H. Newberry - Slayer of Trees

4/14/2016

Illustration from "The Red Fairy Book"

 

I am the bane of trees.  For those who think this moniker is exclusive to a comic book character - uhm- no.

bane
noun \ˈbān\
1 killer, slayer, poison, death, destruction, woe
2 a source of harm or ruin

The reason I am the bane of trees - whole forests, more like - is because I journal.  I journal my brains out.  Other people party, shop, drink or cram snack cakes down their throat.  I journal 'til my eyes are raw and my fingers are dented from the stranglehold I've had on my pen for hours.  (I read on a psych page once that obsessive journaling is a sign of schizophrenia.  I don't go there anymore.)

I've been at it since I was twenty and you'd think this is a side-effect of my craft.  It is not.  It's a byproduct of my need to figure out why I am the way I am, why I think the things I do, and create a list - a pretty impressive one so far- of the concepts cross-wired in my brain.

Given that I'm fifty and I've been journaling for thirty years you could easily estimate I have roughly 30 books covering this span.  (Right?  One for each year?).  All neatly organized by chronology, filled with antidotes of my life and work.  Superlative penmanship spanning the sacrificed papers from front to back.  A veritable flood of ink and masticated wood shavings sandwiched between two, stiff covers.

You'd be wrong.

My current, working collection numbers well over 30 (there'd be more, but I have rampages during which I gather up every scrap of paper I can find and set them on fire.  Pyromania maybe?) and not a one is filled to capacity.  (I wonder if that's a sign of some other disorder.)  Journals litter my house like tombstones; standing in bookshelves, toppled onto tables, half buried in boxes.  In my office, my room, my kitchen, and my car.  Spirals, composition books, binders: at least one sample of very type and size.  Cloth-bound, paper-bound, fabric-bound and leather-bound.  $1.99 small, pocket ones.  $45.00 artisan ones.  Ones with pen holders, some that tie shut with leather straps and others with neat little pockets in which to safely store even more slivers of dead flora. 

Nor are they in anything even approaching chronological order.  In stacks or in each individual atrocity.  'Normal' people start on the first page, write a date and proceed day after day until - viola! - back cover.  (I'm fairly certain I will never know what this feels like.)  Opening one of my journals is about as far left from 'normal' as you can get.  (And not just in content.) It's signing up for a time warp run by an alcoholic afflicted with topographagnosia. (This is a for real mental diagnosis!  It means you have no sense of direction and get lost.  A lot!).  It's buying a plane ticket and being handed a crooked pogo-stick by a twitching flight attendant at the end of the jetbrige.  Grab one and you will be bounced from 1998 on page 1-7 to 20012 on page 8.  From there, twenty blank pages in and - boom - you're in the year 2005.  In May. On the 18th, to be exact.

Adding insult to injury, I apparently am not capable of pursing only one theme in these rats' mazes of massacred pages.  Between any two covers you'll find thoughts, rants, whines, poetry, plots, snippets of dialogue and rough drafts of resignation letters as well as grocery lists, the reason's why I am contemplating the emanate torture of the man I love (and I do love him, no matter what those damn books say!) and why I think my cat just might be the Antichrist in disguise.  (Because he is.  I haven't found the tattoo yet but it's just a matter of time.)

So, yes.  I am the bane of trees.  The persecutor of Pines.  The murderer of Magnolias.  The assassin of Ashes.  (I know that those last two aren't used to make paper.  Give me a break. I'm being satirical.)  God knows how many poor trees have had to die - chopped, shredded and pulped - just to spend a few moments spread naked beneath my pen.  How many squirrels have lost their homes?  Birds their roosts?  Little mushrooms sizzling under a cruel and relentless sun, bereft of protective, musky shade in which to spread their little caps.  And bunnies - ah, the poor, poor bunnies - forced to procreate out in the wide, ugly open before gawking humans with camera phones and no sense of privacy.

Hittite God, temple relief, Turkey

The combination of all these wrongs weighs heavily on me.  They haunt me like the flavors of a favored sin.  They do.  But like any patient in the grip of their psychosis I cast longing, furtive glances towards journals instead of reaching for the phone to call my therapist.  The callous on my index finger throbs seductively and the haunting smell of spent ink wafts into my psyche.  The only way I am going to survive Judgment Day is if God is a lumberjack...Or a psychiatrist.