In Which I Bitch

...about flowers.

This may be the most pointless in a long tradition of pointless blog posts. You know me. Is that going to stop me?

[SUMMARY: Pointless, ho!†]

I have an irk.

Let me give you a little tour of my alley.‡

Here I stand, facing my garage, and I look to the right:




Look at those lovely, climbing roses! They're lush and thick! They aspire to the sky and someday soon will be climbing right onto the decks above them!

Now I turn to the left:




Look at all the lush, deep, dark clematis! Look at how they foam and unfurl and race the roses to the heights!

Only... some of you will notice a spindly, scrawny little clematis on the far right edge of that picture.

That's my clematis.

Here is my next-door neighbour's clematis§...




... and here is my clematis.




My clematis has a name like Percy and gets beat up after school a lot.

My clematis belts its too-big shorts in so tight at the waist to keep them up that it looks like a sandbag with legs.

My clematis is picked last for dodgeball.

My clematis whines about its wheat allergies and lactose intolerance and huffs, fumblingly, off an inhaler five or six times a day.

Unlike many of the gawky adolescents I'm thinking of as I'm laying attributes on my clematis, my clematis will never grow up to be Bill Gates. My clematis seems to be doomed to life as a video store clerk.¶

[SUMMARY: My clematis is a hopeless geek.]

The plants are maintained by the HOA, and my Chihuahua-foisting neighbours hardly seem the happy homemaker types to take care of their own clematis, so it's not my own damned fault everybody else's look better than mine.

Really, if I knew how to make it better, I'd even put my own time into my clematis. You know... the Charles Atlas 98-lb-weakling program for plants.

My clematis would never have sand kicked in its face again if only I knew how to help.

[SUMMARY: Now this is the part where the rap breaks down...]

I do love the blooms on my clematis.#




They're so purple, even my purplephobic camera can give you an feel for the purple.

And those reddish spots?




Those aren't splotches or discolouration, they're iridescence.

[SUMMARY: Really. Love. the Blooms.]

I did snap another tiny spider photo recently.




I'm sharing. Hey, if I gotta twitch and squirm and chase imaginary bugs all day, I'm gonna take you along with me.

I'll let you go if you can figure out how to fix my clematis.


†FOOTNOTE (crossed): I really mean that more in the tradition of "land, ho!" rather than, "Oh, Marin, you pointless ho," but you may draw your own conclusions.

‡FOOTNOTE (double-crossed): Don't get too excited.

§FOOTNOTE (swerved): Who are terrible, unworthy people who let their shivering, sniveling little Chihuahua out every morning (sometimes for an hour) to run around by himself and pee on my porch and sometimes yap to come in for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.

¶FOOTNOTE (paragraphed): And not Blockbuster. My clematis will never wear anything as cool as a blue golf shirt with a company logo on it.

#FOOTNOTE (pounded): All six of them.