Charnia, My Own Personal Butterfly Effect, and I Can't Get a Ride to Funkytown (Text editor walking notes)

CHARNIA

Noun; a fictional place which is a mash-up of Charn and Narnia where the elements of birth and renewal are intertwined with those death and decay. I guess we could just call it Earth, since such a duality actually exists here.

 

 TREE STORY

 

A pine cone was sitting in the middle of the path that I walk in the wilderness area. I kicked it out of the way, and it rolled down a hill.

“Maybe you’ll have better luck growing into a tree down there at the bottom of that ravine,“ I said listlessly, to no one in particular.

My own personal butterfly effect. I kick a pine cone and 100 years later a 100 foot tall pine tree has grown up in that spot. It has enjoyed a long, mostly drama free life, as far as trees go.

But fate, nature and random luck have conspired to abruptly bring about this tree’s demise. One day it is struck by lightning.

Although dead from the core, the tree remains standing for some time. A wildfire sweeps through the area scorching the trunk, weakening it further.

Termites have gone to work on the roots and several seasons of wet and windy weather have caused the tree to lean in the direction of the road from which the original pine cone was kicked.

It is 100 years later, I and I have passed on years ago. I’ve been reincarnated, and my new character is an adolescent male. He lives in the same area and enjoys riding his quad along the same path.

It’s a bright sunny day, although it has rained recently. The boy is zipping along in a carefree fashion, enjoying the wind his hair. He passes the spot where the pine tree has lived and died, leaving only its towering skeleton leaning perilously over the path.

The tree falls on him and kills him. The end.

 

 FUNKYTOWN 

“Won't you to take me to Funkytown?” I shout these words at a cow.

“And you, and you and you," I continue giving the stern '70s disco injunction to everything at which I can point my finger, like Oprah giving away Pontiacs. Or like a baby that giggles and says, “Dat!” to everyone and everything. Like Nina Simone, singing to the birds, the sun and the breeze, I cast my net as wide as the earth:

“Gnarled dead oak stump, take me to Funkytown! Acorn growing from a pile of manure, take me to Funkytown! Poison oak vine growing surreptitiously alongside a tree, won't you take me to Funkytown?”

Alas, nature is not getting through to me these days. I’ve been epiphany-free these days, and I’m not liking it much. I would like to stock up on epiphanies like I do my groceries.

I talked to my psychiatrist about this anhedonia, this complete lack of enthusiasm for life that I have been experiencing for a number of years. I really just wanted him to sign me up for some Prozac, or some other happy pill. Instead, he offers me more nutritional guidelines to further fine-tune my Paleo diet. FACK!

I feel like a 10-year-old begging his parents for a Coke. Instead, they offer him some seaweed-infused electrolytes, sugar-free, of course.

And if Lesa ever asks me why I’m mad at her, this is what I’m going to tell her:

“I really wanted you to take me to Funkytown, and you didn’t do it.”