Another Neurodivergent Queer Writes A Blog!

If you’ve read practically any of my other posts, you’ll have noticed that I love trees. But I do not especially care for Black Walnut Trees in a yard, as much as I know squirrels are partial to them. They’re just dangerous! Like just now, I was almost bludgeoned, I kid you not, to death, by an entire branch from, eh, 50ish(?) feet up—a whole branch! Not just one of those massive black walnuts, which I swear to god could be lethal, but allegedly they are not (although people falling out of walnut trees to harvest them apparently is occasionally lethal; but if you or your vehicle is damaged by a falling walnut in Germany, you’re SOL [The headline of this article though! How laughable!]).

Here’s the culprit, that uppity git:

I was putting out my cigarette in the fire pit, bent over, exactly where that branch is. I was even lingering there trying to extra-put-out the cigarette because it’s a little windy today. Then, maybe a second, but not even that, after I decided, ‘nah… that’s good,’ swiveled around and took half a step away I heard a series of heavy thunks against the water-logged clay soil, feeling the thuds in my body through the ground, and that thwap-sound of a leafy branch hitting the ground.

The other day a much larger branch cracked and broke in the wind, but it dangled there for a day or so before it came crashing down, actually falling onto that bench behind the fire pit. So just now when I heard the thuds and the thwap, I instantly freaked out, figuring something much larger was about to get me, so I leapt maybe three or four feet forward quickly, only to turn around and discover the threat was more contained than I had feared.

But what a nervy tree, this one!

Thankfully it was only a little branch like that one, overloaded as it is with black walnuts. The greedy thing, went and grew too many seeds all at once. Which goes to show you, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you necessarily should. But definitely I’m so sure this doesn’t have anything to say about my cigarette-smoking, so no one should even think such a thing!…(HAHA no, really, yeah… It’s probably time to quit.) But the focus is not on me right now, is it? It’s on that dastardly tree that thought it could get me! Like I said, I’ve never cared for Black Walnuts. They’re mean, unnecessarily violent.

Fun fact about Horace to round this off: he had a run in with a tree when a whole-ass tree-trunk almost fell on him, as he writes about in Odes II.13.1-20, II.27.27-32, III.4.27, and III.8.5-8. There are scholars who argue that no tree ever actually almost fell on Horace, but I bet if there was, it was a Black Walnut, or else it’d been persuaded by one. Those Walnuts are vicious…

Stay safe, friends! And duck if you see a green tennis-ball sized orb coming at you!! It is not a tennis ball!

(Ps. Yes I still love all trees, even Black Walnuts.)