You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
Yard Work. It sucks. It sucks like playing violin on the Titanic sucks. It sucks like having a pic nic in a skunk den sucks.
So much yard work, it suffocates you and prompts your body to send out an SOS.
It’s not like I’m mowing a mountain pasture. Last time I checked, there was no English Dame singing “the hills are alive with the sound of music.”
This is just a normal yard. It’s a a postage stamp of a yard.
But that postage stamp is alive, filled with crab grass and weeds and choking vines that are suffocating the azaleas like Jack the Ripper.
The yard is surrounded by a fence, and a smattering of trees. There are shrubs along the house, not to mention hoses and gutters and directv satellite dishes facing south.
It’s pretty standard. It’s not exactly the New York Times crossword puzzle of lawn maintenance.
It’s just small enough that the thought of hiring lawn people doesn’t make sense.
I need to re think that.
My back is throbbing and my left knee feels like I am that contestant in the one man ass kicking contest.
What I thought would take an hour, took 3.
Cutting the lawn is easy. A mower with wheels rides over the grass, chopping off the blades like a gasoline powered guillotine. It’s a mechanized dance of rural necessity.
Weed eating is the bitch, the task I despise. Weed whacking is the hand to hand combat of lawn care. It’s a grudge match, where you get in the cage, and people pay to watch you battle the underbrush.
I hate my Riobi trimmer like Godzilla hates picking small Asian children out of his teeth after a good city stomp.
It’s an awkwardly balanced pole. On one end there is the engine. On the other end the device that cuts or blows or edges.
I hate both ends and everything in between.
I hate cutting the .08 line that comes on a massive reel that always uncoils and gets tangled like pig tails dipped in wax.
I hate loading that line onto the weed eater cartridge, having to push the ends through the holes like I’m a farmer brain surgeon.
I hate winding the cord, counter clock wise, like a nylon cobra, poised to strike.
I hate the sound the engine makes, a piercing white noise that destroys brain cells and makes my ears reverberate.
I hate the weight distribution that makes my back compensate and causes me to look like an old man with a bone disease.
I hate the moment of contact, where spinning cyclone of line meets dirt and rocks and earth. It is an explosion so combustible it propels pebbles and chunks of debris into my shins and face at 600 miles an hour.
If you wear long pants they are painted with a green grass mulch that literally fuses with the fabric. If you wear shorts, your shins bleed from dozens of tiny wounds as if you were attacked by African Pygmies hiding in the garden.
And now the machine is old and breaking down. It has trimmed a million miles of lawn scuzz.
If my weed eater was a human, it would need adult depends.
Somewhere along the way it blew a gasket and oil is spurting out of the engine. How do I know this? Because when I am working, I find maple syrup colored viscous goo on my arm, and my pants. I look like a grease monkey covered in sweat, lawn clippings and aerated Earth.
“You been riding a dirt bike in a swamp?” the lady walking her dog asks me.
“Get off my lawn,” I snap silently in my mind, like I’m a mute Clint Eastwood.
All I’m saying is, one hour is really three hours.
Trimming is analogous to blood sweat and tears.
Do I really need to keep doing this at my advanced age or should I hire a lawn boy or a prisoner?
I think I have answered my own question.
Thanks Andy.
And that is crazy.™