Squirrel armageddon
On the necessity of soft reboots, and when to grow the beard.
The first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation was by most accounts a disaster. The writing was stilted. None of the characters seemed to like each other. Even by Star Trek standards, the plots were bananas. Series lead Patrick Stewart purportedly never unpacked his suitcase, so sure he was the show would flop.
Season 2 wasn’t…good…but it showed the first hints of the golden age of Trek to come. Problem characters were cut or jumbled around, and the actors seemed more comfortable in their spandex uniforms. Some of TNG’s best episodes were in season 2. The dramatic upturn in quality was so distinctive that it coined a TV trope; TNG had grown the beard.
The thing about diving headfirst into the unknown is you don’t know what you’ll find. “Only what you take with you,” Yoda says. Thanks a lot, master Jedi, but until I get my hands on some trees, all this bonsai reading I’m doing is pure theory. And it looks like I have to shlep the trees into the unknown with me.
I bought my first trees with eyes toward price and convenience more than anything else. Some of them weren’t really suitable for bonsai; others would require years of growth before they were ready for training. So when the squirrels returned with a vengeance and chewed up half my garden, I convinced myself that this didn’t have to be a loss. It was an opportunity for a soft reboot—for my bonsai practice to grow the beard.
Despite my new countermeasures, the squirrels went hard. The eastern red cedar I recently chopped? Completely defoliated. My maple and ginkgo forest? Chewed to stumps. The little fuckers must have decided that the cooler out on my fire escape, which I used to insulate young pines from the wind, would make a nice nest; they filled it to the brim with mangled trunks and branches.
I’m bummed, but disaster brings opportunity. I have limited space to work with on my ledge. Each tree has to do something for my education. Plus, unlike when I first dove into the unknown, I now at least have a toddler-tier sense of what I’m doing.
So I’m going for it. I’ve invested (lol) in some better quality trees, like the European beech above, to practice new techniques. I’m building out a new ledge that will (hopefully) be beyond the squirrels’ wrath. I’m taking particular pleasure in laying out dishes of hot sauce to scorch the tree rats’ tastebuds.
Where this all leads, I don’t know. Growing the beard requires luck as well as commitment. If that’s what it takes to get a chaotic bisexual god-alien to snap his fingers and send me halfway across the galaxy, so be it.
Tree reading
The 20-minute documentary Noble Planta, named after a plant shop in Manhattan’s Flower District, is a loving exploration of “how easily we project human qualities onto things that aren’t human, even as we neglect the actual humans around us.” [The New Yorker]
Bonsai, but made of glass. If I were a Russian plutocrat I’d get artist Simone Crestani a dacha. [My Modern Met]