All life is chemistry. You both know it and show it when the molecules of ‘connection’ (that is to say, being connected to self, something or someone) are missing from reactions made in the humdrum-drumming of the quotidian life. You know this in a falling off the perch and rattling the head kind of fashion when you start watering the house plants with your own pee.
Now the idea is not to acidify the roots and thus kill the last chance anyone has got to connect with the only living thing that keeps growing on no more nurturing than a few bars of Bach, drops of water, spots of light and soluble elements found abundantly in human pee. A soluble gas like nitrogen, needed for photosynthesis, is a big fix for the love of the plant to grow, but let us never ignore the role of light in giving that plant a solid sense of purpose and direction in the life cycle. We can learn a lot from finding our purpose in life in the discreet manner plants do. Conclusively, for the misguided and the lost and the lonely among our legion, moving agonizingly slowly and relying on solar navigation might provide a new modus vivendi there to enrich life to levels considered incalculable by even the standards of Mork’s whacked-out planet Ork.
I digress. Back to the idea in hand. The whole idea of peeing on beloved house plants is not to hasten their demise. As every dog owner with a lawn knows, uric acid in urine turns the green, green grass of home to brown, brown shoots of dead. Rather, the idea of committing this seemingly warped act, when all other meaningful relationships to us have either crash-landed or else never got off the ground to begin with is, in actual fact, to fertilize the potential for beauty. In diluted form, naturally. I mean, let’s not kill the potential for a blossoming connection here by being too overwhelming with our acts of human kindness. Lavishing our love in yellow-brown concentrated form, you might say.
As every homeopath knows and every psychopath with a conscience should, weaken the solution while keeping the essence. As every psychopath knows and every homeopath facing bankruptcy should, making a connection by laying it on thick merely results in the recipient perishing by deeds fair or foul.
The generative qualities of our own bodily fluids go unheralded for the most part. Shoots spring up where little springs of pee shoot out. Watching, albeit with the benefit of time-lapse photography , something leafy with life grow within the sterile confines of a hotel-apartment has got to be tantamount to connection. And I mean the click factor. Transfusing a little of us into what could be loosely described as the bloodstream of the plant might just be an interim solution to that affliction many feel when they’re in a place, in a phase, where connecting on a deep and pervasive level seems the hardest thing to do. If this line of reasoning is reminiscent of ‘The Birdman of Alcatraz’ – you know, the lonely, cold-blooded killer tenderly raising baby sparrows – then you’re not far off approximating the true motives that underlie the theory.
You can let it drain pointlessly away down the toilet bowl or else donate it to needy household refugees: the ficus, the peace lily, the anthurium, the dracaena, or if you’re feeling adventurous, the Madagascan Dragon Tree. Falling by the wayside doesn’t need to be irreversible. Reaching out and making a difference to the being within and without needn’t be Herculean in task. The answer ain’t pissin’ in the wind. The answer is pissing on something that deserves your excess nitrogen. Suffice it to say, connect to more than the internet and let the green-hearted sentinel calm your pounding, postmodern heart with a silent and lasting bond. And, word of warning, if you want the human-plant connection to culminate in an enduring love, don’t stand menacingly over it poised like the Pissing Boy of Brussels, and try perfecting the Goldilocks effect of not too much, nor too little. That formula might just win your emboldened heart a fair maiden further down the line.
The Blind Salamander 