So it begins with this tree. Maybe it’s the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil or Yggdrasil or Bohdi Tree, but in any case it’s one of the very first trees.
Looking over at that tree is the very first man (I forget his name). The man is sweaty and sticky as the sun shoots golden drops at him called raise. When the man sits under the tree, a cooling sensation sweeps over him. He pats the tree as he closes his eyes to enjoy the shade.
Even though the tree and the man die (very sad), the ancestors of trees and men go on to have some zany adventures. Trees drop apples on men who discover gravity, a man travels around dropping apple seeds into the earth, men who never lie chop down trees (very sad) with hatchets, and men proudly display trees adorned with blinking lights and wrapped packages.
One day a boy (who will grow a proud, bushy beard in which twigs and chicken bits and flakes of his own skin get caught and which will continue to grow even after he dies (very sad)) picks up a stick that has fallen from a particularly fine specimen of a Paperback Maple tree. The boy uses the blade of a knife given to him from his deceased father (very sad) to inscribe his initials in the bark:
J- boy’s name
T-boy’s mother’s father’s name
A- boy’s father’s father’s father’s father’s name
The boy and his stick have hours of entertainment whacking the boy’s sister and cousins and rivals until it breaks into little fragments (very sad). At almost the same time across the world, another boy picks up a stick that has fallen from a particularly fine specimen of Heritage River Birch tree. He hides this stick and tells his brothers he’s written the secrets to the world’s happiness on it. The boy forgets what he wrote or where he buried it.
And so it goes for a while. People chew on air that trees eek out, the humans spit the air back at the trees, and through some weird process called defibrillation it works out for everybody. Trees are used for all kinds of nifty stuff. People burn them to stay warm, mold them to make shelter, eat them to poop blue, and process them to make books.
One particular person (who was, incidentally, the daughter’s daughter’s daughter’s daugher of our much beloved bearded boy) buys a ream of paper (which was, incidentally, part of a descendent of a particularly fine specimen of Heritage River Birch) to transfer some thoughts. She packages her thoughts in a manila envelope.
As she walks across her driveway to deliver the package, she slips on some black ice. This causes her to hit her head, knocking her unconscious. Other than the momentary excitement or terror or eroticism of experiencing freefall, the last thought the woman has is, “this is probably one of those important times in life.”
That afternoon, weird pressures from human spit-air and tree eek causes what they call a homeostasis. A blizzard comes, dropping cool white, shiny stuff that often looks so good on the leaves of trees. Buried deep underneath that tree-cosmetic product, the woman lies clutching that manila envelope. For some reason, during the fall her first instinct was to protect the manila envelope she was carrying. Or rather the contents of the envelope, which included:
-a drawing (poorly reproduced here)
-some sheet music (which may have been similar to this)
-And a scrap of a note that read something like
After the storm clears, the sun comes out to warm everything up in a complicated affair known as spring. All the snow in the woman’s lawn melts, and it creates a small stream into the gutter. The gutter-stream carries her down the street and into a small creek. The woman free-floats along people’s backyards and brushes the roots of weeping willows. At the same moment she passes by a Heritage River Birch, a speeding car on the street crashes into the tree. The driver dies (very sad) and many branches and twigs fall down from the spring sky. A piece of birch wood gets stuck in the woman’s curly hair. The birch wood comes along for the journey as the woman flows from the creek into a river. The woman and the birch wood go by cities full of people and forests full of trees. The river and a number of other tributaries disappear into an even bigger river, and in a place where rivers and seas meet (often called omegas) the woman regains consciousness. As the woman and the birch wood drift out to sea together, she thinks “this is really quite pleasant.” Then the Earth falls into the sun.
