flowers are so fucking pretty

Rather than bore you to death or pummel you with an aggravation-charged rant about quitting smoking in an era of runaway capitalism, environmental degradation, massive corporate and governmental corruption, envy, greed, lechery, jealousy, murder, chronic masturbation, and monks that immolate themselves to protest all of this, I have decided instead to post a couple pictures of pretty flowers.  Before I do that, however, I want to say that my job periodically makes me so insanely frustrated that I become apt to resent all organic life, and I want only to be an android or a rock covered in hate gel and diseased angels.  Fortunately, today is not one of those days; and even though Massachusetts has turned into an arid state in which the normal early spring rains refuse to RSVP, I am feeling chipper.  Flowers are pretty and colorful; and each time I see a flower, tiny flowers bloom in me and, like ice picks made of pollen, the flowers chip away at the deposits of black scale this treacherous world daily mounts upon my ordinary human heart, and I soften.  So here's to being soft.  

   
Isn't that god damn pretty?  If only I knew its name.  This flower appeared on the west side of my house recently.  I was plunking around back there, more than likely doing whatever I could to avoid taking a deep and pleasant puff of a cigarette, when I spotted its perfect, upright symmetry, its deep buttery color, and its petals that faced the universe's giant and gaseous source of total energy, the sun.  But the sun, alas, is not a renewable source of energy, and one day this planet must go cold and die.  That'll be the smoking ban that really sticks.  Until then, however, I remain cheerful and continue to bless each of nature's small marvels, reminding myself how profoundly fortunate I am that flowers even exist, not to mention that these flowers voluntarily grow around my house, under the hot air exhaust from my modern clothes dryer.  Life is pretty spectacular in all of its locations.  I wonder, though, how flowers would feel if they had to quit smoking?

 
The question is an absurd one.  Imagine a little Johnny Jump-Up, such as the one pictured above, driving to the cigarette store to buy some smokes.  Flowers and plants in general simply do not partake of cigarettes, heroin, whiskey, gambling, obsessive house cleaning, clinical depression or abnormally extreme social anxiety.  They just sit around and look fucking pretty, an accomplishment for which they never seem to compliment one another.  It is only we humans, with our stretch SUV limos and our ridiculous beverages such as Smirnoff Ice, who lavish compliments upon them.  Tomorrow, to make myself feel better, I am going to blow a shit load of my allotted cigarette smoke onto one of them and say, Take that you pretty and unconscious mass of colorful cells.  It'll be just like the hard March wind, and the flower, you can bet your ass, will not know the difference, though it may shudder momentarily.  After that, I don't know what I will do.  Perhaps I will say the rosary or purchase some insignificant piece of Chinese-made plastic.  It could be worse.  I could be in an actual hell in which all of my surrounds are completely inhospitable and unbending.  That would be a place where good health would truly be meaningless.