Saturday, February 20, 2010

Bagging the Grass

It burns my ass that I have a yard. My dad has a yard. From the age of about 12 or 13, cutting it had always been my responsibility while I lived with my parents. Now I own my own house, and I have to cut my own goddamn yard. I wish my house didn’t have one. I want to pave the fucking yard and just paint the asphalt green. When we bought the house, the yard was nearly dead. That was one of the big selling points for me. The first summer that we lived here, it was fantastic. I could get away with cutting the yard once every two weeks, and I just let the grass cuttings lay. The next summer was still pretty good, but the grass grew a little faster and got a little thicker. My wife suggested that we get a lawn service to spray it periodically with lawn treatments to kill weeds and fertilize the grass. I agreed to it, without thinking or believing that it would realistically do anything. Another year has passed, and as we move into summer, we have much more grass to deal with. It’s terrible. We have thick, fast-growing grass everywhere. I’m still resolved not to bag it, though, as I fucking hate that. Bagging your lawn clippings takes forever, and just seems like a really ecologically shitty thing to do. The drawback is that we have ugly clods of grass everywhere. I couldn’t give a shit if you paid me to. The grass clods didn’t bother me one bit until my dog started eating them. Whenever we would take our Chihuahua outside to do her business, she’d grab a giant clod of grass, and eat it while she shat. She’d squat and grind out turds while chewing a mouthful of grass. It was kind of funny to watch. I guess there’s nothing wrong or unhealthy with that, but it pissed me off. It was time-consuming. Anytime we took the dog out, we had to wait for her to finish playing with the grass clods. So this past week I resolved to bag the grass just to spite our dog. We have a somewhat wooded lot behind our house, so I dumped the clippings there into a compost heap. I gave the yard a crew cut. It looked like golf course. No grass clods anywhere. The next time I took our Chihuahua out to do her business that evening, I taunted her that she would starve to death, because she’d have no grass to eat while she shit. She was immediately thrown by the absence of grass clods. She hunted and hunted for them, and I laughed out loud. I relished my victory. The only problem is that now she won’t shit at all until she comes back into the house. Now it’s incredibly difficult to get her to shit outside without the clods, and we’ve got to either housetrain her again or just mulch the grass again and let the clods lay.
 

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