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The Stupidity of Trees
A cold wind blew in and amongst the trees which was the sort of wind you'd get in late October, early November. And the two men with their faded windbreakers that were probably formerly quite bright, in the eighties, as required, but now looked a sickly shade of yellow and, though he protested it was brown if you pushed him on this front, pink, stood at the base of a medium-sized maple tree in the midst of quite a number of other medium-sized maple trees. The leaves still fell around them.
"Jesus, that"s strange."
"What is?"
"That wind. Don't you feel it?"
"No, well, ehm, sort of. Ish." He tightened his windbreaker to his chest and around his throat and the shovel he was attempting to hold with his hand not grabbing at his windbreaker and it clattered off a stone obscured by the leaves near his feet. He often worried his windbreaker in the hopes that his hands would either wear away the colour even more, rushing the standard march of time and the fading it brings, until the fabric faded into grey, or perhaps even into an almost white-ish colour, more suited to a spring day and bound to make him look considerably more tan than he really was, or that his hands, his large hands, would overshadow the windbreaker and in the shadows it wouldn't be nearly the same hue it tended to be, in most lights. The number of lights he would deem favourable to the jacket were more and more often involving deepening degrees of darkness. More often than not his attentions to the windbreaker would draw attention to the rather inadvertent colour of his garment, inspiring some sort of comment on his selection and general fashion sense, causing him to turn a dull pinkish-red which would provoke yet more commentary on the colour of the jacket and his own almost matching colour, one more of the mistakes he carried forward bravely from the late eighties as a young man hanging out outside of Boston, hearkening back to the eighties more than a good deal of people felt particularly comfortable with. A young man hanging out with a red windbreaker as the eighties turned into the nineties, as you might expect, and things wibbled steadily forward anywhere and everywhere, on the outside of the nineties, on the eighties side of things, as it happened with himself with a slowly fading red windbreaker and a changing, albeit it consistently bad, haircut.
"Well, it has sort of an early November sort of crispness to it, doesn't it?"
"Yeah, well? Are you saying you wish you'd worn something heavier?"
"No, no. But isn't thatstrange? I mean, it's September. Early September, at that. It just doesn't make sense."
"Oh for the love of... look, is this going to be something along the lines of your earlier tree falling in the forest thing when we were trekking out here? Because if I have to hear any more of that mangled philosophical enquiry rubbish coming out of yourself I'm going to bury you in the bloody forest, trek back on my own, get a cup of coffee somewhere warm, maybe grab a paper, if one happens to have been left on the seat at the coffee place, and read it. Just sit there reading it, getting a little bit warmer, instead of standing out here in the middle of a forest with a couple of shovels and a whole load of dirt. And trees. And leaves. And you, with the stupid and possibly wildly misquoted/remembered philosophical lot."
"And how're you going to get to the coffee place? You can't drive."
"Very true. Good point. I might walk."
"In this weather? This strange weather?"
He reached down for the shovel amidst the dirt that clung to it and the leaves that rustled every so often. "Dull ache, sometimes. You know?"
The dirt clung to the shovel like rats clinging to a sinking ship that hadn't been told about the saying about them buggering off out of there.
disclaimer:
So, thanks to our wonderful service provider, BT, we're a tad late with this week's issue, and for that apologise.
For any of you adversely effected by BT's stunningly crap service and support, please feel free to drop them a line, though we don't really hold much hope of you getting through, and so we're not going to post their details, as we suspect they use their own systems for their call logging systems and support.
On a cheerier note: C sharp.
Don't forget to wash behind your ears.
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