Cum Trees

I enjoy to no end this time of year in Downtown Chico, the crisp afternoons, the people excitedly emerging from their sweater and coat cocoons into shirt-sleeved sunshine butterflies. Best of all are the Cum Trees in full blooming regalia. I know not the actual scientific name of these semen scented arbors, if they are fruit-bearing trees, or merely ornamental. For the rest of year I take no note of them, as I go about my business in the Downtown area. But for a few months each year, these trees occupy a place of distinction above and beyond that of the orange trees, shrubbery and assorted other vegetation of downtown. They are the Cum Trees. And they smell exactly like Cum. And I mean exactly.

Perhaps my favorite way to spend a sunny day is to do exactly as I'm doing right now, sipping a bottle of Bud Light beer while looking out of a window at it. Sorry, but I'm not much of a Frolfer. However, every few beers I make a point of taking a bit of a promenade, in order to enjoy the above-mentioned olfactory sensations, as well as the other sites to be seen around these parts. And I don't mean Bidwell Park. I like to dig the dudes selling drugs in the Downtown Park Plaza, the schizophrenic guy in stilted women's heelsholding one of history's most storied debates with an unseen foe, the hawks screaming at each other in the skies above the parking lot at Second and Flume. It almost makes me wish I had the moxie for psychedelics. But my limited studies in that field during college, all of which ended in rather spectacular failures, proved beyond a reasonable doubt that my imagination was already active enough without any help, chemical or otherwise. So I stick to beer, and the occasion taste of liquor for variety. As they say, it "takes the edge off." Besides, as Emerson said "Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time." A shot of time, with a beer back never fails to send me reeling through the streets, drunk on hours, on days, on years. Even those anonymous characters of the street are not immune to this intoxication. Here's one beat old soul, a Bukowski in his own right, who has been haunting downtown since time immemorial with his gray beard and weathered face, now relegated to a wheelchair, a vehicle which doubtlessly serves only hastens his journey to a place from which no one has yet returned. Here's a man that has had too much time! Where were the counselors, the teetotalers, the interventionists when he was killing himself with time, every single day? Why has their yet been legislation written to regulate, if not outright ban the consumption of this most deadly of substances, this most vile of vices?! It seems time is one addiction that refuses to be taken in moderation. One hit and you're hooked. And it's all downhill from there.

Drunk on time and booze I find myself wondering how it's possible, that in a town of 80,000 people, that one who spends the majority of their days and nights frequenting the bars and coffeeshops and restaurants of Downtown can see without fail, the same 100 people day in and day out. For years. It seems like it's all a big lie, some sort of joke you weren't let in on. You feel like your life is a sitcom, and maybe it is. Maybe its the Truman Show, only everyboy's Truman. Everybody is the protagonist of their own show, with its own audience, it's own discussion bulletin boards, its own ratings. God is just the guy calling the shots, what Jack Kerouac called the "Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven." Of course he was talking about himself, but hey, I could think of worse Gods than Jack Kerouac. There was a man who could handle his time, man. Booze though, not so much. No one's perfect I guess.