The Insanity of Lawns

The old man was no philosopher King.  Once they were on my ass about something I had done or hadn’t done or did and shouldn’t have.  Lord knows what.  But they could make a guy crazy, so this time, I don’t know why, I launched into my existentialism trip and started neurotically nattering on about what was the point of it all, sure you do this, so you can do that, and then you get a job and work till you die, and could they tell me what the point of all that was.  Was the point simply to do whitehouselawnwhatever came next?  Whereupon or thereabouts the old man put his hands over his ears—like the hear no evil monkey—and said, I can’t think about this shit.  If I had a shotgun right now I would shoot myself.

And let me tell you what, more than once I wished I had a shotgun to give him to see if he was as good as his word.

 When I read Waiting for Godot I decided that Beckett must have been in our house or lived in some stinking suburb in sunny SoCal.  Where nothing fucking ever happens.  Instead people plant lawns—can you believe it—and then the grass grows—well, what do you fucking expect—and when it gets TOO long—whatever the fuck that may be– and then you fucking actually CUT the lawn—in my case with a totally non-powered push lawn mower—so that it is the RIGHT LENGTH—and then the fucking shit GROWS RIGHT BACK.  And sweet god in heaven, you have to cut it again, and again, and again endlessly until you or the fucking lawn dies, whichever comes first.

Whoever thought of the so-called lawn was fucking insane or had a lot of servants to do his dirty work.  Because not only was I required to cut that little piece of fucking shit assed lawn, I had to pick up the DOG poop from it.  I hated to pick up that fucking dog poop.  Keeping a dog in a tiny little lawn area is another idea dreamed up by some fucking stupid person.  Where else then is the fucking dog going to poop but on the fucking insane lawn?  I ask.  And you have to pick it up because the DOG poop actually kills the grass.  And if you have a female dog, her piss will kill the grass.

And then in the winter, the lawn would die out, after all my work, mostly of its own accord, and I would let the poop just sit there till sometimes it became covered with green fungus.  There’s no sight quite like green fungus on dog poop on a dead lawn.  Our neighbors had a better idea.  They had a dog but they didn’t have a lawn out back—like us civilized people; they just had dirt and in the middle of that dirt they had driven a spike and attached to that spike was a chain about twenty feet long and attached to the other end of the chain was their dog.  A bull dog.

It would lie around in the dirt sleeping or licking its own ass.  And every once in a while it would walk to the end of its chain, point its asshole away from the spike and poop.  I would look over the fence and see in our neighbor’s backyard a perfect circle of dog poop.  It was quite amazing, that circle of dog poop.  That dog knew his geometry.

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