chainsaw massacre!

3 days ago, i had a feeling of impending doom, all day. so depressed, i could barely function; i could hardly focus my attention on anything. i asked my landlady if she was feeling anything similar. no, she wasn't. and then it turned out that she was most likely the cause of my "doomed" feeling...!

it turned out that she had hired a guy to come, the NEXT day, with a chainsaw, and massacre about 40 feet of lush vegetation!! -- which had been making a nice buffer between our house and the next one. a nice assortment of happy, growing things -- anywhere from 6 feet tall to maybe twice that -- violently cut to shreds with a chainsaw! a massacre that lasted nearly the whole day.

my landlady arranged to be elsewhere all day, so she didn't have to listen to the screams of the chainsaw and its victims. i escaped for only an hour or so (i had lots of work to be doing here) -- and, when i came back, the carnage was filling the whole driveway and blocking my front door!

now, where this beautiful, happy vegetation was, i get to look at an ugly, bare, cinderblock wall, and the stumps of the dying. and the devastation is not over; there's a stand of bamboo that will be removed also, and some other things. i'm living, suddenly, in a war zone....

why is she doing this? because she has declared war on the coqui frogs! tiny little tree-frogs, who have come here from Puerto Rico (where they are being extinguished in precisely the same way, by people destroying their habitat). tiny little frogs, who sing the most beautiful serenade all night long -- and yet most of the people here hate them! they're "aliens", they're "invaders", they don't belong here! their songs are actually regarded as noise by most people! my landlady says their singing keeps her from sleeping at night! i can't imagine how such a beautiful serenade could keep anyone from sleeping!!

anyway, they've been labeled "invaders" -- and my landlady has been totally swept up in the hysteria. she used to go out at night and spray BLEACH into the bushes, wherever she heard the frogs, to kill them (why don't people stop and consider what it would feel like to have chlorine bleach thrown on THEM, in quantities sufficient to kill them?!). now she's going for the total destruction of their habitat. next she'll have to poison the earth itself, to keep the vegetation from growing back!

i asked her if she knew there were lots of native Hawai'ians who regarded US in exactly the same way she regards the frogs -- as invaders and aliens. i don't know if she got the implication of that; i'm sure she's able to connect the dots ... but probably not willing....

why don't people understand that every form of life is connected to all of us; that an attack on any form of life is an attack on Life itself; that killing coqui frogs is killing ourselves and the whole planet...?

i wrote more about the frogs in another blog, in case you're interested....