David Mar

The Smiling Tree David Mar

Since I was composing a new character, namely a crime-solving psychic vicar who was to be the voice of my new short-story entitled "Hollow you" (part of the "Hollows" trilogy), I occasionally sat at the balcony of my flat, at the end of the day, in a Cretan resort crowded with young sycamores or soon-to-be-freshers enjoying the pool under the Cretan sun, at a safe distance from the teenage crowd, spying on their comings and goings, eagerly anticipating some gender-banter. Yet, it turns out, I witnessed the most boring social interaction I had ever seen. I wondered at first whether the split ethnic representation of the Youth freighted here by plane from Ireland and Britain was to be blamed for the lack of interaction, but even among their age bracket and nationality, it seems the modern Youth were sanitized beyond repair, to the point boys kept to themselves, walking on eggs, and girls to their precious bikinis. The robotic lackluster pool party somehow turned into the most extreme hedonistic yet gloomy debauchery in town, where teenagers drunk themselves legless. I witnessed a complete shift in behavioural modes spurred by booze as I walked through the music-lit streets, only to find the same young people sprawled on the nameless tarmac to sober up till the morning lights among bins and puke, and disregarded tee-shirts or even shoes. The Smiling tree is a real vision I only shared with one night man who was as bewildered as I was at the bipolar behaviour of the English race. The smiling tree could be construed as an anthropological anthology of future British behaviour, from the skimping scavenging owl to the lavish lark, all but birds'names, in fact, seen through the lens of a tree or religion-neutral do-gooder, or what you will. What was interesting however, once I got to share their entertainment, is the systematic behavioural pattern-shift which requires dull inaction during the day, through to the slow routine towards self-oblivion and self-abnegation where the self just melts away in an irreversible doom-like fantasy of parental laissez-faire and ethylene disaster.