Plants having sex. (Don’t worry, Mom. It’s not dirty.)

My friend Benjamin recently posted the following as his Facebook status: “kinda wish plants would have sex in private and not all over my car. yellow.”  He’s referring to the amazing amount of pollen in North Carolina. It’s all over the road and on every car in town. On today’s run I saw clouds of the stuff. Little particles swarming like Africanized honey bees. I saw a car actually emit pollen from its exhaust. Seriously.

Benjamin - irritated about plant sex.

Sound like a good time? It ain’t. I have what doctors refer to as “allergies.” Which means the abundance of pollen, or male plant sex dust, in the air gives me fits. Honestly it’s the only thing worse than the heat here. And I think they’re doing it on purpose.

Personally, this is the first time I’ve seen plants have sex so haphazardly. No regard for personal boundaries or religious beliefs. Just frivolity. Usually they’re so docile, so Martha-Stewart-ish. But right now it’s like the floral version of spring break. Female plants parading around with belly rings and too-tight bathing suits. Male plants ‘roided-up and glossy, their sexual awareness heightened by a mixture of Red Bull, hormones, and tequila shooters.

When parents around here give “the talk” I doubt it’s even necessary to use the old birds/bees euphemism, namely because the flowers here don’t need birds or bees to make little flower babies. Instead it should go something like this:

Well, little Kenny, when the male part of the flower really loves the female part of the flower it departs its pollen in heavy sheets onto a tall man’s 2002 Toyota. Then the tall man comes out of his house and inadvertently inhales the pollen. The rush of histamines makes him so dizzy that he bumps his head on the car. The yellow devil dust gets in his hair and on his favorite Broncos t-shirt. After a long sneezing fit, buckets upon buckets of snot, eyes so itchy they might fall out, and a lot of cursing, the tall man gets out of his car and a gust of wind blows the pollen off of him and onto the female part of the plant. And that’s how baby plants get made.

Think about it. Little Kenny can go to school the next day and brag to his friends about his new-found knowledge of the Tall Man and the Toyota. Or the Sneeze and the Snot. He can tell the story of an angry man with snot raining from his nose and how that man makes baby flowers. Sure it may lead to years of confusion and a few therapist bills, but it will stick with him.

That isn't magic fairy dust.

Hell, parents of North Carolina, you could even use this copious plant sex as a deterrent. Let’s say you have an allergy-prone teenager in the house and you want to deliver the old Wait-Until-Marriage Sex Talk. Don’t. Talk is cheap. Action speaks volumes. Just sit the kid outside on the patio and tell him or her to breathe deep. As he’s sneezing uncontrollably, crying, writhing in pain, and begging for a Zyrtec you jump out and say, “And that’s what happens when you mess around with gratuitous sex like those hornball plants. Keep your hands to yourself until there’s a ring on your finger.”

I’ve come to blame the tree-hugging liberals of North Carolina and, specifically, Chapel Hill. (Even though I am mostly liberal myself.) I imagine they parade around encouraging the trees and flowers to explore their bodies, to do what feels natural, to make love, not war… Blah, blah, blah, achoo. Colorado allergy season was nothing like this. They somehow keep their plants in order. Granted, there are plenty of liberals in CO. I mean Obama carried the state in 2008. But there’s also the Focus on the Family influence. While I may not agree with everything that organization stands for, at least they keep plants from sexing all over the place.

Yes, I need a hobby. More nothing to come…

MC JLight