Sapped

Bear with me for a moment here and imagine the following scenario.  Imagine a pesky, loud, smelly animal.  Imagine this is the most annoying animal on Earth and that – for the sake of argument – it is synonymous with the very definition of nuisance.  Let’s call this animal ‘human’ so as to avoid any confusion as we proceed.

                Now, imagine that this pesky human just wouldn’t stop.  Not for a second.  It just kept going: building up towering structures, flattening the ground with concrete, zipping around in metal boxes, and the whole while doing it all as loudly as possible.  There is nothing, nothing I tell you, which makes half as much noise in a life-time as a human can make in a day.

                But we’re not done yet.  No, if that had been it I might have been able to handle it.  See, I consider myself to be more patient than most maple trees.  Admittedly, our particular breed isn’t known for our calm and collected nature.  But I like to distinguish myself from the rest of my kind so that you will know that I didn’t come to this through simple annoyance.  This is full-blown, righteously justified, annoyance.  It’s a difference of adjectives.

                So here’s the kicker, the clincher, the defining problem.  Here I am, kept where I am in the midst of a mess of human concrete, machines, and noise as a kind of aesthetic touch, and what happens?  Some pesky human, no bigger to me than a mouse would be to him, comes along and staples something to my trunk.  First off, he had to get it good and secure and so he made sure to put in six or seven staples.  As if one didn’t sting enough.  What’s up with that!?  If you’re a human hearing this, then imagine this as if it were happening to you.  Imagine a mouse swaggered up to you while you were standing outside, and sucking in some lovely March sun, and he placed an advertisement for such-and-such mouse event at such-and-such mouse establishment on your leg.  Then, before you could do anything about it, he viciously jabbed a half dozen thumb-tacks into your leg to hold the advertisement there.  I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in saying that you, like me, would be thoroughly pissed.

                What kind of behaviour is that?  What kind of utter lack of respect and decency.  It’s bad enough that many of my kind have been appropriated for various human uses (the idea of this thing called ‘paper’ makes me feel like ants are crawling beneath my bark) but stapling an advertisement to my truck?  Come on.  That’s just adding insult to injury.

                What am I driving at here, you might be asking.  Is this just some rant about the audacity of humans?  What should I expect, you may be thinking, they’re human after all!  They are synonymous with annoying.  They can’t change their nature any more than I can change mine.

                Well, I reserve the right to be angry about it.  I reserve the right to get mad about it and shout about it and…oh, dang, hold on.  Speak of the devil.  It looks like a few humans are coming over now.  Probably going to jab some new advertisement into my trunk.  Once one appears a dozen more usually follow.  Lambs following the flock.

                Wait.  Hold on.  What?  Um…okay, so, those of you who have kept with me this whole time.  They’re…these humans, a few of the female kind, just removed the notice that was stapled to my trunk.  They’re also using something to pull the staples out too.  I’m, um, not sure what to…Now they’re sitting beneath me.  Making their noise.  But…my trunk does feel a lot better now.  I guess this kind of noise…isn’t so bad.  Um…

                Okay.  So, maybe some of them aren’t moving so fast after all.  Maybe some of them are learning to slow down.  Slow down, and suck in the March sunlight.  Maybe we have more in common than I thought.  But don’t tell anyone I said that.  I hear they’re prone to pride.