Maybe I Just Need a Goat

As I mentioned last week, I took some time off so that I could watch some World Cup action. However, I didn't just lay around watching guys kick balls and fall on the ground. Prior to the match, I decided that I needed to get out and mow the front part of my yard, which was seriously in danger of getting completely out of control. I was a bamboo shoot or two away from attracting herds of pandas--a most unsavory change for the neighborhood--and with pandas, of course, come tigers. Neither of these did I want living in my yard (least of all the pandas), so I decided to mow.

It was not a pleasant thing to do, by any stretch of the imagination. It was hot. The high for the day was only going to get up to 89, so I thought I would carpe the diem and mow before the US/Slovenia match.

Because my mower is awesome--I bought it at Lowe's, how could it be anything but?--the drive doesn't work very well. I know what the problem is. I'm missing a screw. One fucking little screw, but it's what causes the drive to actually engage, helping pull the fucking mower along my fucking bumpy and hilly piece of property. If it's not working correctly (like, for the past year-and-a-half), the job of mowing becomes at least twice as hard. When it's 85 degrees in the morning, it's about a hundred times as hard.

So, I'm out there fighting the natural contours of the yard, the overgrown patches of weeds, and feeling the sun bake away my soul. Sweat is running in my eyes, the mower is getting choked by the dewy grass it's trying to mulch, and my hands and arms and legs ache because I'm fighting the mower as much as I'm fighting the yard. Because I'm not completely stupid, I took breaks, drank water, sat in the shade and surveyed my handiwork. What I had finished looked great. The rest...notsomuch.

But then, I begin to look around my neighborhood. And I begin to feel like a chump. The more I look, the more chumpish I am feeling.

See, I have neighbors on three sides who don't mow their lawns. They let their lawns grow so out of control that other neighbors finally get sick of how shitty it looks and they mow it for them.

The people next to me moved out for reasons that could fill an entirely different blog post. The plus side of them moving out was that I got a new step ladder (and it's a nice one); the downside is that their lawn grows wild, so that it more resembles Catherine of Aragon's eyebrows than a front yard! Hi-yo!

To be honest, I wrote that joke for one person in particular...I apologize if my acerbic wit of dead historical figures did not quite ring a chord this morning...

Anyway, they've moved out. The people across from them have moved on, as well. About the only good thing I'm going to get from them is a free recycling bin that I can use every other Friday...but they're gone, and someone else mows their lawn.

And then...there's the guy across the street. Rex Mulletus, he whose children put sand in my kids' fucking squirt guns, he who constructs ramparts of garbage bags to protect against invasion by the Huns, he whose back porch light shines right into my bedroom window. This man owns no functioning stove, no working grill, and no lawn mower.

And apparently no concept that a mullet is not cool, man. Not cool at all.

For two years now, my other neighbors have been happily mowing this guy's lawn for him simply because he doesn't. And while I'm glad that someone else has decided to do all the work for him, I'm a little bit...put off. I mean, here I am, sweating my fucking balls off to ensure that, at least once a month, my yard looks passable, and these three fuckers all get someone else to do their work for them, mostly by being as useless as humanly possible. Or absent. I guess that's a decent excuse.

It's not fair, if you ask me. Which I'm sure you didn't.

It's enough to make me want to quit mowing my own lawn...or just get a goat.