Seeing the Forest

Can't see the forest for the trees? Don't feel bad. Most people live their whole lives without seeing it. But I see it. Not always. But most of the time. And that's because I work at it. I pay attention to life as I live it. I put what I see in books that I sell and in blogs that I write for free.

I also shared what I saw every month for five years, in a free online monthly newsletter that I called The Pluto Observer. The Pluto Observer used to be the official newsletter of Science Fiction for Thinkers.com, my official website. Now it's just a memory, but one I still share.


When you've got nothing better to do, take a look at what I saw when I took a moment from thinking about myself and dared to see the real world around us. This is what I saw between September 2005 and October 2010. Too bad no one gave a hoot about what I saw and wrote. When I take a look at the real world now I just blog about it or else work on another book about it. Or just keep it to myself.

A Knife In The Heart

I heard the chain saw this morning, cutting and cutting, sawing and sawing. I thought it was one of the neighbors cutting firewood. I was wrong. Then I heard the loud snap and the horrendous, terrible crash.

Downstairs, I could tell that my mother had something important to tell me. Something awful. Then I heard the words.

At the house where I did my growing up between age 7 and 20 — a house we can still see from our kitchen and living room windows — they cut down the tall tree that my father had planted 50 years ago. It was a magnificent, towering hybrid of an ash and some other kind of tree that I can no longer remember.

That's right. It's their property, not ours anymore. It was their tree and they had a right to cut it down. Still, that was the last living memory my mother had of my father, except for our 17-year-old cat that Dad found in an abandoned cardboard box back in 1994. I hope that cat lives forever.

And the tree is gone now. And, yes, it was the tallest tree in town and the tallest and the most magnificent tree this town has ever seen or is likely to ever see again.

This is what it's like to be doomed to living out the rest of your life in a town that should have been in your rear-view mirror a long time ago. What we have instead is a living nightmare that should have been a pleasant dream, departing from us on good terms ages ago, instead of reminding us that we somehow failed to evolve and that stealing what's left of our hearts and trampling that to death is the penance we somehow deserve for trying to come back "home" a dozen years ago.