Lonely Trees

Lately I’ve become taken with documentaries about skateboarding. I’ve seen most of the surf movies – move on to Dogtown. The appeal? I don’t know… some stream of conscious esthetic that’s physical and poetic? Something that happens in a split second, art, an experience, and the wind perhaps convening for inimitable moments of fleeting beauty – or something. Like I said. I don’t know.

I snuzzled on the sofa with the Honey Bee and the laptop on Sunday evening, after a chore-filled day. Ed bought a new computer. I’m SOO frill’n jealous – it’s awesome. He convinced me not to impulse-buy driven by envy and wait it out – consider if I really need a new computer. I don’t. He understands all too well. “I felt exactly the same way the last time you got a new computer,” he tells me. So the compromise was upgrades to the wireless - now I can pretty much be on mars and still be on the internet. Why look at a tree when you can google one?

Speaking of trees, I bought three pictures of trees. Yes – canned art. The kind you buy at chain home furnishing stores for $19.99 each. They’re photographs somehow printed on metal (tin? Aluminum?) and the metal picks up the colors around it. Two of them are a little beat up around the edges. They’re lonely and fragile and yet so, hmmmm, tenacious? Something about trees – I can’t put my finger on it. Yes. Certainly, I find the Madrones and Buckeyes impressive, but I also have a handful of favorite trees in the forest – one particularly impressive Bay, a fine lone Oak on a hill and so on. I fussed in my head for weeks over what I felt about buying art like this. But I like them – so fuck me for being such a snob about these things. I have them. They’re mine… and I just need to get over myself. They’re lined up against the wall – waiting to find their place in this room.

So as I’m writing this, Ed walks in the room and I ask him, “so what do you think of the trees?” He replies, “honestly, I’m not so hot on the trees.” “Really? Why not?” I query. “They’re lonely,” he says.