Yesterday there was a wait at the pharmacy to pick up my prescription. I could have sat in the provided chairs and played games on my phone, or passed the time idly browsing the magazine racks, but instead I did the stupid thing and wandered aimlessly through the tattered remains of retail Halloween in the seasonal aisle.
I thought I would be okay so long as I didn’t make eye contact with any boxes or bags of leftover candy (lest they leap into my arms and beg piteously to come home with me), but in the process of avoiding the magnetic lure of empty calories, I locked eyes with something much worse.
“Hey Boss, you know how they call zombies ‘the living dead’? We should totes go literal with that!” “My god, Jenkins, you’re a genius!”
Let’s talk about all the problems I have with these.
First and foremost, WHY DO CHIA PETS STILL EXIST?! I cannot remotely comprehend how something that is basically Pet Rock 2.0 can still be bringing in enough money to still be a thing in this day and age. I don’t use the words “I can’t even” lightly, but holy shit, guys, I can’t even.
At least the original pets were kind of cute. A leafy green sheep, a verdant fluffy dog? How could you not find those at least somewhat endearing?
Except apparently they don’t do cute animals anymore. You know what they do do?
Chia Emojis.
Chia Duck Dynasty.
CHIA GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING DONALD TRUMP.
And these idiot zombies.
Stop the planet, I want to get off.
I said STOP!
…it’s not stopping.
Fuck it, guess we’ll just have to soldier on.
Awful choice of subject matter aside (why Trump, Chia, WHYYYY?), it pains me how lazy these bastards have gotten with their design concepts. I mean, the whole point of stuff like the Chia puppy and the Chia head was that the ensuing greenery resembled quirky fur or hair.
Meanwhile, the designers of Dragging Drew and Restless Arm up there have oh so ingeniously used their employer’s trademark vegetation to represent…vegetation.
Gimme a minute, I don’t know if my brain is ready for that kind of in-depth visual mind-fuckery.
And there’s another thing; why do Dragging Drew and Creepy Holden get actual people names, but Restless Arm is just Restless Arm?
That arm belonged to someone, man. Whether it’s a grotesquely severed B-movie casualty in its own right or still attached to a body that’s frantically scrabbling to dig itself out, this is a piece of a person we’re talking about here, and it deserves to be honored as such. Even Thing from the Addams Family had a proper name, for god’s sake.
I’m gonna rechristen Restless Arm. Henceforth, he shall be known as Grabby Gary. Don’t you let your creators’ ableism get you down, Gary. You do you.
Spoken Like A True Nut 
Now I have the Ch-ch-chia song stuck in my head.
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Then my work here is done.
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Nice of you to give Gary a name. 😉
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I thought so.
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I liked the disembodied hand until you pointed out that they’re using chia vegetation to represent vegetation and that made me hate it. And then you named the hand “Grabby Gary” and I liked it all over again. Disembodied appendages–from The Addams Family to the obscure Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors–always amuse me, even when they’re not giving someone the finger like Ash’s severed hand does in Evil Dead 2.
And even though the Chia Pet phenomenon peaked in the early ’90’s with a parody–SNL’s chia hair for bald guys–growing any chia pet is better than sprinkling the seeds on everything like hipsters now insist on doing.
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Confession: I love chia seed drinks. I think it’s because they remind me of my long lost high school sweetheart, Orbitz.
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Chia seeds are delish. I add them to every smoothie, and then wait the 20 minutes for them to get good and slimy. Because slimy food is awesome, so long as:
A) It is supposed to be slimy, and
B) It is small.
I never actually tried the Orbitz, but I kind of have a thing going with popping boba, so I feel ya.
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Ch-ch-ch-chia!
They exist for people like me, who can’t get anything to grow if they’re required to actually touch it or care for it in any way. Seriously, the only things that are doing well in my garden are the weeds I’ve been spraying with every poison on the market, and one plant that I mistook for a weed and tried to dig out two years ago. Somehow, that only made it grow back twice as lush and basically invincible.
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I once had a downstairs neighbor complain that the birds I was feeding on my balcony were dropping seeds onto her patio and they were germinating in her planters.
I moved the feeder without argument, but just between you and me, my birdseed weeds were a lot prettier than anything she had been trying to grow.
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