I feel like ivy is this trick plant. You think you’re raising this nice, stationary, predictable thing, then in the night it strangles all your loved ones.
Plants can be so cruel, and I think cowards are afraid to talk about that. There was that mean plant with the great voice in “Little Shop of Horrors” that Rick Moranis raised, and I think that plant taps into our collective, primal fear of our leafy, photosynthesizing enemies.
Ooh and I recently saw tumbleweeds in the American West, and they were the most lonesome looking things. I felt sorry for … well, not sorry for them, but sorry for me looking at them and feeling so lonesome. I thought to myself:
“Ooooooh, I’m a lonesome cowboy!
Lookin’ at a tumbleweed!
I’m a LONESOME COWBOY!
Ridin’ on a LONESOME STEED!”
Then I went on to think:
“I’m a lonesome cowboy!
Ain’t see’d a woman for MONTHS!
I’m a lonesome cowboy!
Horny as a corner-sittin’ DUNTH!”
“Thought” may be the wrong word there. I kind of sang all that to myself, looking at that goddamn tumbleweed.
Where was I? Ah yes, the venality of plants.
Yes, they will kill you as soon as look at you. Make no mistake.
In fact, I remember reading in a book by that histrionic Annie Dillard that in the jungle some damn army or other used to tie its prisoners in place horizontally by their wrists and ankles over some fast-growing bamboo, then carve the tops of the bamboo growing beneath the victims into spikes, and the bamboo grew so fast it would slowly impale your sorry ass.
That’s why when I eat salad I like to imagine it crying. I like to think of it as a cousin of that spiked bamboo who now has to pay for the sins of its bamboo kinsman.
And I find that even just around my apartment an awesome way to jam the central nervous systems of my houseplants is to tell them they look like really good salad material and then just sprinkle some croutons or sunflower seeds or bacon bits onto their leaves, so they think they’re about to be my lunch. Or I’ll leave a small to-go container of creamy ranch on the soil in their pot, so they look down and panic. Just to show them who’s boss.
Me. It’s me who’s boss over them.
If I’m really, REALLY angry at one of my plants (DARRELL, say), I’ll dress as a waiter and grind pepper onto its leaves, and say “Say ‘when,’ sir!”
The plants literally shake with fear.
If I shake its base a little bit anyway it seems like it’s shaking.
