Tree Belly-Button

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.

Should a “Blog Tour” be an actual thing?

I’ve been kind of pondering this idea for the entire week. As I work. As I went and saw “The Death of a Supermarket” which included phrases that would’ve made Orwell proud. My favorite had to be “The more you spend, the more you save.” That one sort of stuck itself in my mind, how little sense it made.

Bloggers need to make up those sorts of phrases, like a cute little tag they can use for themselves. How characters in your favorite TV shows have a certain line that make them not only lovable, but relatable. Bender uses “Bite my shiny metal ass”, Oprah uses “Everyone wins a free , etc.  I use “Rock On” because I want you to and because it is somewhat playful. 

Most people who write these things want to write, but don’t know how to go about it and blogging seems the easiest way of reaching a hyper specific audience. I feel like bloggers ought to tour this great land, the great US of A. Authors do it, so why not internet writers. Internet trolls could be some of their plants in the audience, deliberately placed to increase excitement amongst the otherwise tame audience. Besides, the more bloggers I meet, the more I realize that the dedicated ones should make some cash on the prospect. 

Plus, it might bring some much needed money to bookstores; maybe allow them to attract more buyers of coffee and stale pastry. Too often I see so many people writing these things and give up. Slowly the posts decrease and eventually go down to a trickle. I’m of course talking about myself; I’ve had some blogs for years. I remember putting literally several reviews of every album I heard in a day up on the internet. Since then, I’ve grown wiser. Music requires a great deal of time to fully appreciate it, what doesn’t click the first time may click the second or third. Or you could just be in the wrong mood for it.

How about a Podcast, you might ask. Podcasts are used by those with a microphone and I have my issues with them. When I hosted a radio show long ago I deliberately honed a “radio voice”. Later when I listened to my show I watched in the spectrometer how different it felt from my real voice. No matter how much I tried to speak in a normal voice, I kept on doing it. So a real, face to face meeting with people works much better with many. Without the filter of how they sound, they’d be more real.

I feel the other benefit would be the tone in which these words are said. Tone is a causality of the internet; it takes a particularly good writer to get the point across. Even great writers considered “masters” at their art gave live readings, like David Foster Wallace for example. What may have missed a reader becomes more apparent once you hear the writer’s intension. Kafka’s work suffered from a similar problem. When one of his friends was asked about the tone of his readings (yes, I know, life expectancy is a wonderful thing) he stated that the humor of the stories was more heavily emphasized than the hopelessness most associated with his work.

Did I mention bloggers work for dirt cheap? Because I’m assuming most would probably give readings for like a cheese Danish and stale coffee. In fact, they might feel they are “getting a bargain” for just being accepted in public forum. 

Part of me would be curious if this would or could even be a thing. Bloggers could help out each other, for each place they stop; they crash on another blogger’s couch/floor/collection of blankets. That way, they achieve an intellectual variation on “couch surfing”. 

Please let this be a thing.