Special Ingredients: I Hate Balloons

I think that in life, there are a lot of hidden meanings buried in the things and actions that make up the world. The very nature of the thing or action could very easily symbolize life itself, the very core of the universe. For example, if your wife walks in on you during a very personal moment with the babysitter, you could explain that you are only exploring the various possibilities from the past and what could have been. You’re still going to die, but “Died exploring the various possibilities of what could have been” reads way better on a tombstone than “Caught making a taco-dog with my son’s sitter.”

I realized such a metaphoric look on the world might explain some things in my life (note to my girlfriend: NOT like the situation above). I found myself pondering something like this back in September, after my twenty-second birthday. I requested specifically an NES-themed birthday cake, the intention being that I wanted feel like it was 1990, where I was eight-years-old and blissfully stupid. The cake was there, and with it another nod to childhood that I detested more than a blinking screen: balloons.

Actually, I do like balloons a lot. By capturing helium in rubber, you suddenly have something that can fly without any outside mechanism or expended resource. Even if you just blow regular old air into them, balloons are still fun to bat around, gather static electricity with for showing off, and releasing into the air with hopes that it will fly around and hit someone in the face. Balloons are a blast.

The thing that I really hate about helium balloons, the thing that jades me on them in general, is that they slowly shrivel away. As the helium slowly escapes from the confines of the latex, the once-proud, soaring balloon slowly begins to fly lower and lower, eventually flopping to the ground. Then, it begins to shrivel up into a bloated raisin, doomed to become garbage, even though it delighted so many days before.

I hate this because I’m the kind of person who looks for the permanence in things. When I switch on my Playstation, I expect it to come on like it did for the last six years, even though I put in hundreds, maybe thousands of hours on the poor thing. I expect there to be a McDonalds serving double cheeseburgers for a dollar, and they will put ketchup, mustard, mayo, and cheese on it, as I request. I expect that when I go to kiss my girlfriend or be comforted after a hard day, she will still be there.

Balloons clearly aren’t like this. You fill them with helium, take them to the party, and within a week, they’re dead, shells of their former glory. I hate that, because I want the balloon to last forever, to be able to be played with whenever I feel like it. I don’t want it to die.

Not that I expect permanence out of everything. Food, for example, is useless unless it’s eaten. Most kinds of packaging are useless after its contents are removed. And most importantly, BB gun ammunition is meant to be expended, even though I reuse it when I can find it, usually embedded in something inappropriate.

After my birthday, I saw the balloons die and I began to wonder if there wasn’t a stronger meaning in my distaste for them. Then it hit me: the life of a balloon is the perfect metaphor for the life of any living thing. All of the joys and fears of humanity is wrapped up in a floating wad of latex.

The symbolism is pretty simple. The balloon is created in the factory and awaits someone to add a second ingredient to it to make it start to grow. Then the balloon shoots up, growing into the balloon that it will spend its life being (although I’m not sure if it’s possible for a human to grow so much that they burst, unless you count air as representing life, which I could see, if you define living too much by replacing "living" with "drinking"). The balloon soars and bounces and weaves, feeling the glory of life, at least within its limits (the string).

Then the balloon ages. The life slowly leaks out of it and it slowly comes down from its glory, wrinkling and dying at the end. It’s almost painful to watch, maybe because, subconsciously, it’s like seeing into our own futures.

Oh sure, plenty can happen before that point. Some jerk could stab you with a pin and you pop. You could be let off of your string and fly magnificently in the air, only to freeze to death when you get outside of the Earth’s atmosphere (I know this probably doesn’t happen, but it’s symbolism for recklessness, Erwin VonGeek). Or some kid could untie your opening and let you fly around in hopes of smacking someone in the face. The practical poetry is endless!

Death is something that humans fear more than anything, mainly because it’s such a huge unknown. As I discussed in another article, the lack of knowledge scares people more than anything: it is the basis for all fear, really. If there was solid evidence that death was a burning, painful torment, people would probably feel BETTER, because at least they know what’s going on. They would be sad, but not afraid.

I hate balloons because they remind me of my own mortality, as well as the mortality of those I really wish wouldn’t die. Even so, the balloons never seem to be depressed about their impending demise. I suppose there is a lesson somewhere in all of this, about how we should persevere not matter what life may hand us, to soar as high as we can, never letting adversity take us down. Or something like that. Frankly, this is an article about linking balloons to mortality, and if you take any of this advice seriously, someone should let the air out of you. Thank you.