Enrich your landscape and empower the needy with


1. Tolerance. Go ahead, prune it if you think it’ll make you feel better. Apply some herbicide, or plant invasive hairy vetch to try and choke this baby out. Cut back the creepers or run over them with a lawn mower. Claw at the roots with your bare hands if you must. Once in, always in! said an 1837 circular found still wheat-pasted to the wall of a long-abandoned seed supply company out near Jacksonville. Will eat your house eventually if your faith is strong enough. Give glory to God in the highest, and peace to His people on earth.

2. Forbearance. The whole point of this magnificent vine is not the slick Chinese jade-green foliage that dazzles the eye as it is the utter pointlessness of even planting it in the first place. The first spring, enjoy its all-covering opulence! Thereafter, no amount of fertilization, accommodation, improved lighting conditions, or consultation with experts will stop Forbearance from reducing itself by half. And so again the next year, and again the next. Good friend to dig the dust enclosed here and whatnot. Half-remembered rhymes & ill-forgotten vines for these best new grasping times. Selah.

3. Noncompliance. Deep down in your heart you know you’re right. All your friends say you’re wrong, or they used to until they got tired of telling you so. What do they know? And what about us? Let’s not get greedy here: there is plenty of blame to spread around. Come friends, come foes, and sup at the bounteous horn of noncompliance. Its flowers burst from its roots: when we accidentally uncover them with a careless bootheel crushing out a cigarette butt, we are stunned. It’s such a pretty flower! Why has nature preordained that it grow underground, away from the light? Ours not to reason why. You don’t even want to hear the end of that one, brother.

4. Incandescence. Unremarkable when green, except that it hangs all thick and heavy around the things it climbs. Highly combustible when it dries out around the end of October. Matches are free at most bars and you can pocket several books of them before anybody even notices you’ve come through the door. My house shall be called a house of prayer for all people. Our own personal virtue is that we know we’ll look real smart if people just see us in the right light. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

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