Dodgeball

There is a moment in dodgeball that everyone experiences, the point where one has no perceived advantage in going left or going right, the instinct to avoid the ball is short circuited, one remains frozen in place for what seems like forever,the nervous system's fight or flight reaction disconnected from the musculo-skeletal structure, ripped out like the spiky backbone of a juicy sea bass,
or a jockey stripped from the double harness, the twin trotters of time and space, hurtling along like a funky sulky on autopilot curled round and round the knife edge of indecision like a cocoon,--OK enough metaphors.
What we have been dodging lately are bubbles not balls,--the principle is the same though, we stand frozen like deer in the headlights waiting for the inevitable call of 'yer out', sometimes for seconds, sometimes months, sometimes for years on end, we are frozen, transfixed and yet can not get out of the way, one bubble after another hurtling toward us penetrating our sussurated, semioperable, synaptic, stupefaction,

the tech bubble --bam! you're out,

the housing bubble--bam!--you're out,
.
the investment bubble--bam! you're out,--BAM, BAM, BAM,

wake up, we're not in Kansas anymore we're in the Emeril City, or Dodge City BAM!
All these bubbles! All these balls to dodge.

You know what it reminds me of? Something else that recently seems to have no real center no real essence just a reflection of expanding expectations --strawberries,--yeah, you heard me, strawberries.

What do strawberries have to do with bubbles and dodgeball? They too seem caught in this same uncontrollable soulless expansion. They are huge, and they have no centers and what is more they seem to have lost the essence of what they were, they
have lost their 'strawberriness'. They are gorgeous shimmering replicas of their former more compact selves, expansive gargantuanly irrelevant superficialities, like us, like the bubbles, --BAM!

Why do I like winemaking so much? It always encourages the contrarian in me. Turns the bubbles inside out. It's always about focusing on the opposite; bubbles do not signify the end of a process; they signal the beginning; the surge and ferment that helps us emerge better, more essential, more cogent, more
connected to our teeter-tottering, trotting neural networks, more, not less, --yes that is what is nice about
wine,-- and bubbles,--while there are still a million talking heads talking about the one current bubble, there are a million bubbles that will be worth talking about it in maybe a year or two years when the wine calms down, when this one head calms down enough to drink that wine, recalling bubbles and balls we dodged, then it is our turn, and the bubbles that come hurtling at us one after the other are full of promise that energizes rather than tasteless emptiness that enervates us and surprises us with it's vapid non-essentialness. They say 'wine is life', well
not the life we have been living maybe, but maybe the life we should have been living, instead of trying to avoid. Tiny bubbles, getting bigger.