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.

Day 2: Santa's Carnage Continues.

I was going to start off today's round-up of arboreal atrocities with a reference to the Dardanelles, noting that not since Jean Verdenal was smote from this earth has there been a landscape filled with so many cadaverous trees. But then I got to looking at the day's slate of pictures, and was so...moved, that I suddenly didn't have it in me to make mawkish mockery of the scene. Take, for instance, the day's first sighting, espied on my way into work on California Street. Note the haphazard, half-assed attempt to swaddle it with, what is that, a scarf

made from a garbage bag? And note, too, the tree's placement: right next to a municipal garbage can, like the city sanitation worker would, I don't know, pick it up with his other hand, the one not carrying the trash bin, and then flick them both into the back of the garbage truck, no extra charge, "Was that an extra giant piece of rubbish we should maybe charge that 1% bank for removing, or no it was just a little extra garbage, let's not be silly."

But more. Or worse. Worse because what is that, some wan attempt at modesty for the tree's sake? Like John Ashcroft was out there this morning covering up that breast. Or was it a death shroud, pulled back only far enough so that the viewer could verify the body. "Yes, yes she was my Christmas tree, she was my...little girl. Ah, but then I got tired of her. Plus she was always so tarted up all the time, you should've seen her, flashing evvvvvvveryone in sight, 'Ooh! look at me! Look at my tinsel, look at my round red ornaments. Yes, I'm talking to you, you nice, naughty boy..'.--yeah, that whore, asking everyone to reach under her branches for their presents...you think I wanted to keep that around my house? The influence on the kids...."

Right then. One more interpretative offering, though, before I move on. Because this has always intrigued me, the let's-just-put-some-plastic-on-it-so-they'll-know-it's-trash gesture. I mean, what else would it be? A homeless person's Christmas tree? After all, some of them have dogs...why not a tree?*

Alright, well, as long as I'm ranting I may as well get this one out of the way. This shot of a triple homicide on the corner of Union and Divisadero was sent to me by my friend M----.

You ever see one of those pictures from like the 19-teens where a whole town has gathered on the village green to spend a sultry summer evening taking in a few lynchings? I'm not making this up. For some reason whenever I think of this the words "Ohio," or "Oklahoma," or "Nebraska" bubble up--I know, it's a mystery to me, too, why the usually suspicious ones like "Alabama," "Mississippi," or "Georgia" aren't at the front of that particularly gruesome line--though I'm sure it happened all over the non-New English parts of the country at that time...but I'm getting a little far afield. The point is, those scenes are what I thought of when I saw this picture: two dead tress lying unceremoniously on the sidewalk by a fire hydrant, one figure standing to the right and presumably laughing, one figure in the middle parading around with a third dead body, vamping, desecrating the dead like Animal Mother did that Viet Cong on Full Metal Jacket...and then the one on the right taking a picture of all of it. Oh trees, you were once so noble, so tinseled, and before that standing tall, rooted to the earth with your own, well, roots. Now look at you. Now, after spending ten years growing in the earth on a farm, ten days for sale on a lot, and ten or twenty days tarted up in a living room, this is where you end up: on the sidewalks of the 1%, vamping for their (iPhone) cameras.

This one, at the corner of Spruce^ and Clay--and again sent in by my M-lettered friend--seems a little sad to me. Sad because it seems to be grabbing, with its little tree-hand, at the pole of the street sign, like it's trying to hold on, like it doesn't want to be dragged away. I wonder if the trashman cameth, and tried to collecteth, but the tree held on to live one more day in the cushy confines of Presidio Heights.

"Alright, come here you little clingy, 1%er tree!" The sanitation worker gritted his teeth and yanked the tree down the sidewalk.

"No," the tree gasped. "Leave me! Let me play with the little children again, just one more time, let me lift up my branches so that they can grab one more iPad, one more all-natural child's toy imported from Japan and that was bought in Hayes Valley at that store for all-natural imported toys from Japan, just one...more...night!"

And the trashman gave up, and moveth on to the next block.

Or something like that.

In any event, it does look lonely to me, valiant effort with the little tree hand or no. Which is not something you can say about the one I found in my neighborhood, at the corner of Hugo and 4th Avenue.

See that noticeably different shade of green, right there on the left-hand side of the frame? That's a wreathe, set there, perhaps, by the tree's owners, so that the tree might have some company on its way to the dump. (Note, also, the signs of torture (via cauterization) on the right-hand side of the frame. They're monsters, I say, monsters!)

This next one looks like it's straight out of, like, a conifer-themed remake of The Wire. Corner of Broderick and Pacific, again from the M-lettered word.

The glaring red light in the distance, the dimness of dusk portending thematic gloom, the starkness of the urban streetscape (ignoring for the moment that it's in Presidio Heights), the otherwise empty sidewalks...and one lone tree-body, fell-dropped nary two nights ago by the red-suited Goebbels (no, Santa, I haven't forgotten you! You human chainsaw, you murderous beast!).Where, oh where is this tree's McNulty to come and solve this crime? Where is his Bunk, so they can play good cop/bad cop with all the elf witnesses? 'Hey shorty, you recognize this beard...?'

Finally, I leave you with this, the jewel of the bunch, again sent to me by Miss Mansel Adams. Pacific and Locust, abutting the Presidio. Post-Christmas hang-over; urban ennui.

*Can I write that? I probably can't write that, can already hear, in fact, the cluck-cluck-cluckings of some of my more liberal-minded co-workers. Bah! I'm sorry, but it's true. One of my best friends, a guy who grew up in Detroit and who moved here about five years ago used to rail against this, used to hold this up as Exhibit like C or maybe D as to why he didn't want to move out here. "The homeless people have dogs, [my real name]. Dogs." That's right, people, welcome to America! We haven't quite gotten to the point of a chicken in every pot, but gosh darn it, our poor are fat and our homeless have dogs!

^Oh the humanity!

On the first day of Dead Christmas Treemas...

Well, that didn't take long. The wrapping paper hasn't even been recycled yet but these trees sure have got to go! Looks like Old St. Nick's poison is sure working fast this year; nary one day in and already this town's sidewalks are strewn with tree corpses--verily, nearly a copse of corpses, I say to you!

Victim #1
Location: Stanyan, between Alma & Grattan.
Cause of Death: Unknown, likely Santa poisoning. 

Ohh, poor tree; I'm afraid you'll have to move your tuckus by 10am tomorrow!

Distinguishing characteristics: Peculiar red-and-white netting by the base.

Was she beautiful?: Yes, she was beautiful...and that corpulent, red velvet-dressed beast murdered her!

Victim #2
Location: 17th St. and Belvedere.
Cause of Death: Unknown, likely Santa poisoning.

Distinguishing characteristics: None.
Was she beautiful?: Yes, she was beautiful...and that corpulent, red velvet-dressed beast murdered her!

Victim #3-4
Location: 17th St. btw Douglass & Eureka.
Causes of Death: Unknown, likely Santa poisoning.

Distinguishing characteristics: None.
Were they beautiful?: Yes, they were beautiful...and that corpulent, red velvet-dressed beast murdered them!

Dead Christmas tree season is upon us.

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