ast week, while mowing my lawn, I discovered that my property was not only
not flat, it also sloped uphill in all four directions. When I went the other direction
it still sloped uphill in all four directions. The world of M.C. Escher is actually
reality.
It takes years of dedicated study to be able to recognize things like this. My lawnmower couldn't handle the strain. It doesn't have the experience, and it finally crapped out, which of course was the real reason it felt like going uphill.
Weeds
My lawn is so bad I no longer even have dandelions. Even the neighborhood stray dogs don't bother to go here: one time I accidentally left out some gasoline for my lawnmower, and an animal, apparently a stray dog, came along and tried to drink it. But they can't dig through the hard clay, so they bury their bones somewhere else.
According to the US EPA, yard trimmings make up approximately 13 percent (or 28 million tons) of the national waste stream. Grass clippings account for two thirds of all yard waste. So, it would seem that the solution is to buy a mulching lawn mower. How do they work? The theory is that mulch, made from tiny hunks of grass, is broken down by bacteria and fertilizes the grass. Grass, it seems, is cannibalistic and will happily eat its own kind.
So I got one. To make it mulch, you remove the chute from the side. The grass clippings stay inside the mower, where they're supposedly cut over and over until they fall off. As you might imagine, that never really happens. If your grass has even a tiny bit of water on it, which is to say if it's not dead, the lawn mower goes more and more slowly until it stalls out. At that point you have to reach underneath and pull those big clumps of grass out before it will start up again.
Trample all those spider webs while you're at it
I think there's a better way. There's a general principle I always follow: suppose you tried to grow weeds, or mushrooms, or bacteria. What would happen? They would die. Whatever you try to do, the universe reacts by trying to make the opposite happen. So it stands to reason that the way to create a lush, green lawn is to try to kill it. My strategy for growing a better lawn, therefore, is to somehow trick the neighborhood kids to trample on it.
One of the cruelest things in nature is that the older you get, the cuter kids look. It's nature's way of punishing you for not creating more of them.
You can't ask them to do it. If they suspect it benefits you in any way they'll think it's work and start whining about it. That proves they're part of an implacably hostile natural world. And maybe that's why feminists keep insisting on the right to kill them before they're born.
A feminist once told me that abortion must be kept legal or women would go into back alleys and use coat hangers. Now that I've found a good use for 'em, that just seems like a darn shame.
I just hope I remember to deactivate all the land mines this time.
jul 07 2018, 10:12 am
