meijuun & the copper daisies, or inter-shameful transpacific discourse

No one caught them growing in the meadows. An epidemic of bright copper colored flowers came unsuspected into the suburbs, first spotting up onto the sides of freeways, then into the corners of yards, the grout lines in the concrete. There they were pulled out adamantly as weeds, but unlike the living, the dead ones were hideous. After only a couple of days these copper-penny daisies, as the hikers called them, rolled up into a ball to produce seeds. The pretty petals pulled in, and bulbous masses resembling testicles would emerge. These unsightly hairy balls germinated in weeks after falling to the ground, the stems brown and useless, baking in the sun.

Now the city is full of these. The empty lots filled with half beautiful luminescent penny daisies, with testicles in-between. Children often pick at the ugly seed pods, amazed at how large they are. Proud of their discovery, they hold them up to their parents who snatch the treasure away, disgusted, then scold their children almost with seemingly too much passion.

In any case, the local news did not ignore the penny daisy invasion, reporting on it as if it were an issue of national security. And true, no one knew exactly where it came from and who or what was the exact cause. I saw a half-hour discussion special starting from the botanist from the university, the chief park ranger, and a meteorologist all with their theories. The ranger believed it was a species of rodent that was exterminated from the local ecosystem whose primary diet were these unsightly testicle pods. The botanist believed it was a scientific mutation, and the meteorologist actually didn't say much at all. He mentioned the lack of rainfall, but it didn't seem to relate. At the end no one actually had a concrete answer anyway. Typical local news coverage. All speculation and no information.

Really, not much happened except that there was this conspiracy theory upheld by some people in the neighborhood. That the government or something did it. I don't know. In any case, what ended up happening was that much of the city wanted this unnatural occurrence out of sight. I mean, people just walked around with their own personal bottle of Weed-B-Gone.

But really, the flowers really weren't so terrible to behold in the valley, viewed from enough distance where the hairy balls were hidden/blurred among the multiple blossoms. Almost majestic, a whole acreage of them. Meijuun thought so anyway. When we saw them for the first time it was before the excessive overgrowth, anyway. Went for a walk into the hills, and she was so amazed she plucked a huge bouquet, brought them back home and they sat in the middle of our table, gleaming under our cheap dim lights. Even after the reaction against them she still wore them in her hair, so that they wouldn't turn into pods, and instead would die discarded as beautiful browning copper petals falling out of her long black hair at the end of the day. Sometimes in bed I would see one she missed, gleaming even in the blue night-glow.