Our house is a very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard....
.....not to mention new little red lawn mower.
I bought a lawn mower today. What's this all about? I haven't had to mow a lawn since we moved aboard our boat 12 years ago. I was free of all that, I tell you, I was free.
On the other hand, you can get really cheap lawn mowers nowadays. I have a really small lawn. I could probably mow my yard with a good set of hand clippers, but this shiny, red machine, folded up in a cardboard box, was clean and new and would keep me off my hands a knees. $150 at Lowes. Can't beat that.
Everything I needed to know in life I learned from reading short stories and one thing a lot of short stories pointed out was that white, clap-board houses with little green lawns and white pickett fences were sure signs of the death-by-being-average, intellectual/emotion degeneracy and moral bankruptcy of their owners. I have a nagging, looking-over-my-shoulder feeling that I've sold out. After a lifetime of traveling around the world living in apartments and rented houses, hotels and sailboats, and mocking the settled-in classes, I've gone and done it myself. According to the morals in those stories, I'm shallow, soft, pasty, helpless, feckless, moribund, confused, envious, covetous, conflicted, alcoholic, tawdry, desperate, unfaithful, hypocritical, and filled with self-loathing. Now add to that list guilt at the size of the carbon footprint my little mower will leave behind.
I love literature, but maybe I take it too seriously. John Updike is dead and his suburban-dwelling, cocktail-drinking, neighbor's-wife-coveting protagonists like Rabbit Angstrom are, too. I've written 147 pages on the next book and next week, I get to go out to sea for a couple of weeks in my own boat. Out there you're on your own. No shopping malls, no hedge trimmers, no barking dogs, and once again there will be no lawn to mow, no T.V. to watch, no pickett fence to paint, and no neighbors to envy. But after that, I'll be back. And I suspect I'll be happy to be here--or any where.
On the other hand, you can get really cheap lawn mowers nowadays. I have a really small lawn. I could probably mow my yard with a good set of hand clippers, but this shiny, red machine, folded up in a cardboard box, was clean and new and would keep me off my hands a knees. $150 at Lowes. Can't beat that.
Everything I needed to know in life I learned from reading short stories and one thing a lot of short stories pointed out was that white, clap-board houses with little green lawns and white pickett fences were sure signs of the death-by-being-average, intellectual/emotion degeneracy and moral bankruptcy of their owners. I have a nagging, looking-over-my-shoulder feeling that I've sold out. After a lifetime of traveling around the world living in apartments and rented houses, hotels and sailboats, and mocking the settled-in classes, I've gone and done it myself. According to the morals in those stories, I'm shallow, soft, pasty, helpless, feckless, moribund, confused, envious, covetous, conflicted, alcoholic, tawdry, desperate, unfaithful, hypocritical, and filled with self-loathing. Now add to that list guilt at the size of the carbon footprint my little mower will leave behind.
I love literature, but maybe I take it too seriously. John Updike is dead and his suburban-dwelling, cocktail-drinking, neighbor's-wife-coveting protagonists like Rabbit Angstrom are, too. I've written 147 pages on the next book and next week, I get to go out to sea for a couple of weeks in my own boat. Out there you're on your own. No shopping malls, no hedge trimmers, no barking dogs, and once again there will be no lawn to mow, no T.V. to watch, no pickett fence to paint, and no neighbors to envy. But after that, I'll be back. And I suspect I'll be happy to be here--or any where.
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