Spring can bring out the best in people; it certainly drags them out of the house. Those first few days, before the essential beauty of warm sun and sweet breezes is relegated like so much other novel ephemera, it seems like everyone is out in the streets and most of them are smiling. The presence of so much happy humanity hits me like too many gin and tonics and makes me giddy.

I was sitting on a porch, letting the sun hit my bare feet for the first time in far too long, drinking scotch and reading Nietzsche when the tow truck went by. It manifested itself first as a horrid squealing noise as it rounded the corner and came into my awareness. A passerby, young guy, hippy looking hair and a bright green t-shirt with a peace sign on it, looked from the truck to me, and we shared one of those grins that say- “Yep, I see it too, it’s a wild and wonderful world inn’t.”

The back tires of the car being dragged were locked and smoking as friction bit asphalt into rubber and produced not only that smoke and horrible sound, but a tangy stink as well. It’s the kind of scene that’ll make you put down your book, pick up your drink and just watch it go by. The driver was obviously, and understandably, tense; the arm out his window was gripping the side-mirror as if the reflection of the spectacle he was producing was itself responsible, his jaw was set around a cigarette that he didn’t remove when he took those agitated drags which sent a meager tobacco contribution into the great cloud of smoke he was coaxing from the street.

I watched him go a whole block before he stopped. He burst from the truck with his arms waving frenetically, and while I couldn’t hear him, the poetry of his posture told me that he was venting his frustration explicitly.

I suppose I ought to have begun this anecdote a bit better, perhaps by explaining my interest in climbing trees, I think it would have helped make this particular transition less ham-fisted. It is of course too late for all that, these blogging entries are usually too organic for that kind of forethought, all the same, it would have made the ‘moral’ I’m trying to relate alot easier to slide in without anybody noticing. As you can see, I’ve botched the job badly, forgive me - at any rate, I really ought to have explained about tree-climbing.

What is it about climbing trees? Well for starters, few adults bother to try it anymore; and if you head up a tree when the leaves are out, you don’t have to go to high to be almost completely invisible to the ‘man on the street’. Very few people look up; I’ve spent a fair amount of time resting in the branches of medium-sized maple trees on fairly busy streets watching people walk underneath me, so I can verify that fact. People study the debris on the sidewalk, most of them drop their gaze when a car passes by, and heaven forbid they get caught staring into a window. Of course, up also has that ‘blinded by the sun’ thing going for it, so if you’re a couple feet above eye-level you aren’t going to get spotted by most folks.

But that’s just one aspect of tree-climbing; the voyeuristic spectator at the feast of human activity part of me, and like I said, I’ve already made a mess out of the plotting of this, so that single aspect will have to suffice.

So, with just one further digression, I will return to my story.

I’d been reading Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, when the tow-truck entered my awareness. Myself, I’ve always felt like Nietzsche caught the short end of the reputation stick, but then I’ve also always felt that salt was a necessary part of any intellectual diet, and that if you’re reading philosophy in search of answers, then you’re a bigger fool than I - and I’m the damn jester. At best other people and their ideas can help sharpen your own questions, and maybe, if you’re extraordinarily lucky, you may eventually find some answers of your own that work for you.

The man from the tow-truck was unleashing some sort of pure fury on the car as I scrambled, barefooted, up the tree. There was no attempt to regulate his behavior, it was pure, primordial action. I stood in a crook of branches as he landed a few solid kicks on the rear driver’s side door, then returned to the truck to get what appeared to be a length of fence post, with which he applied ‘pressure’ to the rear wheels.

The sound of the blows rang down the block, and I smiled from my position in the tree, totally exposed; no leaves to block the eyes of all these early-spring walkers who, turning from the spectacle of the tow-truck could easily see me, standing in that tree. At least one of them had to wonder just what was going on in that block.

(audio enjoyment was Ween from their album “The Mollusk”, everything else is my fault)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 5:04 pm and is filed under indiscriminate, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.