quitting

Let me tell you a story. I know you like them, and they're fairly cheap. My only difficulty, having offered, is to distill the rather complex happenstancings of the day to day into a coherent vignette with all the elements of (plot, symbolism, etc.) that will somehow both entertain and challenge you. Things happen to me, yes, but they happen to you as well. My challenge is to rise above that and present to you my life in a way that is in some small way more interesting than clicking away from this site and surfing somewhere you shouldn't. I'm trying to protect you from yourself, you see.

Today, I give up. I could tell you that last week a dust-devil (mini-tornado) snapped up Christine's cache with a loud BANG and shot it 100 meters up into the air. It also took a box of seedlings (with fifty trees in it) and threw it fifty feet up and forty feet across. The sound of that tarp was so loud that Christine just dropped what she was doing and ran in the opposite direction, while the rest of the crew a quarter mile away looked on in stunned disbelief.

None of this, however, would interest you much. And I have to go to the bathroom so badly that I can't be bothered to try to package it for you better. Too much information? I am a bushman these days - so deal.

Here is the real news: I'm quitting treeplanting. No, Not like those dejected, dirty folks you see on the sides of the highways and byways of summer with shovel, a bag of garbage, and a little cardboard sign that says "mommy or bust".

That is to say - my planting career is winding down and will peter and piddle out sometime in the beginning of august. I have done one of those newfangled "cost-benefit analyses" deelios and planting, while nice and lucrative and full of fluffy niceness, is costing me too much in terms of health, sanity, and the pursuance of that elusive fantasy of "who I am as a person".

Each day is now, therefore, tinged with both melancholy and joy as I approach both a new beginning and the end to a large part of my life and who I have become. I expect I'll be writing some trippy weirdness at the end of the season, laced with a bunch of questions and wrapped up in a tortilla of uncertainty. For now, though, I wave and take a bow.