Saturday, November 25, 2006

The Short, Brutal Life of a Parade Balloon

One moment you're flying high, the center of attention. Young children on their parent's shoulders point to you and laugh in shared delight. The marching bands and anemic floats meander with scarcely concealed envy, knowing the spectators regard them as little more than the filler leading up to your appearance. A thousand cameras focus on each step of your journey, while on TV screens throughout the city, you float down the canal of grand old buildings like a Godzilla who had come to Tokyo, not to destroy it, but to dance through its streets.
Then you turn the corner, just out of the sight of the adoring crowds, and suddenly you're getting the air knocked of you. You're being punched, kicked, pummeled. Your nose falls flush against the pavement and your nether end hangs indecorously in the air. You feel your spine being squeezed out of you , your legs stomped flat as pancakes. You collapse.
Yet the assault continues, without mercy, until you're nothing more than a bundle of brightly colored rag, stuffed into a bag and put up on a dark shelf, to spend all the seasons of the coming year consumed in angst, worrying whether some freshborn cartoon will steal your place in next November's resurrection.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice. Is there a moral to this?

Anonymous said...

I guess this proves that Reindeer cannot fly...

Anonymous said...

I suppose the moral is that we shouldn't get too puffed up when we sail above the crowd, for eventually we will all be deflated and crated.

Anonymous said...

A modern Icarus

Becky said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Becky said...

hey Lynn--I enjoyed your article, particularly because the parade balloons you featured are all made by the company I work for, Dynamic Displays. Would you be willing to link back to us in your post?