Truesday: Soon To Be Paved With Good Intentions

If you don’t know what a push mower is, well then, you’re obviously the enemy. It uses the most renewable of all available resources: a combination of elbow grease, loss of pride, some sunstroke, and a really steep drop in standards for lawn aesthetics.

Or here’s a picture, if it helps you to visualize the operation of this contraption in modern-day, toaster-ovens-and-high-speed(s?)-internets times.

That’s right. I’m that guy:

1. I live in the 78704, so I’m down for the bumper sticker cause of the week.
2. I prefer my landscaping to be “native” (read: whatever weeds can hack it)
3. I don’t waste water by tossing it out onto my lawn (save those springs! Or am I just lazy! Alright!)
4. I use natural stones for bordering lawn shit (took them from empty house next door)
5. I mow my lawn with a crappy push-mower and tube socks (to make President Carter proud)
6. I often find myself crying whenever I wake up in any Interstate Motel 6.

That last one might not fit, but you get the picture.

If you were to cruise by my crib as I butchered my lawn, you’d probably point at me and say to that friend of yours who still owes you fifty bucks for that time you actually ate a rotten egg back in college (they don’t remember that bet, they never do), “that dude and his mess of a lawn are like, stupid hippies.” And your friend is all “what a dumbass. Walking his lawnmower over the same spot, he might as well get on all fours and graze that shit down…” Then he’ll yell toward me, but actually at the closed window. “IT’S CALLED ELECTRICITY ASSHOLE! Aha! Ahahahahahahahah! Ha!” He’ll find himself hilarious, and you will too. Hilarious, that is, until he asks for another hit off your pipe, and then the fleeting fun at my expense will fade into some bad band music you will think is cool for another month, tinning in the background. Gas is expensive, and you just can’t swing sharing your grass whilst also pitching in on the gas.

Besides, your friend is kind of an insufferable asshole. Admit it.

So I’m slowly weaning myself from the juice. Pulling myself from deep within the slick-mire. Trading in the go-tar for some self-sufficiency. I’m… pushing some rotating blades on a stick with a collection of vain hopes that my lawn won’t look like a blind barber had a seizure all over it. Lucky for me, it doesn’t look that bad. But I guess you could say “looks like Edward Scissorhands tried to feverishly scratch his ass all over it like a Labrador Retriever with gland issues on a living room rug,” is probably worse.

But that’s alright by me. As far as my meager lawn care is concerned, my conscience is clear. Like a clean and pollutant-free, salamander-infested natural spring. I’m no longer OPEC’s bitch. No longer are my lawn and I potentially complicit in any possible (more) Saudi Suicide Missions. With my trusty, modest tool of lawn trimming, I’m no terrorist benefactor, Halliburton teet-suckler. Or whatever the most current rally cry there is for hating oil and those who profit from it. Man, fuck those profit making people with their “scarce resources”, “utility management”, and their “secondary market for option and forward contracts”. It’s all voodoo to us normal lawn-caring folk. Voo. Doo.

So screw all that scary, confusing crap. I got a push mower. Man-powered. A man-powered grass mower, which I push like a motherfucker all over my lawn, retracing my lines like a victim of profound OCD. Yep. Push mower.

Or, a push mangler, more like. Grass man-handler. Weed slapper. But whatever. At least my weeds aren’t serviced by a tool of the fascist-neo-Genghis-Kahn-baby-punchers.

Plus, my grass-musser was made in the USA. Beat that, as you drive by, pointing and laughing because I’ve been at it over an hour and my lawn looks like I tried to trim it with a rusty shovel and a claw hammer. America, fuck yeah.

USA! USA! USA!