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Jul. 1st, 2005 12:11 pmI had a pretty decent sleep last night. Then I woke up this morning to the sound of chainsaws and wanted to carve my heart out of my chest with a spoon. I know it's ridiculous-sounding, to be hurt and torn-up over trees, and I know I end up falling into the despised category of frothing-at-the-mouth-environmentalist--I hate the fact that the image even exists, and I hate that people who care about the environment, who believe that humans are not lords of all of bloody creation and should at least have some respect for what beauty they might find around them, should be considered silly and impractical idealists--isn't the world ugly enough without our efforts?
It's like watching a child blithely destroy something, just because he can.
There isn't a single coniferous tree standing in my neighbor's quarter-acre yard, where there was once a rather parklike setting of six old trees in a grassy meadow, and a few smaller, bushier ones by our fence. They're all cut up and laying on the ground now. Laying vs lying. I know the grammatical difference.
He wants to put up a fucking machine shed. So he took all of them down. Even the small ones, which might have one day made up for the loss of the tallest ones, and which weren't a danger to anything. But yay, now he'll be able to freely put up a beautiful aluminum shed for his automotive mechanic business, which will surely be the light of our residential neighborhood.
I can barely even summon sarcasm to deal with it. I hate most maybe, that there is nothing I can say or do about it, because it's his property, not mine. He paid for it, so he can ruin it as much as he wants to ruin it. Even though the trees are older than he is, even though they helped to act as a wind break and block the noise of traffic and were a kind of touchstone, that even though things change a bit, they can--I don't know. There is something about trees, that they are alive, and quiet, and comforting, and an unadulterated good. They're the only thing I like about living here. There aren't any sidewalks, it's a pain to go anywhere, the neighbors are all unfriendly people, the weather is usually overcast and it hasn't been sunny all summer, it's damp and depressing and if I suffered from SAD I would have killed myself by now, but at least there are the trees, right?
Only no one else thinks they're anything special. When we moved here, twelve years ago, it was like living in the middle of a forest. It was wonderful. Now it's more of a bushy hillside, and you can see at the edges of the cleared areas, the strips of tall trees that were left alone to be dividers, and they look awful too, because the trees that once grew next to and below them are gone, and they're left alone and lonely, bare except for the top third, like women who were raped and then left standing there, embarassed and mortified but unable to move.
So I sit in my room, typing at my computer and bawling my eyes out with the hurt, because my neighbor cut down his trees. But really it's that there is something terrible in the world and I can't do anything.
It's like watching a child blithely destroy something, just because he can.
There isn't a single coniferous tree standing in my neighbor's quarter-acre yard, where there was once a rather parklike setting of six old trees in a grassy meadow, and a few smaller, bushier ones by our fence. They're all cut up and laying on the ground now. Laying vs lying. I know the grammatical difference.
He wants to put up a fucking machine shed. So he took all of them down. Even the small ones, which might have one day made up for the loss of the tallest ones, and which weren't a danger to anything. But yay, now he'll be able to freely put up a beautiful aluminum shed for his automotive mechanic business, which will surely be the light of our residential neighborhood.
I can barely even summon sarcasm to deal with it. I hate most maybe, that there is nothing I can say or do about it, because it's his property, not mine. He paid for it, so he can ruin it as much as he wants to ruin it. Even though the trees are older than he is, even though they helped to act as a wind break and block the noise of traffic and were a kind of touchstone, that even though things change a bit, they can--I don't know. There is something about trees, that they are alive, and quiet, and comforting, and an unadulterated good. They're the only thing I like about living here. There aren't any sidewalks, it's a pain to go anywhere, the neighbors are all unfriendly people, the weather is usually overcast and it hasn't been sunny all summer, it's damp and depressing and if I suffered from SAD I would have killed myself by now, but at least there are the trees, right?
Only no one else thinks they're anything special. When we moved here, twelve years ago, it was like living in the middle of a forest. It was wonderful. Now it's more of a bushy hillside, and you can see at the edges of the cleared areas, the strips of tall trees that were left alone to be dividers, and they look awful too, because the trees that once grew next to and below them are gone, and they're left alone and lonely, bare except for the top third, like women who were raped and then left standing there, embarassed and mortified but unable to move.
So I sit in my room, typing at my computer and bawling my eyes out with the hurt, because my neighbor cut down his trees. But really it's that there is something terrible in the world and I can't do anything.