When I mow my lawn, I am an agent of destruction.
An entire cosmos exists beneath our feet and from its perspective we are mythical entities too huge to truly comprehend. Time affects this tiny corner of reality differently, as creatures can live an entire lifetime, reproduce and die in the span of single human day. But no matter how microscopic, life abounds there. And to it, I bring desolation.
To the inhabitants of this dark and beautiful domain just outside my front door, my instrument is the size of a continent. Its mighty blade is like a tornado of steely decapitation. Herbs. Weeds. The occasional dog toy. Two to three inches of purely verdant St. Augustine grass bursting with life in the suburban afternoon haze. None of them are spared the sting of the cut.
Look out at a long row of houses paralleled by a long row of lawns, you too might get to thinking. Maybe it’s the sun beating down on your growing bald spot, slowly cooking your brain until you stroke out and die in your oil-stained driveway. Or maybe it’s because this is your third dark ‘n’ stormy since breakfast. But a well-maintained yard, sometimes even a garden, just starts to seem like a challenge to God in which man claims to have tamed nature.
This couldn’t be further from the truth, though. Whether perfectly manicured or wildly unkempt, those polygonal pocket universes of green teem with activity. Workers harvest the land. Soldiers die in war. Mothers want the best for their children. It is all meaningless in the face of the coming of spring.
Winters are much colder and longer in North Carolina than you’d expect, so I start to get anxious for when it’s finally time to drag the old Husqvarna 7021P with Manual-Push Mulching Capability out of the shed and spread death like a thousand nuclear blasts. The turning of the season means a lot to me, as it reminds me that the holidays are well behind us. They can be such an awkward time since it was around Christmas nine years ago that my wife and I stopped speaking. And there’s nothing quite like the smell of fresh-cut vegetation on a Saturday in late April.
Do the pathetic wriggling denizens of this micro-realm raise their antennae or whatever other strange appendages they may possess to the sky when they hear the mighty roar of the 160-cc engine? It must sound like the fabric of their very reality is tearing itself apart. Do their disgusting little mouths let out prayers to non-existent bug gods, asking for some kind of divine intervention? If they do pray, I cannot hear them over the hypnotic dull buzz of whirling annihilation.
Their pitiless toiling means nothing to me. I see a home to thousands built in intricate design I could never recreate, and I reduce it to a pile of dusty ruin. Could there be ant-sized schools and bowling alleys and massage parlors where you can get more for your money if you know how to ask among these great bug communities that I literally rip in half with a 21-inch long razor-sharp piece of hardened steel that to them seems like an entire mountain range moving at super speed demolishing everything in its path? In a way it would almost take the fun out of it if there wasn’t.
The creatures whose lives I shatter don’t know it, and I barely know why myself. But this act brings me great pleasure. The vibrations of my mighty machine stimulate and engorge my mediocre penis, which is then only slightly more noticeable through the baggy mesh folds of my rapidly dilapidating gym shorts. Maybe if I hadn’t wrecked my parent’s Volvo in high school after drinking a fifth of Dewar’s while celebrating making the varsity team, I wouldn’t have destroyed my shoulder. Maybe I would be the star quarterback for the Jaguars like my father always wanted. I’d be rich enough to have someone else do my yardwork for me instead of being two child support payments behind and about to have my Geo Metro repossessed. But then I would never experience the unnerving sense of arousal this provides me.
Those are all just maybes. For now, I’m happy. Or at least, I don’t feel weak.
For when I mow my lawn, I am Shiva. I am Ragnarök. I am the Reaper.
