For the last two years I’ve found myself the caretaker of my landlord’s lawn. This is a privilege I pay incredible money for. The house itself is fine. It’s homey and even beautiful when the light hits it right, and it has a serviceable, flat, unremarkable front yard.
But its backyard.… Oh, reader. Its backyard is as impassible and pockmarked and inhospitable as a teenager’s face the morning after pizza night.
Forget a pleasant bourgeois game of badminton on this Martian hellscape. Disregard any notions of a quaint backyard party here; you don’t deserve it. And if you even fucking think about mowing this lawn, be prepared for disaster.
Every year around this time, my lawn begins to grow, rearing up as cantankerous as an old dementia patient, ready to strike me for the crime of being its nurse.
Lawn care has become the life-halting speed bump of my summer, a two-hour Shakespearian tragedy I act out each week, slumping and bumping blade against blade with my tiny tiny tiny electric lawnmower: a brilliant piece of technology that barely makes it around the yard without needing its mommy, the battery charger.
Lawns are, generally for anyone, a huge waste of time and resources.1 They’re meant to project wealth, status, and manicured perfection: 1950s bullshit that most people lack, in other words.
Moreover, most of us don’t farm animals, and most of us don’t need to keep grass low to see approaching enemies creeping in the undergrowth towards our castle turrets.
I think.