and the funny sam hyde quote is true. they wont stop until youre dead. they want you to kneel, and if you refuse they want you to die. they hate you. all of their personal failings are now your fault. theyll destroy the fabric of the internet to keep people from talking about how they rape women and groom young girls. you think this is the good side? you really think these are the people to rally around? i cant really be mad at the young people. theyre just impressionable kids, but boy it gets hard to be understanding when they act like they know everything, theyre thinking for themselves and truly independent when theyre just groomed and theyre going to get groomed again and years later with a gravelly vocal fry and a receding hairline as a young woman of 20 they will realize they made a mistake and by then its already too late but damn you sure were right when u were 15 huh!

none of you people care about anything real or understand anytihng real you go to high school you goof off in class you dont get it and you probably never will and i am deeply saddened by the reality that i may never meet another person that understands

i went to the park in november. i went for a walk down a trail no one ever goes down, and i know this because i walked into spiderwebs. Walking into spiderwebs is the easiest way to know that you're the first one in a while to travel that way. Nothing like some silk in your mouth to shock you with fear, because one time as a child I walked into a spiderweb then was horrified to discover that the spider was still on me. It's scary because I don't ever really want to kill it, but sometimes there's no other choice. Is it weird to mourn the death of an arachnid you knew for ten seconds? Today I spotted one of the cats at work playing with and potentially eating a dead spider. I picked it up in a towel and put it outside, partially because I didn't know what it was and Jalapeno is certainly dumb enough to eat something poisonous, but also because it was alive and somewhere deep down I believe it deserved some semblance of respect in death.

Anyways. The trail wound through a section of the park made up of mature beech forest, though how mature a forest deserves to be in this region is certainly a question. Did you know that beech forests used to be much less common around here? They seem to dominate "mature" forests, but before we came along and decided fire was abhorrent this region actually more closely resembled savanna due to wildfires. Now, the dynamic fire-dependent oak forests have been overtaken by beech and tulip-poplar. They aren't bad, I certainly like to see the little beechdrops pushing up over the leaf litter and the clear yellow color the trees turn in the fall. I still can't help but miss what once was, though. The whole park is beech, for the most part, but this area was dotted with the corpses of chestnut oak, felled by some mysterious cause and I'm no forester so I won't even hazard a guess.

Tiny saplings poked up everywhere they could get footing, which proved that at least one tree knew it was dying and produced a mast crop before going out with a crash. Most trees showed stem failure, but some looked more like a creeping fungal infection, hard to observe until it really gets going and difficult to treat. That's the way things go sometimes. You push hard to try and get the things you want, the things you need in life, but you're slowly poisoned from a cause you can't even begin to identify or understand until it paralyzes you and things pile up and suddenly your skin is shedding and contrary to the common conception it's not a metaphor for changing into something better. No, you're terrified and you feel like something is wrong and something is wrong so your feeling is right but you simply can't put your finger on it. And by the time you can, it's too late. You are so wholly affected by this thing that you have just invented a name for that you can never go back.

And then it lurks. You think you can go back, you try, you do the same thing day in and day out. You settle into a routine, the same one you've always had, and you ignore the creeping, twisting feeling in your gut. The routine is comforting and safe but you know it won't last. And, lo and behold, it doesn't. Someday, against your will, the feeling rises until you can't ignore it anymore and you need to face it, but only so you can push it down again. After all, what are you going to do? You can't get rid of it. The cause is impossible to fix, the roots are dug in now. You can't even express it in a way anyone would understand. Despair? Sadness? Melancholy? Emptiness? No, all of these make you sound like a perfect candidate for Prozac or some other cocktail of depressants or antipsychotics or something that will not fix you but make the problem go away. After all, if you aren't feeling, you can't feel the horror. But it waits. After all, we are human, and humans are built for endurance.

So you sit in it, sometimes. Sometimes you need to. Sometimes you think this feeling can birth something beautiful, that this is the trauma you need to become a great artist but it's not true. The epiphany never comes, that first beautiful evocative painting never pours from your brush or your pencil or your keyboard. All you can do is sit in it. Maybe you cry. Maybe you say nothing at all. Maybe it feels like a desire to sit and wallow and maybe it feels like a desire to run away, get on the freeway and drive until you're far enough away from it or whatever caused it or whatever has seeped into the groundwater to make you like this. Is it something in the soil? Is it the fluoride or the seed oils or the 5G or any of the things people blame their bad feelings on? Maybe it was the chestnut blight, the thing I love to blame everything on. Maybe before then people didn't feel impending doom leering over them. But yes, they did, because I've dug old forestry books out of piracy websites and blown the dust off

--like an archivist or an archeologist and the men in them say that they are terrified for the future and what will become of our forests and who we will be in the years ahead. While I was at the park and had all of these thoughts running through my head in a jumbled mess that would give a psychic fits, I stopped in front of a beech tree. That was the first tree I had ever seen showing signs of beech bark disease, though I've seen many more since then that are suspicious. The smooth grey canvas of American beech bark lends itself to inventing shapes and spots and knots and suddenly you are seeing fractals where there are none and you're being drawn in and-- I was not imagining fractals then. True, open cankers on the bark of a beech tree are very easy to spot. The bark puckers and peels away from the wood, and the inside is dark. Black, it feels. You are staring into the abyss and it doesn't stare back and that is almost more disconcerting.

They look like eyes, searching for some part of you that is susceptible to the fungus, Nectria coccinea I learned today that it's called. Red. The fruiting bodies, perithecia, are red like my favorite scarlet crayon in elementary school. Seeing them along a tree almost makes it look like the tree is bleeding, pieces of it leaking out of miniscule holes and it feels like if you stop to stare too long it will come for you too. But that's all paranoia. Tree diseases are quite possibly the least scary kind of disease. That does not stop my genuine, deep unease when I look at pictures of beech bark disease. The image of that tree lingers in my mind. I often think of it. The trees around it are healthy, but for how long? Are they truly? Am I imagining things to make myself feel better? If they weren't, who would I even tell? It is a public park, what would they care? I am alone with the picture of a dying thing emblazoned in my mind forever, and in many ways it reminds me of a zombie, though that may be reductiv

Much like those men in the late nineteenth century, I am terrified for our future. Though, I possibly understand it more. I have witnessed what destruction has been wrought and I know it can happen again and I know that it will and this knowledge waits in my soul to pounce when the time is right and I cannot share it with anyone because they simply will not care. They haven't found the feeling yet, and maybe they never will. Our forests will continue to burn, though not in a way so visible that someone may do something about it. This burning is unseen until the heartwood is rotted away and then it moves on and most people never see anything more than a downed tree on the side of the path. It was probably its time. Everything is okay. Keep on moving. It will be fine. We will be fine to continue in this way. I would much rather have the white hot fires of change.

el samir hyida

Lutts, Ralph H. “like manna FROM GOD; THE AMERICAN CHESTNUT TRADE IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA.” Environmental History, vol. 9, no. 3, 2004, pp. 497-525. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.2307/3985770.

you dont get it you dont understand you never will you do not have the idea of how the world is dying sitting on your chest you do not sleep you cannot eat you can only ruminate and then you cannot do anytihng about it because you will never find oyurself in a position to fix anything you can only change small portions of your life the tiny corner that you inhabit but that will never be enough and you will never exact change much less revenge because the people who did this are in hgih places and you will never be there and you will never be able to feel clean again you are dirty and tainted and you feel and involuntary desire to run away to leave to escape is it the fungus is it in me am i dying i dont know maybe and maybe that would be preferable maybe it wants me to spread it maybe i am simply a carrier and this is much like toxoplasmosis or maybe not and im being paranoid because when am i not i mourn our losses i wish for change it will never come i am alone i am alone i am alone you do not understand