supernaut

What the fuck is it with fucking men with chainsaws in Wedding the last year or so? Firstly they try and chop down a 100 year old huge and beautiful Plane tree. Thwarted! By a bunch of deadbeat artists and activists who chained themselves to the boughs.

I suspect this thwarting unleashed some kind of psychopathic need to fell anything arboreal within view of Uferhallen.

About a year ago, they returned and lopped two trees opposite us. ‘Not so old, in the way of the pipes’, said Berliner Wasserbetrieb. And for good measure, they repeated the act further down the road. Just to rub it in, once all the digging and filling of trenches was complete, they left two squares of sandy Berlin dirt to be placeholders for the local’s affliction with having their dogs shit anywhere horizontal.

Not even getting warm, in late-autumn, they (I suspect the same chainsaw-wielding philistines) returned, and began at one end of Uferstr and continued till the street ran out. Outside my window, what was once a charming youngish thing reaching above the 4th floor roof was reduced to an amputated caricature. Oh, I suppose it grows back all bushy in spring, but what the fuck? Do these guys get paid by the branch? And looking at the black chopped up mess out my window throughout a typical grey and dim Berlin winter doesn’t do much to alleviate seasonal slash-the-wrists syndrome.

Late last year, I could hear chainsaws and tree pulverisers at work across the road, and hoped, like the plague, they were receding into the distance. Not bloody likely.

This morning, in a direct line from window through aforementioned tree butchery and across the Panke canal, a beautiful weeping willow eight or so stories high was the latest victim of the serial killers. It’s possible it too will grow back all bushy in spring, but for fuck’s sake what was the point in this pruning?

It’s not as though it’s old or rotten. The way they’ve been hacking through the streets, I think these tree trimmers take pleasure in fucking over huge old trees like this. It’s some kind of jerk-offery to reduce something majestic that gives so many people and animals pleasure to a sad stump and a truck-full of wood chips in a single morning.

(and yes, blah blah, danger to public, pollarding, willows are hardy etc, fuck off.)

first, hack out one whole side

then assault the crown, leaving a bit

then gut everything from underneath

now humiliate the last branch on the top

weeping? nah, stumpy har har

success! ugliness achieved!

weeping willow in the snow