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468 words by attila written on 2026-03-22, last edit: 2026-03-22, tags: growth, gybat, home, soc, wilderness ⋔ Previous post: Markdown RevChron Stylee
I just did some pruning aka killing, and yeah I know that's a bad attitude. A wrong one, even.
I am in every way unsuited to this task. I keep imagining that all these these little limbs Want To Live, Damnit! And this is wrong thinking. And I know it. And it continues to grind in my head, regardless.
Trees and bushes, at least, need to be pruned periodically if you intend to live with or near them, otherwise they will fuck up your shit. Grow into your house. Obscure your windows. Unpruned flora is what we generally call wilderness, which I like a lot. In fact I prefer wilderness to most other things, but that's another story, and neither here or there with regards to the issue of pruning shit before it fucks up your house.
Or after it has fucked up your house. Whatever. Point is, I'm kinda cooked in the head on this issue and have always been. It hurts me to prune. I don't like it. I don't want to make these choices.
I, I, I.
Want, want, want.
So whatever, man: give your balls a tug and get on with it already. I'm a grown fucking man who has never gotten over being the eight year old crying about their dead snail buddy. Because you can't fix a broken snail. They don't get better. I tried.
And no, this is not an excess of empathy. You can't have too much empathy, that's something else entirely.
No, the point is not that I have too much empathy, the point is that I'm flat-out wrong about something and cannot actually self-correct, except by forcing myself to do the thing, which as it turns out doesn't always work. Gritting my teeth. Git 'er done.
Maybe this will produce a good result, or maybe it will produce a shit result that looks like I was just pretending to do the right thing, but performatively so. Happens a lot.
This is not really the brief, here. The brief is more like: see how my attitude is incorrect and actually adjust it to be more like the right one. Instead, I just acknowledge that I am wrong, but nothing changes. I might do something like the right thing, but for the wrong reasons, a common problem with me.
I'm just ranting, anyway. I wrote this down to see if I could actually carry these words in my head from upstairs, where I was pruning trees that were growing into and on top of our house, all the way down to my laptop and remember more or less wtf I was on about.
I guess I got that bit sorta right. Call it a win.