Death of a Lemon

I came home today feeling a little down. But…the sure-fire cure for the blahs, the antidote for antipathy: absurdity. So, with that in mind, I wrote this post. Last night I received a single lemon from a friend. It was the last one she had. Poor little lemon. I brought it home and set it safe in my fruit bowl. Isn’t it pretty? So smooth, so yellow, so innocent. So trusting.

Some time today, fully in the throes of doom and gloom, a dark thought entered my mind. I thought of this lemon, sitting alone and unblemished in my kitchen. I thought of its beauty. Its tart taste. The perfect complement to a cup of tea. Lemons are quite beautiful when you think about them that way. That was when I decided to feed it to The Annihilator.





The Annihilator is my juicer. It is actually a circa 1963 Juice-O-Mat I inherited from my mother. This was my favorite toy as a child. It’s a dinosaur! It’s an alien! It's a giant shark! One day she called me and told me she was going to get rid of it. Nooooo!!!! I couldn’t let that happen! The Juice-O-Mat was the first in the “O-Mat” series of small appliances first marketed in the early 1960s and is a genuine collector’s item. People pay $60+ for these things on EBay. But this one is mine. I will not give it up. This one is very special because it still has the original aluminum cup to catch the drippings, er, juice, of its victims.




I brought it out. I put the lemon on the counter where The Annihilator could smell it.




The Annihilator grinned in anticipation. It has been a while since The Annihilator has eaten. It is hungry. It opened its maw and awaited the offering.


The lemon trembled in fear. It was a sacrifice to my black mood. There was no way for it to avoid its fate. I placed it in The Annihilator’s jaws. And now you see why I call it The Annihilator. The lemon went from fat

to flat in half a second.



Decimated. It does a good job, which is probably why people still want a 40-year-old juicer. The yield from one lemon, though, is a bit on the skimpy side.

When I first got The Annihilator, I thought, “Cool! I’ll have fresh-squeezed orange juice every morning!” Do you have any idea how many oranges it takes to get one cup of juice? I stopped counting after A LOT. That dream died hard.

The best thing about The Annihilator?




Its dentures are dishwasher safe. No evidence left behind. The perfect crime. I feel so much better.

Bwaahaaahaaaaahaaaaa.....