Plant Locomotion

GUESS WHAT? OILCHANGES IS NO LONGER NECESSARILY ABOUT OR PICTURING AND PRETENDING TO BE ABOUT FOOD. 
 

This morning, before I became conscious of the terrible world and the fact that I am a compromoised being who lives in it, I bent over to tie my shoe in the plant room.  I noticed that my pencil cactus needed water.  Because I am a creature of fragmented attention, I proceeded to water my pencil cactus before completing the shoe tying act.  Nothing so special in itself, but it was upon the realization that I could not get through the twenty second act of tying my shoes without getting distracted, with half my mind still set upon my plant and the other half worrying about upcoming car payments, that it suddenly occured to me that plants would never have invented the automobile because they do not have the concept of travel.  I enjoyed this thought for about two seconds.  Then I questioned it.

Plants, of course, do have a concept of travel, of locomotion.  If they had not, they would not design and build seed dispersal methods that bear their potential young over minor and major distances.  Take the slutty maple tree, for instance: not only does it have the concept of travel, but it has the concept of packed highways.  It bears its seeds and then, when it is ready to disperse them, creates packed highways of the air.  So, I thought to myself, perhaps there is some other reason to explain why the plant did not invent the car before man.  I finished tying my shoes. 

Perhaps some of you are laughing at the absurdity of my morning thoughts, but I was not laughing because, behind all of this was the real fear that I had become a nobody in this world.  Worse, the fear that I had always been a nobody and that, through the incursion of great personal debt, I'd allowed myself to temporarily believe the opposite.  Such is the state of my self-esteem these days.  Shortly, I have none.  Now, as I reflect on this post (I just took a moment to preview it before publishing it to my minor readership), I realize the answer to my question of the morning, rather, why I was unable to answer it: I have been defining "car" too rigidly, too literally.  A car is merely a device to move a thing from point A to point B.  The human car, therefore, is just a more elaborate, more expensive, and mechanically inferior version of the plant car.  Alas, I am not a plant, and so I am stuck with my Subaru.  As wonderful as it would be to pack myself into a seed pod and float, it would doubtless be cramped and uncomfortable, and chances are I would not be satisfied with the place where the winds decided to let me down.