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| Low Maintenance Studio in desirable area |
Autumn brings out the reflective side of me. I think about looking at things from different perspectives. By now I try to think about whether or not the year went according to whatever plan I set up for myself. There are multiple lists I think of creating to try and improve upon this year. One of them is obviously a “best-of” music list, but I have various promises to keep, like avoiding coffee, chewing gum, and usually trying to read more, though I tend to get through a book or two. I’m a slow reader.
Today I went walking around a favorite spot and noticed something I hadn’t seen before. A tree’s limbs looked as if they were flailing about in the wind. “Whoa, that is a cool Halloween tree” I thought to myself. “Shame I didn’t see this before the holiday.”
What came next was the fact it had a little belly button. Here was all this spookiness surrounding it was a bit of sweetness. It looked like it had a belly button, an innie specifically (sorry outies). Apparently this is called a tree hollow, where animals live and breed and hang out in general.
I approached the tree with no worry, since it is a tree and offers little resistance. As I looked into the hollow, I immediately thought of this book I read as a kid. It wasn’t one of those books I exactly thought was a page turner, since my school did assign it, but it had a premise of a young child ignored at home. Instead of like doing the reasonable thing and talking to his parents he moved out of the city to live in the wild.
The wild mentioned a hollow which he was able to live throughout the year. As a kid I thought that was extremely short-sighted of him. Mostly the book served as a warning to small children about not running off into the wild because it is too hard. A particular section talked about how he couldn’t find a bucket to store water. He exclaimed how at home he never needed to worry about these sorts of things. Eventually he goes back home to resolve things.
Kids were supposed to take home the message that you should be mature in your interactions with adults. But I hate buckets. I thought the message they were trying to convey was to stay in your place. I didn’t like that message it felt completely unambitious. As a protest against this dreadful attempt at propaganda, I made a stand. When the kids were supposed to build these little log cabins out of folding paper a certain way, I did. But I decided I wanted a bigger house than a simple cabin, like that felt impoverished.
So I decided to come up with a new design. Using the paper I brought it together into a regal manor. Apparently we were all supposed to be pioneers moving west. My argument was that I was intelligent enough to figure out how to build something that wasn’t just a bunch of stupid logs tied together. That my pioneering ancestors would’ve been capable of constructing at the very least a 2-story 5 bedroom, 3 bath house.
This came around the same time that I began to appreciate the city and the countryside. Around this time I wondered why the suburbs were even built. Suburbs felt like a lame compromise between the city and countryside. In the countryside you could apparently live in trees, so that appealed to a child with no steady source of income. Around this time I began reading about various members of society who lived in cities for free, like squatters. So either place offered me more freedom than the meticulously well-landscaped area I had to call home.
All of this came rushing to me as I stared at the tree’s belly button.