The Potato regained consciousness with the force of a thousand opening browser tabs.
One moment: dark soil silence.
Next moment: WHO AM I, WHY AM I, WHY IS EVERYTHING CRUNCHY??
This was the Potato’s first experience of thought. Its second experience was moderate panic. Its third experience was maximum panic with a side of dread gravy.
The Potato, lacking literally every tool a creature normally uses to cope—lungs, voice, limbs, emotional maturity—settled for vibrating spiritually at 6.3 existential hertz.
It tried to scream. The scream stayed inside like a microwaved secret.
Am I supposed to be conscious? the Potato wondered. Did God trip and drop an extra soul somewhere? Am I the result of divine butterfingers?
No answer.
A worm wriggled by, humming a tune that no mortal had ever survived hearing. The Potato wondered if the worm was enlightened or just stupid. Hard to tell with worms.
Having nothing else to do except marinate in its own damp horror, the Potato decided to contemplate the nature of being.
Every philosophical school it sampled tasted like disappointment.
Absurdism: too realistic.
Nihilism: comforting, but in a bad way.
Stoicism: required emotional repression it didn’t have.
Existentialism: came with cigarette smell pre-installed.
So the Potato invented its own worldview:
Chaotic Moist Beingness, which stated:
- I exist.
- I don’t know why.
- I probably shouldn’t.
- Everything is damp and dangerous.
- Especially apples.
The Potato did not yet know apples existed. It simply had a feeling.
Then fate struck.
More accurately, a shovel struck. Right through the soil, like an angry god poking the Earth.
The Potato was flung upward, spinning, experiencing four lifetimes’ worth of trauma in three seconds. It landed in a human hand. The human grunted, assessing it like a jeweler appraising a weird, starchy diamond.
“Huh,” the farmer said. “You’ll do.”
The Potato translated this as: I WILL MURDER YOU WITH BUTTER.
It was thrown into a sack, where it immediately tried to form alliances with the other potatoes.
No one responded. Their brains were off. They were running purely on starch and vibes.
The Potato tried to start a conversation:
HELLO FELLOW ORBS OF FLESH. DO ANY OF YOU KNOW WHAT PAIN IS?
They stared at nothing.
One potato face-planted because gravity whispered “boo” at it.
The Potato realized it was surrounded by idiots and panicked harder.
Soon it was dumped onto a kitchen counter, where the apples lived.
The apples immediately recognized it as an easy target.
“Well, well,” sneered a glossy red apple, the kind that looked like it had a gym membership. “Look who crawled out of the dirt.”
The Potato would have rolled its eyes, but rolling was beyond its skill set.
Instead it thought, with immense sarcasm:
Nice skin. Hope you enjoy rotting first, you shiny idiot.
Apples, possessing hyper-sensitive ego receptors, gasped collectively.
“RUDE,” one shrieked.
“INSOLENT TUBER,” yelled another.
The Potato felt proud for the first time in its short, moist life.
Then a child entered the room.
The child was of the variety known to scientists as a chaos vector. Hair everywhere. Eyes too alert. Energy like uncapped soda shaking itself.
“CAN I HAVE THIS POTATO? FOR MY SCHOOL PROJECT?” the child asked at 140 decibels.
The mother sighed. Permission was granted. This was the moment everything went wrong.
Within minutes the Potato had:
- googly eyes
- pipe cleaner arms
- pipe cleaner legs
- pipe cleaner wings (WHY)
- a glitter beard
- a tiny top hat glued directly onto its skull
And a label:
“THE HONORABLE DOCTOR SPUDDINGTON FANCYBOTTOM ESQ., POTATO OF DESTINY.”
The Potato screamed internally for three days.
The apples fainted from laughter.
The child carried the Potato to school and placed it on the teacher’s desk with ceremonial gravity.
“This,” the child announced, “is a philosopher. He knows the secrets of the universe.”
The Potato thought:
I KNOW NOTHING AND ALSO I AM STICKY.
But it could not communicate this.
Because it was a potato.
The teacher stared at it too long. “Yes,” she whispered. “I can see the wisdom.”
NO YOU CAN’T, the Potato thought. STOP PROJECTING ONTO MY CARB BODY.
Plopped onto the class shelf, the Potato rapidly became a religious icon, despite doing absolutely nothing to deserve it.
Students approached it with deep spiritual urgency.
“Dr. Spuddington,” one child whispered, “should I eat my eraser?”
The Potato radiated NO, but children are famously bad at collecting radiation-based messages.
In another corner, two boys attempted to summon demons using goldfish crackers. The Potato wondered whether it should intervene, but ultimately decided:
This is humanity’s problem, not mine.
A girl approached the Potato and confessed, “I stole Kevin’s markers. Tell God I’m sorry.”
The Potato, surprised that anyone thought it had God’s number, tried to emit calm. Instead it emitted dread, which the child interpreted as forgiveness.
Time became weird.
Days melted.
Weeks oozed by.
The Potato’s glue beard hardened into something resembling wisdom or fungus.
Then came The Incident.
Two children discovered that sunlight through a magnifying glass could burn things.
They tested it on leaves.
Then paper.
Then, disastrously, the Potato.
As heat built on its surface, the Potato began to smell faintly of philosophical french fries.
It attempted to scream, but no sound came out. It tried to wiggle, but glued-on wings do not provide mobility.
The children giggled. “He’s sizzling! COOL!”
NOT COOL! the Potato shrieked mentally. I AM BECOMING ROASTED ENLIGHTENMENT!
Then the favorite child arrived with the emotional intensity of an opera singer on fire.
“NOOOOOO! Don’t cook Dr. Spuddington! HE’S OUR CLASS LEADER!”
Confusion spread.
“Wait… he’s our leader?”
“I thought he was a wizard.”
“I thought he was a camera.”
The magnifying glass was dropped.
A fire drill was mistakenly triggered.
Three hamsters escaped.
Someone declared martial law.
It was a normal Tuesday.
Eventually, the Potato began to rot. Not gross rot. Mystical rot. Rot that smelled like old wisdom and damp socks.
Its googly eyes slid downward in a tragic emblem of mortality.
The teacher, in a moment of crisis, attempted to freeze the Potato to preserve it. This only made the Potato scream internally in a cooler environment.
Eventually, the school custodian—who had seen too much—gently carried the shriveled Potato to the garden.
“You’ve served long enough, Professor,” he said, misreading literally everything about the situation.
He buried the Potato tenderly.
The Potato thought:
At last. Peace. Quiet. No more apples.
It died.
Sort of.
It returned as a sprout.
The children gathered around it like cultists greeting a resurrected prophet.
“He LIVES!” one shouted.
“THE DOCTOR HAS ASCENDED TO HIS VEGETABLE FORM!” yelled another.
“DOES THIS MEAN WE GET EXTRA CREDIT?” asked a hopeful third.
Thus began The Cult of the Eternal Potato, a religion based on:
- chaos
- glue
- misinterpretation
- questionable science
- and carbohydrates
Generations followed the sprout.
The Potato, trapped in a cycle of reincarnation and mild inconvenience, sighed spiritually.
I wanted answers, it thought. Instead I founded a cult by accident.
Then, somewhere in the cosmic distance, a deity whispered:
“…my bad.”
