Day 3: What's worse than "carnage"? Devastation?

Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you know us by. ... This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting.

That's Virginia Woolf, in case you don't know. To the Lighthouse (p. 62 in the '81 Harcourt Brace edition).  Mrs. Ramsay is at the house knitting, sitting by a window, pausing every so often to meet the long strokes of the Lighthouse, to watch the light sweep the surface of the water. She is thinking of herself, of all of our selves, of what it means to be and have a self inside whom nobody knows, of what it means, to borrow a phrase of her contemporary's, "[t]o prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." But she may as well have been talking about the depths of Santa's hatred for trees, about Santa's scabrous and vicious thirst for innocent sap. "[D]ark"..."spreading"..."unfathomably deep"; "core of darkness"..."could go anywhere, for no one saw it." Dark and spreading indeed. And it in fact goes anywhere, everywhere*--and no one sees him. It's Christmas Eve, and then we all go to bed, and then we all wake up and you people start throwing out your dead trees. On the sidewalks, at the curb, resting against trash cans as though they're trying to sit up, as though they're gagging, gasping for air, as though you've left them there for dead, as though Santa wasn't certain that he murdered them.

But you know.

You know and that's why you chuck those trees outside your house as fast as you can. Seven yesterday, and that was with two separate people roaming the city looking for tree corpses; nine today, with the work of just one.

The first was a double homicide, or arboricide, I guess I should be calling it, on 16th Street between Castro and Noe. A bit up the hill from the Lookout, I guess, almost as though they'd nipped out--if trees were accepted within our midst, that is, if they were allowed to be themselves--but almost as though they'd nipped out, maybe, from the Lookout last night and went up the hill to have anonymous, clearly protected sex...but no; Santa killed them, and their erstwhile protectors kicked them to the curb, one modestly covered, the other as naked as they day she was born. Just another day in the Castro, on this third day after Christmas.

I climbed to the top of the hill, to the ridge that continues on to Twin Peaks, taking in now and then that gorgeous view that none of Santa's victims would ever have again. Mesmerizing. All of you, really, you have to try it. If only because Slouchy no longer can.

Slouchy's the guy I found leaning against a recycling bin, as though he were just resting, taking a break. Roosevelt at Saturn, on the upper side of the street. Or maybe Slouchy'd actually tried to make the last, noble, Giving Tree gesture of self-recyclement. But he got the bin color wrong, or maybe he knew and that was as far as he could get before the last remnant of Santapoison tumbled through his branches. O, Slouchy, at least you did not die in vain. For you are here, amusing one more festive child.

I crested the hill and walked past Victim #2 again, whose body still lay outside, abandoned. Oh, the Arbority! I rounded the corner and slung further into the neighborhood, a neighborhood I was certain would be littered with trees. They'd shut this place down entirely on Halloween so their kids could teem everywhere in as un-closely a supervised way as they're capable of allowing to happen, which meant to me tonight, QED--there will be trees. And good old Ashbury Heights, or wherever I was, didn't disappoint.

Rat-a-tat-tat, went Santa's quarry.  Belvedere, between 17th Street and Rivoli -- Alma, between Cole and Shrader -- Grattan, between Stanyan and Shrader -- Stanyan at Parnassus. Or, presented pictographically:

Victim # 16. Belvedere. Standard issue dead tree here, lying right by one that gets to live.

Victim #17. Alma. Ominous, crime sceney, a core of darkness going everywhere. 

VIctim # 18. Grattan. Grimmer than Alma.

Victim #19. Stanyan. Can you see his head canted upwards, as though straining to read the Rental Guide?

Emerging onto Parnassus, suddenly surrounded by hospitals and nurses and people who gave life and who didn't take it away, I thought I was through the worst of it. But no, not if Parnassus had anything to say about it.

First it was Victim #20, at Willard, accompanied in its garbage can vigil by the remnants of an iron bedframe, and then up the hill a mite, and just across the street really, lay Victim #21, its tuckus in the air and its face aimed right at a Vespa's tailpipe, probably saying this morning as it warmed up, "Please, please put me out of this misery!" Sigh, the still more arbority.

And that was it. The last coniferous statue of the night. But before I go, I want to say one more thing about Grattan, because it wasn't just grimmer than Alma, he was also sadder. Longed more. If it's not too untoward, if you can stand it, I'd like to show you a shot looking out over his undercarriage, the place that so recently shielded presents, kept them safe, I would like to show you a shot looking over the top of it, across the street into a well-lit room behind a window, a room in which we can faintly see the outline of a still-loved Christmas tree.

*Except Market Street so far, but everywhere but there.