The Chinese Seeds Conundrum

Stephen King could have written this mess, and we'd be only at like, Chapter Five, right now. Still from Creepshow, You Lunkhead.

Human beings are primates, I remind myself, or find myself reminded, on a regular basis--and the thing about your monkey brain is--it's curious. Well, your monkey brain, my monkey brain, the point is, we are more curious than we are smart, but we are also fucking dumb. Case in point: The Chinese Seeds Conundrum:

In late July, America was briefly enthralled with “Unsolicited Seeds from China,” which started showing up in mailboxes in all 50 states. These mystery seeds prompted warnings from the USDA, which said people should not plant them, and should instead alert their state agricultural authority and mail them to the USDA or their local officials.

Many Americans heeded this advice. Many more decidedly did not.

You guys, this is how the horror novel starts out. "Many more decidedly did not." That right there is just negligent, but what did the folks do? They were told not to plant them of course, because, like, lets say it's just some random GMO licensing legal fuckery that takes over your lawn--it's just raw naivete to assume there's anything good in that.  Or who even knows what:

Audrey 2 from the brilliant movie "Little Shop of Horrors"

Yeah, I'm not saying it could definitely be alien man-eating plants, but no. It could be--okay what if it were alien man-eating plants and then you had that on your conscience in your suburban picket-fence tract home somewhere that's green Mr. Man? Is that what you want?



But because monkey-brains will be monkey-brains, if the seeds sort of looked like pumpkin seeds or whatever, here's what some folks did:

In one exchange, a state entomologist and a plant health director discuss how they should categorize and respond to a person who said they had eaten the seeds.

“I’m adding them to my database. Of course, there doesn’t yet exist field to indicate that someone ATE the seeds,” the plant health director wrote. “I don’t know if they also ate other seeds or the packaging,” the entomologist responds.

Ok, somebody maybe ate the packaging, and those are folks that we can't do a damn thing to save, but maybe people have been eating the Seeds of Mystery and Warning?

Here come the muthapucking zombies.

Do you all want zombies up in here? This is how you get zombies, mushroom people, pods that replace your neighbors; like, what movies have you all been watching, people? In the year of OH LORD NOW WHAT 2020, people are eating mystery seeds? We have COVID-19, locust storms, murder hornets, fire tornados, and people want to get their dugout chew on with random stuff sent from strangers?

If this van had Reeses Cups, you know you would be disappeared by now, don't you? 

Now, this is actually pretty much a metaphor for all the other dumb stuff people have been doing this year, like take the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally that people said was a bad idea but then hundreds of thousands of people went to, and now 250,000+ people can now trace their COVID-19 infections to this thing.  Or the rapid opening of schools only to discover that when you gather multiple people from all corners together in one place, they will socialize and spread so much COVID. So much COVID.

And here's the thing--so, we talk about death as being the real big bad and assume young healthy college-age kids aren't going to die. Or maybe big tough old bikers aren't likely to. But we're finding out that there are long-term consequences like heart damage, or neurological damage, that don't actually kill someone (right away) but mess them up real bad. And that isn't very good. 

Anyhow, what I'm saying is, when dealing with the unknown, I'm that person in the theater during the scary movie yelling "You stick together! You bring a flashlight! That doesn't look SAFE! Don't go down there!" And please don't eat the seeds and wear a damn mask and don't congregate with randos until we have all this sorted. Because I've watched a lot of movies, and I'm really skeptical about our monkey brain outcomes.

You finally did it, you maniacs! You blew it up! Or ate the seeds or did that kegger thing.

Because maybe some people think America Needs Football, but actually, we need to fricking sort out what's going on.