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thong-creamingly good
Tuesday, June 11 2002I'm from the country, not the city, and I tend to take my country-smarts for granted and work under the assumption that people who don't know basics about nature are, in fact, stupid. You can imagine, for example, my dismay in 1992 upon learning that my then-girlfriend didn't know what a bluejay looked like.
It's true that most modern city people delegate the bulk of their interactions with nature to others: farmers, horticulturalists, the forest service, fishermen, the military, NASA, the goofy local weatherman, etc. Still, certain essentials of nature fall into the category of common sense. While relatively few people can be expected to know what herb will cure their Poison Ivy rash (that would be jewelweed) or what Red Cedar foliage tastes like (gin), they should at least know basics such as: - Water only flows downhill.
- Living trees grow bigger over time.
- If you dig deep enough into the ground, eventually you will hit a rock.
- A single large tree contributes many times more to its environment than a tiny seedling tree.
(This may seem obvious, but during a recent Salon interview of Ted Nugent, the interviewer failed to delve deeper when Nugent insinuated that his planting of tree monocultures was more important than the preservation of old growth.)
I numbered these items because I wanted to draw attention to item #2. I saw evidence today that at least one person, if not more, wasn't aware of this basic common-sense fact about nature. In all fairness to this gentleman, he appears to be either from India or the Middle East, and if you know anything about these places, you know that the people living there do not have much exposure to trees, mostly because their ancient ancestors destroyed them long ago.
The gentleman in question is the foreman for a construction job happening in the backyard of the neighboring apartment. Inspired perhaps by our back porch, our neighbors have decided to completely redo their backyard. Being shady and damp, there isn't much promise to the backyards in the interior of our block, so our neighbors have elected to cover theirs with wood decking.
Happily, our neighbors opted to leave a medium-sized Red Maple in the corner nearest our yard (it is, after all, the only sprig of vegetation out there). Unhappily, the foreman for the construction job demonstrated profound tree ignorance when overseeing the installation of the decking: he ordered his workers to install the decking as close as possible to the tree. And by close, I mean really close. The gap between decking and tree is so tight that you can't get a knife blade in between them. I actually saw one of the workers pounding the decking planks into place - that's how tight the fit was. Indeed, the process of installing the planks scuffed up the tree rather noticeably, probably damaging essential capillaries just beneath the bark's surface. (Another fact of nature: temperate-zone trees consist of a thin tube of living tissue around a thick core of dead wood. You will kill a tree if you sever this tube all the way around. Killing a tree this way is called "girdling.") I couldn't believe the ignorance I was witnessing, so I went out on the back porch and talked to one of the two workers, both of whom looked to be from India. I said, "Hey, I have a question for you. What's going to happen when that tree grows?" "That's what I was just telling him," the worker said, indicating his colleague, "But our boss told us to put the planking as close to the tree as possible. What can you do? You have to do what the boss says."
So the ignorance wasn't with the workers; it was with their foreman. Or perhaps our neighbors. But it's also possible the foreman knows what he's doing and views this sort of installation as a guarantee of more work down the road. Someone, after all, will have to come and fix things once that tree starts plowing the planks aside. Still, no matter how you look at it, it has the appearance of contractorial malpractice.Tonight Gretchen and I found ourselves unexpectedly addicted to a reality show called American Idol on Fox. The premise was that a team of three judges toured the country and sat through 10,000 rehearsals of random young singers, picking 100 of these to be further winnowed in Hollywood. After much winnowing, ultimately only one of them will be annointed "American Idol," a newly-discovered pop music superstar.
On tonight's installment we were treated to an wildly-entertaining collection of performances, some of which were cringe-inducingly bad. Others were thong-creamingly good1, that is, if you tend to cream your thong every time you hear examples from the N'Sync/Britney Spears/Celine Dion school of singing. The judges (one of whom was Paula Abdul) were brutal with their opinions, often sending away the rejects in tears. It was, in short, reality teevee at its finest. When it was over, we were sure to carefully note when the show was coming on next (tomorrow!).Later we watched an intense women's basketball game between "us" (the New York Liberty) and "them," the Utah something-or-other-that-inappropriately-ends-with-two-Zs. It was a close game right until the end, but happily Moroni was asleep at the watch and "we" won. Gretchen was screaming so much from the many nail-biting changes of fortune that the woman in the apartment behind our backyard actually came to her window to see what was the matter.
 1I use the term "thong creamingly" for a very good reason. The thong is the new underwear of choice of the Monica Lewinsky-Britney Spears generation, most famous for their virginity pledges and advertiser-induced fancy for boy bands. Though I have a normal-to-slightly-abnormal fetishistic interest in women's underwear, this interest does not extend to thongs. When I close my eyes and imagine thongs, the picture of thin straps arching over a supple young rump easily morphs into the twin lobes of a McDonalds arch, reminding me of the chief failing of today's youth: their slavish adherence to the dictates of advertisers.
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