before – the Water Department refused. Time was running out.
But then, as the potato was vegetating its last moments, I took pity on the crowd and let them in to see their child. Then kicked out the lot of them! I had custody dammit! I would cremate my potato and bury it in an undisclosed location to avoid what would, no doubt, be a media frenzy. The potato’s three and a half weeks of fame were not yet up.
Love,
Helga