Audrey II

  It's Halloween Month. Yes, Halloween is in fact a celebration I make last a month. I love whimsy, the fright fests, the communal celebration of being someone who you are not, just for an evening. But more than anything, I love the gaudy excess. We stuff ourselves with bagfuls of candy and smother our homes in faux cobwebs and ghoulish horrors, and it delights us. When I was a wee one at Christmas time I always begged my folks to decorate our house with the colorful lights and tacky lawn ornaments. No such luck. We had the wholesome and holy white lights with red ribbons on the lamp posts. It looks good in retrospect, but I'd still love me a plug-in glowing baby Jesus.

Halloween was the only time I got away with cheap kitsch and flair. So I spend the whole month of October drinking pumpkin spice lattes, filling my Netflix queue with scary movies and turning my house into a display. It is a fact all my roommates have come to accept, and I think secretly adore. In October, my spidey senses are heightened, unconsciously attuned to the next craft or decoration I can discover. So naturally, when I happen to spy a Venus Fly Trap out of the corner of my eye in the floral department at the grocery store, I pause. This plant is is a man eating inanimate organism. See "Little Shop of Horrors" for a more accurate description of how this plant is a badass. So I bought him. And in tribute to the Broadway sensation, I named him (or her, I guess) Audrey II.

This evening, I happened to kill a mosquito whizzing around my apartment. I was going to throw it away, and then a devious sensation crept in as I remembered my little leafy friend. Experiment: Will Audry II actually eat a bug if I feed it to him? The result, a resounding yes. It's kind of a sick satisfaction to see your carnivorous plant feed on a hapless little bug. Kind of like the satisfaction Freddy Krueger may have gotten from slaying teenagers. Muahahaha!