mowing philosophy

There are perks to staying at home when going to college. You get free board and lodging, you eat your parents' delicious cooking (well, in my case, at least), you live in the comforts you've known for the past decade and a half -- things like that. Then there are some not-so-positive consequences.

One of these is having to continue to mow the lawn.

So here I am, mowing the lawn at 5:30 in the evening. It's the height of ragweed season, aka sneezing season, and as I began mowing, the start of my depression cycle. So when added to loud music in order to drown out the roar of the motor, I end up getting mildly philisophical, or at least overly thoughtful. This, mind you, is not the best place to think deep thoughts, nor the normal chain of events, but hey, gotta swim with the river. I will say these mental ponderings were partially brought on by my mild interruption of some sort of family/neighborhood gathering/reunion of baseball-in-the-driveway a couple houses down; I felt kinda bad for entering a raucous motor into their equation of loud screaming and yelling, but hey, I had a lawn to mow and wasn't afraid to tell them if they wanted me to stop.

I started pondering how a person is viewed when mowing, aside from the obvious "oh that guy is mowing." If you think about it, people mowing lawns is actually a very hilarious sight. Here these people are, walking back and forth across their lawns, pushing this rather odd pollutant of a machine in order to satisfy nature and the government while trying to think thoughts of dominance over their maybe-green grass in order to justify their boring and dreaded task. It's like some sort of ritual: the men all come out of their homes at the same time, as if by instinct, to shave off inches of grass from every corner of their lawn.

In addition to these thoughts, my neighbor decided that since I had started the fun, he would join on his riding mower. Now, I usually don't critique people's lawnmowing, and I don't claim to be the master of lawnmowing, but his style was more than a little interesting. So here I am, emptying the grass catcher, and in between the music I hear in the distance some vague semblance of the on-off-on-off of a motor. I had earlier noticed him circling the lawn, making large streaking mow lines across his lawn, going in and out of the trees. No problem, it makes the mowing maybe a bit less monotone and divides the work into smaller parts.

Now, because he was on a rider, he had the option of toggling the blade movement. I'll admit, it is kinda fun to play with the switch/button/thingy, but not particularly when mowing. Apparently getting the lawn mown is much more interesting when circling around the a tree, only mowing on one side at a time. Maybe it's just more convenient when on a rider to avoid going to one end and making a sharp 180, but hey, this was just kinda silly looking, not to mention inefficient.

Which ends the mowing train of thoughts. So when I finished mowing about two-thirds of the lawn (my dad told me not to do part of it because he sprayed grass and weed killer or some such and bagging that might not be such a good idea), I went inside to a hot steamy shower and grilled steak, so it's all good.