In California, leaf blowers produce more pollution than cars. I remember this fact as I approach the corner of Duboce and Noe Street, where leaves flutter violently in the warm spring air. A man swings a leaf blower around like a flamethrower, wild and reckless.
Rather than collecting or cleaning up the leaves, leaf blowers merely agitate them. No problems are ever really solved, just blown a few feet down the street. This ineffectiveness comes at great cost. Gasoline isn’t cheap, and the ecological price of burning it is steep; to burn fuel for such useless ends strikes me as absurd. To expend energy that is so limited and precious, to inch the world that much closer to dissolution, and for what? There’s not even an increase in local order. The leaves are still messy and brown just like the asphalt is still hot and black. The world is now just a bit noisier, a bit poorer in natural resources, a bit closer to nothing at all.
I wait to cross the street to the park as the leaf blower’s two-stroke engine roars along with the passing cars. Pink globes of fallen magnolia blossoms blow and flop against the pavement, where they roll like heads. The hands on the clock can’t revolve forever. Their revolutions are numbered. The earth can’t cede its limited resources forever. Neither can I, or you, or the goldendoodles across the street, little brief balls of energy careering through the dog park.
So much beauty, so much moving and shifting and ending and for what? This world and all its overwhelming riches and beauty being spent like time: recklessly, pointlessly, absurdly.
I suppose lately I’ve just been terrified of time and terrified of endings. I’ve been terrified of how anything could ever come to mean something, when everything is tumbling towards nothing.
Do I overreach and conflate the briefness of my consciousness with the briefness of the world and its natural resources? Perhaps. I must admit I don’t know all that much about the world. Do I then conflate my brief consciousness with the briefness of everything else I’ve experienced, the briefness of all those relationships, those summers and those houses, the burning sandalwood candles, the glasses of red wine and the long drives and the reddening leaves? All those things end too, just like the awareness that got to experience them and their fleeting beauty. Things end, but what is one supposed to do in the meantime?
I throw my words into the swirl of blowing leaves and gasoline exhaust and I cross Duboce Street into the park. The grass burns green and the sun is hot on my neck. Ruddy red dogs flicker across the grass like flames. On this warm spring day I move through the incandescence of the park, or maybe the incandescence moves through me. The dog days will lie down soon enough. But today, dust glints in the sunshine, a spark on the light-rail track, a brief white-hot moment of consciousness welding it all together for a little while. Somewhere nearby, leaves the color of rust flow along a current.