I was walking the lakefront with a furry friend. The day a bit raw, gray, but no wind. I was dressed for heavy weather. A beach with a calm, shimmering lake on one side, a large looming concrete wall on the other side. Beyond the wall, an enormous tree. 5 men, an odd tribe of tree folk, dressed in heavy, black garments, defying gravity, arrayed on branches of a truly massively-naked, tree. Trimming heavy, dark, twisting, branches. One man, at the top branch, maybe at least 175-200 feet in the air. Dangling by ropes. So weird. "Tree-trimmers" doesn't really capture the strangeness and the bald, dangerousness of the scene. An unlikely tree, gnarly, bare branches reaching into the void, a dark skeletal structure, in a realm between alive and dead, 5 men, with ropes and saws, hacking away at the stone-like wood. Death-defying work. Unlikely and strange.
Later, I walked into a house, a man; bald-headed, comfortable in a large puffy green chair, sat with a virtual-reality headset on his head; the large, plastic googles covering his eyes. He could hear me rustling around, briefly disoriented, his head turned my way, blind to the room, alive in another reality. I was there to attach a leash to a collar on a dog to go for a walk. The man pulled the headset down and joyously exclaimed: "I am watching a movie with my son. He is right here with me." He pointed to the emptiness next to him in the chair. The man then put the headset back on, and sank back into the cushions. I walked out the door with my furry friend. Unlikely and strange.
