In the summer it must be fabulous to be a grape, surrounded by all your cluster mates, chatting it up about your wonderful color and fragrance, soaking in the long days of sun and ocean breeze to enhance both, wondering why some grapes are plumper than others, but otherwise enjoying the surety and certainty of the stasis of being a grape. After all, what else do you know? You are approaching the ideal of grape. Perhaps you’ve heard whispers along the vine of something called “wine,” and “pressing,” but those have no meaning to you.

As Adam Gurri notes in this week’s melancholic post (melancholic for me, at least) at The Umlaut, the finger comes to pick you, at the appointed time and season, that which you cannot know. At this time you will learn what pressing is, and you will learn that it is not at all pleasant, along with you and all your mates. You will protest against the injustice of it all, the disruption of this revolution, but you will not be heard, not your voice nor those of the millions being processed with you.

Through the screen you are pressed, and then what are you? Are you a grape?

No, you are joy for posterity, the gladdening of hearts.