lawnmower man

and i'm thankful that spring is coming now, it's going to get up above seventy on thursday and thanks to the sun lately, the yard has gotten very shaggy and overgrown, full of weeds and dandelions, and i have been putting off researching what lawnmower to buy because that has seemed like the least interesting thing in the fucking world to me (and there are a lot of things i do not think are interesting)

and i was torn between the gas mowers that have been a fixture of my life since i was a child but never really liked, i remember badly mowing our yard when i was a surly teenager because i couldn't see the lines where i'd mowed very well and my dad would get annoyed with me because he is really anal about household chores in a way that i did not like as a youth and then grew to appreciate in its way when i lived with my parents after coming home from korea,

and then electric mowers, which i did not know existed, somehow i thought that a battery would not be powerful enough or something and yet that seems to be the kind that everybody has here, but something about the cords and the bags of them make them seem like big vacuums in a way that i find distasteful

and then manual push mowers, which initially appealed to me because they are cheap and though we are doing fine right now after a long period where i worried about our finances this feels like such a boring thing to spend money on and also i like not having to buy gasoline and charge something but then i read that push mowers aren't good for cutting long grass and articles that like recommend, if your grass is really long and you want to start cutting it with a push mower, hiring a service to mow it the first time and then doing it yourself after that and like the whole reason i am buying this mower is to reduce the number of people i have to interact with, i am not trying to add interactions here

and so, having read like three posts from the top 10 google search results for "push mower long grass" over the course of several minutes one day months ago, i crossed a border of "okay, i know i need to think about this more, but also i do not want to think about this any more at all, so let's repress it good, except only partially, because also always (no not always just often) there will be the ghost in the corner of my eye reminding me that i still have not made this lawnmower decision

and meanwhile the grass is growing and growing, nature, and i look at it out the bathroom window every day and see it getting longer and shaggier but also thinking, i do not really care about my relationships with my neighbors as long as they are not bad and the back yard is surrounded by a fence that no one can see and is this actually a problem i have to care about or can i just blissedly defer it forever

and anyway we're having a couple of people over on thursday when it is going to get above seventy in the evening and we don't have any chairs and i had proposed we could just sit on the grass on blankets (a very safe distance apart, never touching, they will bring their own beverages from home) and i started to look at the yard and feel like "oh shit, that's not good, gotta make that lawnmower decision"

and i'm thankful that what i finally did was i looked up a youtube video of "can you cut long grass with a manual mower" and of course there was a video for exactly that, probably multiple but i just shifted off the first item in the array and i watched the video of a man addressing the very specific question i had with the answer of "yes, you totally can, you just might have to make a few extra passes and push harder"

and as someone for whom the physical act of mowing is my favorite thing about it, beside, that was great, and suddenly all this decision paralysis weight was unlocked and dropped beside me and i'm thankful that the spasming of the global supply chain has supplanted amazon as the hegemonic owner of "hey, i want this thing now gimme it right now" since everything is next thursday at best and i'm thankful that i bought a push mower from home depot with next day delivery and i'm thankful i managed to put it together, even though i fucked that up at first, and i'm thankful that yesterday evening i mowed our back yard and it was a pleasure and it looks so much better now

i'm thankful that d and i stepped outside to see the moon (well, thankful that i stepped outside to take down the recycling and compost bins she had filled earlier to the street and she stepped outside to see the moon) and when i turned back toward the house i saw that there were a lot of stars and we stood there looking up at the stars for a little bit in the cool breeze with bare arms before going back inside.