These people. They just seem to be growing stupid. The incessant noise and natter of the younger ones is enough to drive any being to insanity. It is as if they think themselves alone in the world, that their shouts and general obnoxiousness shan’t disturb anyone. It bothers me.
The time wasn’t that long ago when the youthful would practice some degree of discretion. Their whispers could sometimes be discerned betraying hidden loves and whatnot. Today, hmpf, nothing is secret, quite the opposite really, as people blab loudly on their cell phones and bark conversations between friends in public places.
That, I suppose, is nothing to the perpetual noise people produce: the young men imbalanced from surging testosterone blaring music from over-powered vehicles roaring into parking lots and endlessly slamming doors. Or the constant hum of people moving in planes, trains and automobiles that is inescapable even to those who have the opportunity to try.
Of course, even the noise might be tolerable if they hadn’t taken away the ability of the wind to move me. All of these buildings everywhere, I am lucky if the sun ever reaches me in these concrete canyons. And let us not speak of my nether regions, which for some forty years have been tightly bound by these people, between their so-called homes and a putrid, leaking waste removal system.
They all walk by me, as if I don’t exist. The only recognition I receive these days, at best, is when one of their dogs relieves itself at my feet. A little urine burns far less than having words chipped into my side, I guess.
And then one day last week a man in an orange suit came by and sprayed me with the white X of death. The same harbinger of a prolonged killing at the vibrating teeth of a mechanical saw I witnessed sprayed on so many of my former friends. We had been a happy lot before these people came. And now I am to become a stump of my former self too. A befitting end to a tree that can’t stand people, at the hands of a people who clearly can’t stand clean air.
Alya\'s World 