GYSO Drawing Part 40 - tomato Plants

Published: 2020-08-30

Introduction

Thor:
And that’s how we survived as literal tomato plants since the last podcast episode. That’s all folks, thanks for reading, we’ll see you on the next podcast episode!

Tim:
You see, this post is formatted in this backwards way because it is like a plant growing from the ground and into the sky. It’s all symbolic and planned, I swear. It wasn’t just a random idea that I post-hoc rationalized a symbolic meaning onto or anything. This is high art and you will appreciate it’s meandering meaning. Just throwing ideas at the wall every two weeks.

What went right?

Tim:
When you can’t move or think or do much of anything, you get kind of bitter. That’s a survival strategy, being bitter. It means that nobody will eat me.

The way GNU/dirt works is that you have to run it in a VM inside a Windows XP VM. And it’s actually a web service, and you need to send a request to a server for every command you want to run from the terminal, and every pixel you want to render. Except it isn’t like simple SSH, because the interface is run on an electron app running in a docker instance inside a chroot on your home directory.

There’s a certain brand of cow shit that I like. It’s the one they make with all the literal cow shit that makes plants grow because they’re disgusting little shits that are into that kind of thing. All plants are gross, but they don’t care. Nobody cares about what plants think. Which is why I decided to invent GNU/dirt. It’s a linux distribution based off of Mint which is based off Ubuntu which is based off Debian that’s made specifically for people who have been forcefully turned into tomato plants for no damn reason.

Thor:
The magic of friendship is it’s transformative powers. When a so called human would come and shower my soil, I appreciated when they would stay for a while and expunge their carbon dioxide out of their lipid, gaping, mouth-holes onto my beautiful growing-soil. It would feed me, and it made me grow strong.

Eventually, I had grown about a meter and something into the air. My growing-soil was getting too small for big little me. My back, which had transformed from a literal hunch back, into a literal feather-weight spine, was now beginning to restore it’s shape into the “human” form I was so previously used to.

What went wrong?

Thor:
What they don’t tell you about hunched backs is that you get very tired after a while. After being properly tired for enough of a while, I decided to take a small nap there, on the windowsill, that I was light enough to sit on because I was continually shrinking in size. I asked everyone around me to give me water every once in a while when I looked dry, and that was that.

When I woke up, life was simpler. Food was no longer an issue, as I would now feed off the sun’s beautiful rays. Occasionally, a so called “human” would visit me in my location and feed me tasty drops of water into my growing-soil. It made me happy and kept me from growing sad.

At this point, I wondered how my aloe vera plant was doing.

Tim
Something, as you could say, went wrong, and now I was stuck into the pot of potted plant soil. I texted my good friend Thor about this new development. I noticed that my arms and thumbs were a bit more red than usual.

I wanted to get out of the huge pot of fresh soil, but I also wanted to stay. I entertained the idea of walking around with it on my back like a god damn crab, but I decided against it on account of not having a good enough hunch back. Also it would get dirt everywhere. Also I was pretty sure I was stuck.

I asked my aloe vera plant, Henry, what he thought about soil. Turns out that plants can’t talk. No matter how much I try to get Henry the aloe vera plant to talk, he just won’t do it. Why do you hate me Henry?

What happens next?

Thor:
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic pond, I was feeling continually dehydrated and craving sunlight all the while. So I ended up, with my hunched back, in a windowsill, looking out at the beautiful sunlight. Oh, the sun had never looked this beautiful.

Do you ever just step out into the sunlight, just to absorb the feeling? For just a moment, pausing to imbibe the greatness of life and of the joys within it. The complete and utter beauty of life being one of them.

Tim:
Feeling pretty down, I ended up trying to do a quadruple backflip, as I tend to do when I’m feeling inadequate, when instead I embedded myself into a pot full of fertile soil that I keep in the center of my room at all times. Somehow, this soil pot, instead of being an idol I worship, ended up being more comfortable than a beanbag chair, so I just stayed there in the cool soil.

And I was there, too, feeling this feeling and feeling like I shouldn’t be feeling the feeling.

Thor:
So this weird thing happened to me and Tim after we aired the last podcast episode. If you read the show notes, you know that I was under some weird angst-ridden duress while editing that. I just thought it was one of those days, you know? When everything is annoying and suck-y. But what’s really weird is that the feeling just kept escalating…

When I got in touch with Tim later that day, he told me that was having the worst day. It was so bad that his skin was turning red in places. For me, my strongest symptom was that my back just kept giving in on itself, and I didn’t have the energy to keep it straight at all.