My Lawn Is Beelzebub

Each Monday morning I awake to the sound of a two stroke engine running at full bore. From its anus spouts an acrid fart of hot carbon. The loathsome fart singes my windpipe, propelling me closer to a tumorous death.

A peasant from Temazcalapan wields the contraption in question. It is not his fault. Like me, he is merely a gear in the relentlessly proactive juggernaut, the great Rube Goldberg machine. Some blind landlord, a faraway geriatric living off accumulated fat, ordered him to make these motions every Monday.

He blows leaves around. His blower sucks fuel sucked from the sands of Arabia that thousands of people have been blown up protecting. The fuel was shipped five thousand miles and processed it in a toxin-belching, fire-breathing hell-toy. The blower is considered a big improvement on the broom and the rake.

Next comes his friend from Quetzalcuitlapilco, another peasant that the blind old landlord has encouraged to travel half way across the continent for the good of his family. He carries the weed-whacker. The landscaper makes a few passes across the grass with it, ensuring that all blades of grass will remain shorter than four centimeters.

Two hundred miles away another man, this one from Mizquiyahuala, slaves away on pumps and pipes, covered in grease and sweat, eight thousand feet high in the Sierra. The water he collects will travel those two hundred miles in a feat of engineering, and eventually blast sloppily onto this lawn square. It will be dumped across the square in such quantity that it runs off into the gutter and into the ocean, laden with poisons and fertilizer. Perhaps this man has a pact with his cousin from Quetzalcuitlapilco to make the grass grow, so that his cousin will always be employed cutting it.

No one ever sits on my lawn.

It's grass roots are shallow, but run deep. The lawn is merely there to represent our industriousness. The more expensive, high-maintenance features on our homes, the greater our virtue. The original builder executed the design with the help of myriad peasants from Chihuahua. His thinking about the whole thing remained absolutely positive until the day he died, and was carted away with much ado in an gargoyle-adorned coffin, his relatives wailing about Jesus, and buried beneath an even lusher lawn in a tree-dotted golf course somewhere in his crème colored tuxedo. Beside this square of proper golf-green he parked his awesome automobile, a fire-blasting behemoth of pure steel in which he rode here and there, positively spreading the Good News to the detriment of everything that stood in his way.

The front lawn is now a wasteland facing lines of hulking automobiles in the street. Sun-baked, it can barely survive even with half the Owen's River and a cloud of nitrogen smog dumped upon it every day. A little square of squared-off green between bright, glaring, angular sheets of concrete laid here and there for ghost pedestrians. The back yard is potentially a pleasant place to sit, but nonetheless is never sat upon. Along one side of the lawn, the lemon tree drops lemons, and each Monday the peasants rake them into a pile and dump them into a plastic bucket so that a grinding, smoke-blasting machine can come pick them up and bring them to some mysterious place: the place of rotten lemons and blades of grass that dared soar higher than four centimeters. This machine is always piloted by an Orc with a psychotically productive zeal in his eye, and its presence brings the neighborhood the atmosphere of a steel mill for a time.

In the time before time, when a leaf fell from a tree, it simply lent nutrients to the ground below it. Plants in southern California survived with less water. There were plenty of fine plants.

A pleasant environment requires no Arabian fossils, no imported Sierra snow, no Monday-morning cacophony of greasy cam-shafts and valves and exhaust tubes blasting a hundred decibels of hot carbon fart, no great migration of peasant hordes, no weekly cavalcade of dump trucks.

We do not require grass everywhere. Our grass must not remain always green, less than four centimeters tall and totally free of leaves and fallen fruit. We're in a recession. Can we dispense with this prodigious landscaping?

But no. Our world is one in which we pull with one hand, and push with the other and meanwhile stomp everything into submission that dares question our holy crusade. Pushing, pulling, stomping, with granite resolve, until we die of a heart attack. Our world resembles the end of Harley tailpipe at full blast. A smoking, filthy cacophony, a world of boiling hot cancerous shit.

No one ever sits on my lawn. Everyone is too busy.