Friendly Cement

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with a supremely interesting young man, young by what an old person’s standards would provide, over a casual cigarette and homemade cider. We sat there, with a tape recorder alternating between old blues and contemporary alternative. My buttocks was firmly planted in a soft cushion of half-dead grass, still fighting the urge to pop out before summer. My feet played with a pail, suburban cement tinged with coffee stains and still echoing the acoustics of the day. I was on the outskirts of a coffee shop habitat, a bank habitat, a residential habitat and, first and foremost, a parking habitat.

We were discussing something grand, some aloof scheme of rhetoric concerning the nature of life, when I couldn’t help but look at the cement and realize the triviality of it. Not the Naturalist triviality of it nor the Pollan triviality of it but the ideological triviality of the space. It occurred to me that it was altogether pompous to not consider this parking lot nature. To ever believe that my peers could conceive of something unnatural in a world which is only natural is the most troublesome of ideas. It occurred to me that the only reason we consider a parking spot unnatural is because of our own selfish need to be able to create something unworldly. We are essentially formulating something inorganic, that never had life nor could lose life, and immortal. Through the perceived constancy of this space we ourselves took some idea of immortality from it.

If this view sounds illogical and coy it’s because it is entirely illogical and coy. Logic has been made readily to serve just as cement or modern architecture or ceiling fans have. Why would man ever dream up, for logic is truly such a dream, a frame of thought that would belittle his utterly unfathomable importance to the Universe? We are rude to our other mammalian counter parts to think them not capable of the same dramatic feats of “manipulation” that we have achieved had we not evolved to be the lesser evil instead of the greater (evil existing for a moment under the dim witted pretense that this essay seeks to debase). Perhaps all of mankind is not centered around the need for survival but instead the need for power. Power is a much more give-take proposition that life or death and would allow for the desegregation of man from nature. Environmental racism is probably the most untreated atrocity on the planet. Heaven forbid the ceiling would ever shatter and nature given it’s rightly place; we would all be ought of a job.

I said some of this, to my well-traveled friend, and he nodded his head and for a moment raised his cider. Such a worthy statement had I made, so drenched with the smell of burnt cocoa beans and hand-rolled cigarettes, as to merit the highest of coffee shops honors; agreement.

Horney Toads

When I first moved to Texas and had begun to replenish my collection of Bonsai trees, I started noticing lizards that would crawl up the branches of my larger trees and camp in the hollows of their trunks. To an inexperienced gardener the response may have been “ what are you doing?! Get off my tree! Shoo, shoo!” However, to a hardened Bonsai enthusiast of four years of experience, the lizards were a joyous sight and for some time my desktop was decorated by images like the following:

I have come to learn, as of late, that my shy little friends were, what is commonly known as, “horney toads.” This fact, unfortunately, I have learned too late. Within the six years I have been in Texas I have, each year, seen progressively less of these beautiful creatures and, at the present time, there are no known horney toads calling my trees home. They say the disappearance is because of the rise in fire ants but that doesn’t negate the fact that many people would kill a lizard on site. When the horney toads were around my plants had almost no pest problems at all, but lately, because the lizards are not there to eat them, red spider mites, scale and other heinous insects have begun infecting a good portion of my stock. I feel like Michael Pollan when I say that I wish people had taken time to understand them before killing all of my lizard friends. He struggles with the ideas of weeds, plants that are perceived to be grotesque and, in a way, must be controlled yet can also be beautiful at times. The horney toad population was a population of unsuspecting, local fauna that has been annihilated by the invading weeds of suburbia and humanity. It’s not that suburbia or humanity are bad things, on the contrary they can be quite pleasing, but they must be thought about and contemplated.

Now that my natural pest control friends have all died off, I go through Safer pesticide/fungicide spray like Grant went through Vicksburg. Safer is an amazing product, and I have been using it since I first started Bonsai in Ohio, before it was sold at major chains like Lowes and Home Depot. It’s a delicate spray in that its only ever intended to be used for vegetables, rose bushes and the like. Safer is also organic and supposedly not that bad for the environment. However, Safer costs around $7 a bottle; the lizards were free. All I had to do was supply the bugs. Safer also is said kill mycorrhizae in the soil (a fungus beneficial to the breakdown of organic matter by roots); lizards at most would only fertilize the soil with their droppings.

Horney toads may be gone already, so there’s no use complaining, but I will sincerely miss my friends. If only people had given them a chance to explain themselves before deciding they were a pest in need-of-eradication.