Wildman Hobbies, part i

The Wildman has some hobbies that are fun to observe.  A hobby, by definition, is an amateur practice that an enthusiast pursues "on the side" or "in his spare time".  Neither of these definitions of time and/or spatial relationships applies to the Wildman (see T. Pascal et. al., #adventuresofwildman, redacted).  However, the first part of the definition, that of being an amateur applies.  The hobbies that the Wildman pursues are not ones in which he makes an avocation or from which he earns income.  These hobbies are purely for enjoyment and pleasure, which is redundant from the Wildman's perspective but will be a handy way to describe the sentiment to an outside participant-observer.

One of the hobbies involves the Wildman's magical powers, namely talking to animals.  The Wildman can talk to animals, but they do not talk back.  This is a minor inconvenience that does not deter the Wildman from indulging his passions with animals either domesticated or wild.  The domesticated animals tend to be of the small sort -- usually cats and dogs.  But the Wildman is sometimes observed lost in a deep conversation with horses and cows.  Indeed, there are the odd sightings of some Wildman-sheep sightings but those are apocryphal and scatological in nature.  The wild animals tend to get quite exotic: there are well-regarded sources claiming to indicate discussions between Wildmans and tigers, lions, bears, sloth, and emus to name a few.

During these long conversations with the animals, the topics of discussion range far and wide from politics to death, inflation politics to social unrest, legacy religion to best practices for building web applications.  The Wildman is often the one providing most of the discussion flow with an occasional bleat, snort, whinny, or roar from his conversational partner.  The animals who discuss such topics with the Wildman are not even aware that they are engaged in a conversation, but that does not stop the Wildman practicing his hobby with the animals he loves so dearly.

Another pastime for the Wildman involves planting tree seeds in odd locations.  If you've even encountered a tree standing in the middle of a street sidewalk, or perhaps in the middle of the field, you might wonder how this tree got to the location is is now.  You might imagine the random vagaries of a local building ordinance or the dispersal seeds from the intestinal track of a bird or creature.  About 90% of the time, you'd actually be looking at evidence of the Wildman's handiwork.  The Wildman carries with him several different species of seedlings which he has inside his infinitely large yet infinitesimally short (time-wise) pocket.  Whenever the Wildman is afraid of being spotted by an observer-participant, he naturally wants to distract the onlooker from seeing or interacting with the Wildman prematurely.

This is where the Wildman practices his love of planting seedlings in the past, using his long limbs which extend across multiple dimensions.  The Wildman will reach into the past with his hands, plant the seedling in a spot where he knows the observer-participant will look (because he can see them approaching now), and then will see a tree appear in the present.  This tree will look peculiar as it has suddenly grown for decades (or perhaps centuries, depending on the tree variety) in only a brief second.  The sapling was only just planted in the past and grew up in a spot where the present observer-participant will see it fully formed many  years later.  The observer-participants will say to themselves, "Huh, I wonder how that tree got there?  I don't recall seeing it previously, but my memory is now changing and I'm beginning to remember it as I've passed this spot many years before.  Or was it larger in my childish memory?  I can't recall exactly."

As you can see, this is great fun for the Wildman and he enjoys this sport immensely.  Not to mention it is good for the environment and can avert global climate change if needed.  There are some side effects, naturally, as with all things Wildmanish.  The most obvious side effect is the problems sometimes caused by zoning regulations and traffic.  On one notable occasion, a tree sprung up in the middle of a busy freeway and caused a lot of death and mayhem as cars collided with the tree and others.

Nobody could quite understand how a tree had appeared in the middle of a freeway so suddenly, except that there were vague memories of the tree having been there the whole time, now that they thought about it.  That was a stupid design if ever there was, commented the new reporters.  Obviously, the engineers ought to be fired for having designed a freeway and not moving the tree from the middle of the road.  The tree itself was fine despite being hit by cars for the next few years of its life, losing only a little bit of bark here and there at bumper-level.  Eventually, people knew the tree was there and simply avoided it in the middle of lane 3.

Another unfortunate incident involved a tree that had grown up in the middle of a house.  The whole roof had to be taken off in five pieces, lowered down to the ground and cut a huge hole in the middle to allow the tree to continue growing.  The owners were some of the original hippies from the early '60's so nobody thought it odd that they would grow a tree inside their house.  What was odd was not planning ahead to have enough room for the tree to grow and thus having to redo the roof at great expense.  All the money they saved by not showering for 60 years had paid dividends, allowing them to retire gracefully into a nice home without running water and no shoe racks for the barefoot couple.  They constantly complained about disturbances and a "Wildman" sighting in the area.  However, with the quantities of hemp plant growing on the property, and that strange tree inside their house, the rumours were ignored and the Wildman gleefully disguised himself in that area.