Kevin Plant thought an outing to the grand opening of the local minor league baseball team’s new stadium Tuesday night with friends sounded fun—despite the very real dangers to peanuts at baseball games. Plant and his friends, you see, are peanuts.
“I’ve never been invited before,” Plant said. “Never have known anyone to go.”
But Monday night changed all of that. Plant said he and about 80 others were invited to the game by lifelong-friend Casey. “Casey said we’d all ride together in a bag,” Plant said. “Fun in numbers, he said.”
Plant’s fear of crowds had him decline the offer. “I try to stay out of salty situations,” he said before realizing an obvious and unfortunate pun. Plant laughed until what looked to be tiny bead-like tears appeared. “Oh, man. I’m gonna get roasted for that one.”
Plant’s concern grew when he received a text message from Casey saying he had been dropped and had fallen into a ravine with no apparent way out. When asked if he was alone, Plant recalls Casey said he was with an elastic hair band and a wad of chewed gum, and that the 3 were trying to hold things together. Hours had passed before the final words came from his friend.
“A lot of wind now,” Casey texted. “Sounds like a gas-powered machine or something. The hair band has blown away. I’ve been blown under the gum. There’s no getting out of this canyon. I may not be found until this place gets demolished. I love you.”
John Jeffries, a homo sapiens that specializes in the retrieval and relocation of things from places at which his kind assemble, says Casey’s rescue is still possible. “We find peanuts like Casey stuck in crevices years after they’ve gone missing,” Jeffries said. “There is hope to find him someday.”
Jeffries said Casey’s friends shouldn’t be too quick to celebrate, however. Finding Casey will likely lead to a life sentence in landfill, or worse, a painful finality in an incinerator. “Peanuts best be careful what they wish for,” Jeffries said.
Plant says he’d like to do his own research on how to help find and rescue Casey—as well as to gain his understanding of what his friend’s fate may entail—but has been frustrated by discover nothing. “I’m just a peanut,” Plant said. “I can’t afford Wi-Fi plus a phone. I had to pick just one, so I went with a basic cellular plan with limited text messaging and no data. So there’s that.”
The Las Vegas Aviators beat the Sacramento River Cats 10-2 in their 2019 debut in front of a sellout crowd of 10,000 homo sapiens and 400,000 peanuts—the latter of which are mostly presumed trapped in bags, dead or missing.