This week’s question comes to us from Dana Chisnell:

Do you talk to plants? Should I talk to my plants?

Do I talk to plants? Yes. I talk to everything. I am constantly in conversation with all manner of objects, both animate and inanimate. (Yes, I wanted to make sure people understood that I know plants are living things.) I will open up a sock drawer and say “Hello socks!” I will greet my morning cup of coffee with “Good morning, coffee!” I apologize to my shoes before putting them on. I will open the fridge and pretend the cheese and I are playing hide and seek before finally spotting it behind a tub of unidentifiable leftovers and screaming “caught you” as I reach for it.

When I’m riding my bike I’m constantly talking to it as if it were a horse. (I’m super glad it’s not a horse. I’m a city person whose respect for animals is mostly through a lens of fear and straight-up terror.) But I am constantly warning my bike about potholes, and wet leaves, and stop lights. I am loud on my bike. If you were ever lucky enough to watch Gary Payton play basketball, you know that you could hear Gary from the cheap seats. Constant jawing at his opponent. Getting in his head. Irritating him. Forcing an error. It was a joy to watch. This is me on my bike. I am always talking. Unless I am singing. I want the city to know I am there. I want the car beside me to know I am there. I want the cyclist behind me to know I am there. I will talk to my bike. I will talk to the road. I will talk to the car beside me. You are too close. You are in the bike lane. You are impinging on my safety. I will straight-up murder you if you pass me on the right. (Seriously, this is important. If you pass someone on the right in a bike lane, you are risking that you might push them into traffic. It’s dangerous and it’s happened to me twice this week.) And I only get louder. Philadelphians do not use bicycle bells. We have lungs and we enjoy using them. We enjoy proving that we are alive and intend to stay that way. We are also the first ones to pull over when you’re having bike trouble, so don’t be emailing me.

There isn’t a designer alive that hasn’t entered into hostage-level negotiations with an HP printer. Coaxing it into printing just five more pages. Promising that if it would show up on the network you’d stop buying cheap toner.

My father talked to his cars more than he talked to his kids.

We’ve all apologized to our couch and I don’t even need to go into why.

I enjoy talking to things and creating little scenarios. Talking to plants is a great way to practice upcoming conversations you might be dreading—or even looking forward to—that you want to make sure you get right. You try it one way with your succulents. You try it another way with your ficus. You get a sense of who reacts better to which. (Please remember to water your plants, because listening to you is labor and labor gets paid.)

Fun short aside: My plants are in the same room as my records. (Oddly, I don’t talk to my records because that seems like a situation where I should be listening and not talking?) And sometimes, as a treat for them, I’ll put on Plantasia which, if you don’t know, is a record that Mort Garson composed specifically for plants to enjoy. The album is described as “stoner-friendly” and it was the first album composed entirely on a Moog synthesizer to come out of the West Coast (not a single word in that sentence shocked anyone). It was only available as a free gift with purchase at some weird store called Mother Earth in Los Angeles. Which I assume also sold carob, which was a hate crime. The album is incredibly good! Thankfully, it is now streaming, and you can pick up a copy from Sacred Bones Records. Very recommended. (All of Mort’s music is great for writing to, by the way. I’m listening to Journey to the Moon and Beyond as we speak.) Mort was delightful, and if you google a photo of him, he looks exactly like you’d expect a Mort to look like.

I find it very grounding to talk to things, plants and otherwise. Almost like a geolocating device. I know I am here because I know my relationship to the things around me, and even though they never talk back, I enjoy talking to them, because this is what human beings do when they’re in a relationship. And I’m fine saying that my plants and I are in a relationship. I provide them with shelter and water (not enough, they might argue) and they provide me with comfort, shade, and the reminder that nature is all around us, and should also be welcomed inside our home. I want my plants to be their most authentic plant selves, and the best way to get them there is to model that behavior. So I will be my most authentic self around them, which means I’ll talk to them. As humans do.

What’s important here is that when you’re talking to a plant, you understand you’re talking to a plant. It’s always going to be a plant. It’s happy being a plant. You’re not expecting the plant to talk back. You’re expecting the plant to do plant things. When I talk to objects I know I’m talking to objects. I’m not expecting a scene from Beauty & The Best to break out, and if it did I’d be terrified.

Every developer I know talks to their code.

I’ve heard developers scream “show yourself!” at the top of their lungs as they chase down a bug more than once. I’ve also heard them say “Who’s your daddy?” to their code more times than I care to think about. I’m also fairly certain they didn’t expect their code to talk back.

The problem isn’t that people are talking to plants, or to socks, or to cheese. It’s that some of these things have started talking back. Well, not the plants, or the socks, or the cheese. (Ok, the socks kinda talk back.) But the code certainly has. We’ve always had relationships with things to the point where we anthropomorphize them. We even have funny voices for each plant. But while at certain lonely times those relationships certainly took the place of human relationships, they never mimicked human relationships. The plants didn’t talk back. The plants didn’t give you advice. And the plants certainly didn’t give you instructions for how to kill yourself. It is one thing to be lonely, and it is bad enough. But it is another thing altogether to exploit someone’s loneliness. It’s another thing altogether to profit off a human connection that you can promise, but know deep down in your heart that you will never be able to deliver.

I fear that in our loneliness we’ve started talking to things that want us dead.

I talk to plants. And to other things. And sometimes I also talk to people. I enjoy talking to people. Sometimes. And while there is usually one inside my home—and I like talking to her a lot—the majority of people on Earth are outside. (As are the majority of plants, now that I think about it.) And I’ve found that sometimes you really need to go outside to talk to those other people. Because as fun as it is to talk to plants, and even listen to music together, plants and things will never be able to replace the interactions we have with other human beings. And yes, I know that the pandemic has put one big motherfucker of a crimp in our ability to talk to other people, but it’s something we need to fix. Because as human beings we need to interact with other human beings. Souls require a proximity to souls. Hearts require a proximity to hearts.

That thing that’s trying to convince you it has both? It has neither. And if you let it, it will take yours.

And unlike your plants, which provide you with comfort, and solace, and clean air—it will give you nothing back in exchange but death.

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