Nuts!

 

I'm writing to you from our new abode. It's a small, charming cabin dusted in a thin layer of fresh snow. All of the surfaces inside are wood. We've got a small wood-burning oven which generates heat marvelously in such a little space. Outside there's a thick fog and subtle specks of gravity-defying snow hang stubbornly in the air. The tree that I can see through the window is beginning to bud. All along the thin branches little clusters of buds have begun to swell. They look almost like those little, alien, white-and-purple sprouts that come out of potatoes when you leave them sitting for too long. Soon spring will be here. Jesus, where does the time go?

I spent the last day getting absorbed in creating 80's style grooves with the MIDI tools inside of Reaper, the DAW I use to record and edit episodes of my podcast. There's an entire universe within just this one genre of music; the gated reverb on the drums, the relentlessness of pounding 16th-note baselines, dreamy pads and synthesizer LFO modulations. If I had unlimited time, I'm convinced I could become the Beethoven of synthwave. 

After completing Murakami's Kafka On The Shore, I started reading a piece of non-fiction called, The Nature of Oaks. So far it's incredible; informative, engaging and magical. Just like there being a universe inside of synthwave, every tree is a universe. Literally.

“During that impressive life span a single tree will drop up to 3 million acorns and serve as a lifeline for countless creatures, including dozens of bird species, rodents, bears, raccoons, opossums, rat snakes, fence lizards, several butterflies, hundreds of moths, cynipid gall wasps and other predators and parasitoids, weevils, myriad spiders, and dozens more species of arthropods, mollusks, and annelids that depend on oak leaf litter for nourishment and protection.”

And that's only while the tree is living! As trees enter the final stages of life, the perimortem stage, they begin to more actively feed the necrosphere—a creepy name for all of the decomposers of a given ecosystem. Insects begin to bore into them, fungi tunnel through them, other creatures live in their hollows, all before the tree is slowly subsumed and swallowed by the forest floor. That whole dying process itself can take more than one-hundred years, depending on the tree species. Makes our flitting little human lives seem small. 

I'm conscious of the fact that I've used the words little and small repeatedly throughout this post. Maybe I should begin discussing my penis in great detail, since it matches today's theme. 

Like an oak, it also produces nuts.