I'm for seeded watermelon
And human writing
About this time of year, I start looking for seeded watermelon. But it’s become harder to find.
Yes, watermelon with seeds. You know, the kind that’s dense near the rind but cotton candy flaky and airy toward the middle. The kind that’s bursting with bright red dripping childhood sweetness and never-ending summer. The kind that forces you outside to eat it, makes you lean over, dip your cheeks in, suck and roll those seeds around your tongue so you can spit them out, barely missing your sweltering toes as juice engulfs your fingers and trickles off your elbows. The kind that calls for a thorough wipe-down after the indulgence is over.
Seeded watermelons are full-body-experience watermelons. It’s diving into summer, a flavor extravaganza only achievable with work and surrender and love of mess. Both food and body tincture, thirst quencher and tongue twister, an ambrosia of the past.
Seeded watermelon, with its deep green and lightning-bolt white stripes, is a different universe, a flipped dimension from the neutered, faint and barely green—like diluted tea—seedless spheres masquerading as food.
Seedless watermelons are the product of our corporatization of everything. Those perfectly heftable, sanitized, ever disappointingly pale, almost plastic, pink flesh. Insides built for semi transport across thousands of miles, outsides engineered to bounce on impact, conceived not for feral mouths craving unadulterated genes.
Those seedless ones: We cut them into squares and eat them with a fork on our perfectly white couches. Never an “oh” or an “mmm” or a “damn, that’s good”; such flaccid fruits prompt conversations that are equally bland.
The seeded watermelon of my childhood seems out of reach to me now. It’s a troublesome thing of the past, a thing that takes too much time and too much mess. It’s too damn imperfect.
But God, was there ever anything that tasted better than the massive, unwieldy, seeded watermelon of summers gone, that made the gleeful groan with pleasure, mouths so full and busy with seeds, no words could be muttered till the thing had been consumed, and pink-splattered rinds littered the dirt?
Running through a lightning bug evening, standing gleefully in a warm thunder shower, giggling under a half-scoop-of-ice-cream moon, wiping those sticky flecks of bright succulence from drenched cheeks?
I fall in love with writers who make me feel the same way as a seeded watermelon. The first cut reveals the living, pulsing, vivid flesh of human experience. Texture, sensuality, pain that’s sweet, critique that’s funny, emotions that drip down my chin, flecks of story left behind on my skin. Naked, messy, sticky, stomach full of pleasure, and I am spitting out seed after imperfect seed. But my tongue is alive with the mess of it. The curtains of my heart are spread open. I’m forced into the wilderness of the soul. I laugh. I cry. I’m drenched in tingles. I feel.
The most precious and delicious are the ones with the likelihood to break or bruise when dropped.
Bring me those seeded watermelon stories so I can mull and chew and spit and occasionally swallow one magical seed accidentally so that it grows a story within me.
Before art. Before science. Before fire. Before we were even human. We told stories.
Will AI platitudes become the opiate of the masses?
What do seeded watermelons have to do with artificial intelligence? Allow me a moment, please.
AI is here to stay, whether we like it or not. As for conservation, it can “listen” to forests to track which species are present, a task that used to take hundreds of man-hours. Project CETI is using AI to decipher sperm whale “language.” I’d love to dig into these hopeful products of AI.
AI is not all bad. I use it for proofreading and an occasional image, but I’m always transparent about it.
What’s truly offensive is when I observe writers sneaking AI into something they claim is their own. It burns. It’s sacrilege. I’m not talking about using AI for writing drudgery like press releases. I’m talking about selling AI-generated storytelling, analysis, and context written in a fluffy, vapid manner to steal the algorithm. AI content is specifically designed to please, to satisfy, to ameliorate, not to scrape against neurons or interfere with swallowing. It’s painful to see people fall for the bait.
AI is dull by design. It’s trained to avoid confrontation, remain fair, provide affirmation and avoid hurt or insult. It will never contain the sharp facets that humans bring to storytelling.
When compared to humans, AI chatbots are known to be good at summarization. What takes a human many hours to do well—summarizing today’s news for instance—takes an AI chatbot a few seconds. But when it comes to insight and analysis, AI falls short.
In my post last week, I mentioned a story about millions of bees “escaping” an overturned truck. After seeing several references to the story online, some of which sounded like AI rehash, I decided to ask ChatGPT to summarize the story. Then I asked it for “deeper analysis.”
I’ll let it speak for itself as to why it falls short:
Here, I write, “So you admit you were bland,” which was immediately removed, even though ChatGPT still answered the question.
So there you have it.
AI writing is everywhere. If you aren’t sure, run it through any of the dozens of AI detectors available online. Or, spend some time with ChatGPT to familiarize yourself with how it communicates.
A massive shift is taking place in our consumption of information. We’re not only living in a post-fact world, but a post-meaning, post-context world, where experts and scientists face unprecedented distrust, and uncertainty is tearing our psyches apart. Fame seekers wield AI as a balm for it all.
When it comes to storytelling, we need poem hunters, circle noticers and people who lay it on the line. We need big, unwieldy watermelon stories full of seeds, that crack when dropped and drip when eaten.
We need those slippery, wayward, tough seeds that cling and root and grow more stories.
To read more stories like this, head over to my personal narratives section.
Hopeful headlines
PERU
From Phys.org: Newly-declared conservation area in Peru is home to pink dolphins, giant armadillos and woolly monkeys
SOUTH AMERICA
From Mongabay Brazil via
VIETNAM
Also from Mongabay: New population of rare douc langurs found in Vietnam’s highland forests
UK
From The Guardian: A place for birds nests in the walls of every new home in England?
ANTARCTICA
From NPR: Penguins in Antarctica could actually be helping cool the climate … with their poop
USA
Alaska
From KTOO: Feds ask court to dismiss timber industry lawsuit that aims to increase Tongass old-growth logging
Florida:
From Naples News: Record year for Burmese python program means fewer snakes, more hope for native wildlife
Nevada:
From NPR: Faced with rising temps, Las Vegas is embracing a simple climate solution: More trees
Maine:
From the Press Herald: The country’s first mushroom casket was buried last week
About Earth Hope:
Earth Hope is a solutions-based journalism project that highlights environmental success stories to inspire action. I’m
, a former newspaper reporter and current eco-news junkie. Read more about this project and what inspired it. Visit earthhope.substack.com for more stories.
Well this left w a proper watermelon craving.... And equally a craving for real human connections and stories... Beautiful writing thank you 🍉
Wow! Thank you for linking us as something we need. I’m so glad to be a seeded watermelon story teller. Yay! I also avoid AI and only use it occasionally to help me find a title for something if I am struggling. But, otherwise, I don’t even edit with it. I love how you got it to explain why it doesn’t work for nuanced and messy human storytelling.