A lemon rolling down a hill is the latest viral video star, with almost 5 million views
Spoiler alert: the Twitter video, shot by Californian Mike Sakasegawa, has moments of modest tension. But mostly, it just depicts a lemon rolling relentlessly down a hill
For two minutes, Mike Sakasegawa followed a lemon as it rolled down a hill near his San Diego home, filming the citrus fruit’s adventure on his phone.
He didn’t have a plan for the lemon. Sakasegawa saw it first from a distance, already rolling at a steady pace, as he walked home from his morning run.
“I thought it was a tennis ball or something,” Sakasegawa said in an interview Thursday. He’d just passed a guy walking his dogs. He ran to catch up to the rolling object, and it was only as he got closer that he noticed it was actually a piece of fruit.
Sakasegawa decided to follow the lemon. “I wanted to see how long it would keep rolling,” he said. He hoped it would roll quite a long way.
He did not talk to the lemon, or touch the lemon, until it stopped rolling at the bottom of the hill.
After the lemon stopped, Sakasegawa posted his documentary to Twitter on Wednesday morning. In 24 hours, his video got more than 2.5 million views. By Thursday afternoon, it was closing in on 5 million.
I just kind of felt bad. I had watched this lemon roll like a champ down this hill. I felt bad that it was sitting in the gutter, that someone might drive over it
Sakasegawa is a photographer, and his work often focuses on seeing the beauty in mundane objects. That’s probably why he followed the lemon down the hill. But Sakasegawa is still super confused about why anyone else was interested in the lemon.