Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Minus Cotinus


I didn't know what it was, but I did know when it was.

It was at 12:30 a.m. Woke me right up. I didn't rule out earthquake for the first couple seconds. Rumble crack shlump crackle crackle thunk boom. But no actual shaking. It sounded like a tree coming down just outside my bedroom window. The trees just outside my bedroom window aren't really substantial enough to have made that much noise. The only tree that would conceivably be a threat is in Anna's yard next door, and if it goes down, it could take us both out. Anna and I think that would be an acceptable sacrifice if the alternative is taking down a massive old Western cedar with a lively clientele of birds and mammals in it. That tree was big when we got here and we've been here 43 years. Anna's a tree person. I am too, now that we got rid of that dumb scarlet oak I never liked. Now I'm all on board for the trees. As it were.
 
Anyway, I popped right out of bed and looked out the window, and everything looked totally normal, except for several tons of ice on everything. My power line was bouncing a little, and I concluded a big shelf of snow had slid off the roof. I went back to sleep.
 
What's that word for taking pleasure in someone else's pain? Skunkenfrond? Fritzenshizzle? It's not nice.
 
I'm not always nice.
 
The next morning, as we blundered out in the sunshine to the sound of general artillery as the neighborhood shook off its ice, the mystery was solved. As it would have been the night before if I'd put on my glasses. A large tree had fallen down, across the street. On a car.
 
The tree, a 40-year-old Cotinus, was the last tree left in our neighbor's small front yard, after he'd had two massive, beautiful, healthy conifers taken down, ostensibly because he worried they might fall on his house. They were never going to fall on his house. The Cotinus that he left behind, however, came down upended root-ball and all, no longer having any support from the root system of the murdered trees. Oops!
 
Sadly, it did not fall down on any of that neighbor's oversized gas hogs, but instead on his neighbor's car, which was not much of a car, but it was all he had. So I feel bad for him. Sort of. He did use the car to run the occasional errand, but mostly he used it as a sound system. He has a fondness for insanely repetitive thumpa thumpa music with autotuned singing and naughty lyrics, and apparently that cannot be fully appreciated unless it's at a volume that dissolves kidney stones in the next block. Sometimes, in fact, it's best appreciated at one in the morning. Some of the individual songs are so dang appreciatable that they need to be played over and over again for an hour.
 
And now, there's a tree on all that.
 
Not only that, but there was a large squirrel's nest in that Cotinus that I've been noticing for a while that looked like it contained some items that previously belonged to me, and I couldn't quite get the angle with my binoculars to make sure, and now it's a foot off the ground near a left fender. It sure looks like it was a comfy nest. That is because sure enough it is lined with a brick-sized piece of Poly-Fil stolen from our chair cushion, a bit of thievery that the little shits like to engage in when they're not stripping insulation from our wiring or assaulting our bird feeder. Sure hope none of them fell on their little punkin heads when the tree came down.
 
Heh heh.

18 comments:

  1. I'd love to know how damaged that sound machine--I mean car is. We have a couple of those ear-aching monsters in my own neighborhood, which could sure use a big crashing tree of karma too. Have to admit I had a chuckle at that squirrel tale, than seeing that defiant looking critter on your window pane. It would appear he sees your home as "Murr's Furniture n' Goods". Anyway, glad your own home & car are safe! So you've lived there since 1977, 1978? Those years are almost mythical now, my gosh...

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    1. Sadly, the van was able to drive out from under just fine and is back to serenading. Note: Need heavier tree.

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  2. Perhaps some other long-suffering over-thumpa-thumpa'd neighbor had a hand in the downfall of the tree and the direction thereof? Desperation and being robbed of sleep can make people quite creative.

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    1. It's actually been a bit quieter in the last couple months, only ramping up with the addition of alcohol--I think somebody squealed about it, and the perpetrator has been a little less friendly, no doubt suspecting me, but it could have been ANYBODY.

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  3. For a moment I thought you had an earthquake or plane debris from the sky. Now the squirrels are homeless and need more of your stuff to build a new home.

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    1. Or perhaps they can strip some nest material from the seats of the crushed sound machine?

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    2. HOW COMFY DO THEY NEED TO BE? THEY'RE FURRY.

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  4. I remember one afternoon, being awakened from a nap by a loud, insistent alarm going off in the neighborhood. I was steamed! I thought it was a car alarm, so I grabbed a baseball bat and went out in search of the mo-fo (and his car) that wasn't turning off his fucking alarm. Turned out it was actually an "over-reactive" alarm at the reservoir in back of us. So I called them and got them to shut it off. I still wonder sometimes if I would have actually bashed in a car with an insistent alarm. I WAS pretty mad, and if they couldn't be arsed to turn off their alarm, they probably wouldn't notice a 5 foot tall woman swinging a baseball bat at their car in the mid-afternoon.

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    1. I remember when car alarms first came on the market. We'd been burglarized a few times and every time we heard an alarm we roared outside to do vengeance. It didn't take more than a few weeks to transfer our ire from suspected marauders to car-alarm owners. Does anybody ever think it's really a break-in?

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  5. "Fritzenschizzle" my new favourite word :) now I'm off to google images of scarlet oak trees because I don't know what one looks like, and why didn't you like it?

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    1. I will tell you. Although I think I did once already in a post about it. Sucker was only fifteen years old and it grew up and then sent out horizontal branches that shaded the entire yard--but if you stood under it, there were no leaves. Only at the ends of the branches. So it LOOKED like a tree from a distance. Birds didn't even land in it. It was just a big useless roof over the whole yard and it sure wasn't old-growth: I planted it.

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  6. Could the word you're after be schadenfreude? Personally, I favour shcitzenfrizzle heh-heh-heh

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    1. Bingo, dinahnow! But if said right, it's every bit as effective as that 2nd word in your reply... which I doubt I can do justice upon. 7 years in Deutchland got me up to speed on schadenfreude though. Just saying it feels better when faced with such as Murr's topic of today, yep.

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    2. It could be, but what fun is that?

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  7. Cotinus is really kind of an icky looking tree, though. The blooms are smeary and blurry, like algae, or clusters of slimy pink snot.

    Now that I've made a shitty comment about an innocent tree that was killed by ice after being subjected to horrible music from a car,I'll try to be nice to people today.

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    1. How will that help the tree, though? Maybe you should be irascible with people today, and say complimentary things to trees. Especially -- if you come across any -- Cotinus trees.

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    2. This one was a green Cotinus so it had slimy green snot.

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  8. I had to look up what a Cotinus Tree was and what the snot flowers would look like... interesting.

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