Sunday, June 13, 2010

Screw the Lawnmowers!

I admit I may be just a bit of a misanthrope (mild understatement), but when I go out to the garden on a nice cool evening after dinner--on a day when I sure as hell needed a nice cool evening in the sanctifying garden--I don't like feeling nautious. Literally as soon as I go outside the neighbors start up their mower, and being downwind, I get all the stink, all the cancer, all the vomit, and all the noise.

My insanity grows with every wall vibration in my office as I try to write / focus all afternoon. It grows as nearby mowers thunder in the distance during dinner. And it absolutely explodes when I try to get some measure of peace and emotional venting done outside where I feel the most able to do so. Screw you, lawnmower, and the jerkface who invented you:

Screw you James Sumner of England (they're all from England), who used kerosene as a fuel to invent the first steam-powered mower.

Screw you Thomas Greene, for inventing the first chain-driven reel mower.

And screw you Edwin Budding for, in 1823, starting the whole damn thing. Give me grazing animals (or a prairie), or give me a missile launcher!

(And screw the infernal angry-mutated-wasp-sounding weedeater that follows the mowing, and the buzzing vortex of carbon-spewing suicide that is the leaf blower which finishes the trifecta of agony hours later.)

9 comments:

Jim Groble said...

i just got an old fashion push mower. no gas power, just jim power. it sounds pretty cool.

Diana Studer said...

We had a 'Jim power mower' for the last garden - before we saw the light, and no more lawn. As my mother says, a push-mower is a lovely peaceful, sunny, English afternoon sound. Ride-on mowers like golf-carts are an abomination! (We have 2 or 3 neighbours like yours - smelly and noisy) Ours is one of the 3? Gardens Without a Lawn in our town.

Steve said...

Cutting grass on the prairie is like trying to sit in the corner of a round room. I am so with you on this one. My old man mowed his way through my whole childhood...and his tractor more than once tried to kill him. Did he stop? Nope. Wanted the world to look like a "park" instead of a prairie/swamp/woods.

I also hate leaf blowers. Imagine it, in Nebraska--the seventh windiest state--people feel the need to horde their leaves with a gas-powered blower...the worst.

Unknown said...

I'm with you! I felt bad firing up my lawnmower Saturday night around 9pm, but I had just gotten home and knew the rain was coming on Sunday... I silently apologized to my neighbors for the entire 7 minutes it takes to mow my whole yard, front and back.

I can't wait until this mower dies, or I have a spare $100 to buy the "kim-power mower" that I want. And FWIW weed eaters are the devil and I completely hate them.

Gail said...

People have gotten so used to the noise that they are unaware of how wonderful silence can be~gail

Benjamin Vogt said...

Jim--Jim power sounds creepy to me :)
Steve--Growing up my dad was a homebuilder who had lawns and empty weedy lots to mow. We'd put most of the riding lawnmower into the big suburban with the grass catchers hanging out the back. After an hour on that thing my butt vibrated the rest of the day.
Kim--I always feel bad mowing, psychologically and physically. I wish it ook me just 7 minutes to mow my lawn, but it's usually 45.
Gail--And in silence there is so much noise yet, though we sholdn't call it noise, perhaps conversation. We are all so terribly afraid to be with ourselves.

Adrian Ayres Fisher said...

We have a push mower that used to be powered by our teen-age son. Now we mow more rarely, so our lawn, or I should say meadow, it has so many "weeds," gets a little shaggy before cutting. Push mowers do sound nicer than the motorized, polluting version. I'm not averse to necessary lawns, but they are way overused and over-medicated.

Amazingly, my town outlawed leaf-blowers and luckily no one has enough lawn for a ride-on.

Chloe m said...

You sound a teensy bit mad.I would be too. I moved away from all that crud. Now I get to hear damn dirt bikes all day. Can't win.

Benjamin Vogt said...

Adrian--no leaf blowers? I envy you!
Rosey--Dirt bikes v. lawnmowers. Hmmm. Hmmmmmmmmm.