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.

Mother’s Day at the Deli Counter

The grocery store closes at 8pm on Sundays. It is 6pm as I walk up to the deli counter while my wife gets the produce. There are two people in front of me being served. There’s an adolescent boy getting bologna, and a middle-aged man getting half a pound of everything. It’s Mother’s Day. There are two women working the counter, both middle-aged and motherly-looking. One of them turns off all the lights behind the counter as she prepares more meat and cheese for this bastard of a man. A smiling manager approaches and asks her something. She replies, “I’ve been here since 6am. I’m done now.” He smiles and nods. She smiles with beautiful indolence and defiance, and continues preparing meat and cheese for the raging asshole of a customer. He orders what easily must be another half pound of everything. I begin to contemplate what sort of man is so inconsiderate to keep this poor woman working like that. When he is finally done, I order half a pound of turkey breast and a quarter pound of sandwich pepperoni.

The Sound of the Ocean

Sometimes you’ve got to blow off work. Sometimes a subtle reason is all you need to stay home. Like bad allergies, or a cold, or no reason at all. Some days were just not meant for writing code in an office without windows. My house is about a quarter-mile away from a back road that gets substantial morning traffic. It’s never congested, but there are frequently cars zipping along, on their way to work. Through the bedroom window, if you’re sleeping in on a weekday, they sound kind of like the ocean as they pass, just not as rhythmic and even. It’s kind of like cheap, miniature vacation ambiance. My allergies are acting up today. Frail, feeble, and failing, I’m in the rare mood to listen to bright smiling music to clear my head and make the most of my stolen day. Misery and commiseration are for work, not for home. As I comb through my CD collection, looking for optimistic music, I become acutely aware of what a depressing person I must be. I guess I need to work on that, not that I have any idea how you “work on” something like that. Oh well, fuck me. I settle on Iggy Pop, The Minutemen, Le Tigre, Jane’s Addiction, and Fugazi. Load up the CD carousel, put it on shuffle, and sit down on the couch with my laptop. The dog is sitting on the kitchen floor, in a bright square of sunshine. It’s her favorite thing to do. She loves to bask like an alligator on a hot rock. The warm sun helps her digest her breakfast, and she loves to nap in it. Today will be a good day despite my allergies, goddammit. Crumpled tissues pile up, all pregnant with snot, and I type and read and sketch, a narcotic joy overtaking me that I never want to end.

Bad Ideas

Bad ideas come into the world on their own. They don’t need anybody’s help. My dog climbs up onto the end tables and chews up things she shouldn’t. She loves it. I’ve never wondered for a moment if she saw another dog do that on TV and got inspired, or if she heard a band sing a song about climbing on tables on the radio, or if one of her friends put the idea in her head while she was out playing. I’m pretty sure she hatched that one all on her own.

Chalupa

The wife and I just got a dog, a Chihuahua. I just wanted a dog. I didn’t care what kind. It didn’t matter to me. She agreed to get a small dog. So we got the smallest kind on god’s green Earth. We got a four pound Chihuahua puppy. It’s fucking adorable, and it needs to wear those goofy little clothes that people like to put on small dogs. Apparently Chihuahuas are so small and have such little body mass that if the temperature drops below 70 degrees Fahrenheit, they’re cold. So they need to wear those embarrassing little dog coats, unless you live on the equator. Pittsburgh isn’t on the equator. Their teeth are also very small and delicate. So they have to eat little dishes of soft processed meat. Somewhere Charles Darwin is rolling over in his grave, spinning like a lathe.