When I was a very small child, my baseball-obsessed grandmother forced the entire family to dress up in Sunday clothes to drive 30 miles into the city and see a film called Field of Dreams in which (I’m pretty sure) the ghosts of a bunch of famous dead dudes play baseball for huge audiences in a cornfield because Kevin Costner never got to play catch with his father. Because I am scared of baseballs hitting me and don’t like corn, the only thing in that particular film for me was the ghosts, and they weren’t even haunting anybody. Now, had my grandmother taken me to see Gas Station of Nightmares, about a flower that smells like corpses that brought a thousand Californians to an abandoned gas station because no one had anything better to do, well, I might have had a childhood memory of not being bored for two hours.
So what I’m saying to all the grandmothers who read Jezebel is put your weirdest grandchild in their funereal best and drive them to Alameda, California, where a man has grown a plant that smells really gross and is letting people poke it outside an abandoned building, per the AP:
“Solomon Leyva, a nursery owner in Alameda who deals in exceptionally rare plants, had been posting on social media about his amorphophallus titanum. When he saw a lot of interest in the giant blooming flower, he decided to wheel it Monday to the abandoned building, where a line of people stretched down the block for most of the day.”
After, I’m assuming, hearing a disembodied voice that whispered “If you display the plant with a name that sounds like it should mean ‘I love giant dick’ in Latin, they will come,” they did just that, with 1,200 people to date showing up to the old Art Deco gas station to smell a plant that smells bad.
This is a beautiful story, and I only wish my grandmother were alive to hear it and tell me I’ll never get a husband if I don’t stop being so fucking weird.