Backyard reverie

Dear Hiring Manager,

You can tell that Spring has come to Minnesota, because everyone starts up their lawnmowers. Yesterday I heard a loud engine, and, when I looked out the window, I saw a form that had the likeness of a man enthroned on a giant mobile contraption. The machine moved as the man moved, from one end of his yard to the other; and it clipped the grass as it went.

I think I told you this already, but when we bought this new old house, we inherited a large backyard. At least, to me it appears large. I suppose if you were to dig up the grave of a farmer who died a century ago, and revive him, and bring him to my house, and tell him to appraise my backyard, he’d laugh that I described it as large and assert the opposite: I’m sure he’d say my backyard is small. He’d also wonder why I’m not growing any vegetables, and why I have no tropical mango trees, and where are my oxen.

What I’m trying to prove is that lawn fashion changes over time. As society degenerates from feudalism to capitalism, and then to a type of neo-feudal-capitalism, the average size of lawn goes from sprawling to minuscule. In olden times, the tiniest yard that one could find had upwards of 40 acres of rich soil. For Adam (the ancient everyman) was required to work the land to achieve his bread (I use that term here to stand for all forms of nourishment); thus, he would eat all his meals in great sorrow, with beads of sweat streaming down his face, on account of the hard work that he expended in harvesting this sustenance; for the ground was cursed, as it remains, by its alleged creator: thorns and thistles are always vying for the top slot in paradise (that word simply means the same as our modern garden); yes, back then — say, just one century ago — the necessities of life were acquired only with difficulty.

But those vast yards of eld shrink down as we approach the present day, where all lawns are nearly grassless, or at best patchy, because they’re one small sandy lot. Build your house on sand, as Jesus always sez. (Matthew 7:24-27) Actually he implies that building one’s house on rock is the far better option, but I don’t have time to get into the details of all that right now, plus my court case against him is ongoing, so my lawyers have advised me to avoid sermonizing about it. Now the reason that today’s Adam, whose name is Bryan, owns only a fraction of the yard that he formerly possessed, is that now the banks control all the property, like the lords did back in the days of the king, and instead of plowing and planting to get his food, Bryan rents himself out as a servant (that is, an employee, which is sort of like a soft slave) to a multinational corporation, for one’s time alive is not one’s own to enjoy (all enjoyment also belongs to the bank), and the necessities of life are acquired only with difficulty.

Actually, nowadays, life’s necessities are placed purposely just out of reach; so that, right when one thinks one has finally stretched one’s hand far enough forth to reach the tree of life, to eat of its fruit, one is driven away from one’s garden by a flaming sword (which stands for the electronic financialization of everything by our archons, the banksters), and one dies in one’s iniquity.

So we have this backyard that’s good for nothing, and altho I admit that it’s far too small for a farmer, which is why I put the old man (whom we exhumed and resuscitated) back into the ground whence he was taken, it’s rather large for a useless plot. Just compare it to the size of the yard that we had at that last place we lived: those complexes of townhomes shared one common ground, but each section or “house” (connected on either side to its neighboring units, which is why I usually call them apartments rather than houses — I think, to qualify for the label of house, you must at least control the bounds of your own physical body: no respectable octogenarian would ever marry a siamese sextuplet; uncut, I mean; for first you’d remove your lover from the conglomerate, like a pea from its pod: only then would you have the privacy requisite to consummate God’s holy sacrament; and, by the way, the first pair of conjoined twins to become internationally known were born in Siam, hence the name), I say, our old townhome complex, which was more than eighty years old, consisted of evenly spaced rows of shelters, each shelter having six contiguous units; and the backyard of each individual section or “house” was about the size of a walrus coffin. Contrast this with our current backyard, whose proportions rival the open grave of Prometheus. (Prometheus was about the size of Milton’s Satan, that is: roughly a trinity of sperm whales, encoffined sardine-wise.)

Now the whole reason that I mentioned the vastitude of our present backyard is that, yesternoon, after I noticed the man across the street mowing his lawn, I turned to look out of our house’s rear window; & lo: in the weedy expanse, there were two brown rabbits! one was grazing by the aft starboard maple tree, and the other by the forward port cedar. We got all the other trees removed from our yard last autumn. So each of these creatures had occupied its own zone of the wasteland. They seemed content.

But how does a human know if a rabbit is truly happy? The beasts might be lying to you; and it’s not even scientifically proven yet that telepathy is credible.

But I like having no pets and no children. There are still the strange creatures that roam freely past my window: I enjoy their presence, and watch them grow up and send them off to school; and it doesn’t cost me a dime. Who needs a bunch of farm animals when you can just sit at your own kitchen table and observe wild rabbits, squirrels, crows, and the occasional deer.

I’d like to raise chickens, tho. I’d like to be able to put on rubber waders (it’s my understanding that waders are like big boots that go up thigh-high… or even, ideally, all the way up to the chest or neck!!) and fling seed on the ground to feed them. But, you see, then I’d begin to worry about the local wildlife coming and stealing my poor chickens’ foodstuffs. That’s when events turn ugly: you end up installing barbed wire fencing around all the attractions, to keep out unwanted visitors. A beautiful transparent rosy nectar birdfeeder, wrapped round with barbed wire so that the squirrels can’t climb up and kiss it. Barbed wire around the flowerbed, to bar the rabbits from bliss.

I’d rather just leave my backyard a dull tawny patchy dreary quag, and smile on the company of all the unlovables: The devious crows, always up to no good. I welcome all the “bad hombres” of the forest to come inhabit our yard. It’s better than keeping a dog in a kennel. Or a baby in a crib. Or a horse in a stable. Anything that is corralled and cramped up — I’m bothered by that. I like to see free-roaming fowl...

The one exception is the turtle: It drives me nuts to see one trying to cross a busy highway. You’ve wandered too far, mister turtle: the trucks go fast here.

I wish that we would build turtle-bridges over every city street and intersection: then our slow-motion friends could creep safely to wherever they’re going, while we bipeds hasten in our vehicles to our important business meetings, without getting in each other’s way.

Where ARE the turtles trying to go, incidentally? Do they think that they will find harmony, over the horizon?

I’ve heard that at least certain types of turtle hatch from eggs that were laid in the sand long ago, so their parents are already dead when they enter the world; and they (the newborn turtles) just crawl instinctively in whatever direction seems right: they simply wing it; and that’s how they live their life. Eventually I suppose they find out how to impregnate each other (unless every turtle is a virgin birth, brought to us by Jehovah — or by the angel of Jehovah, if you don’t like the thot of Jehovah doing that type of manual labor himself), and then they fix on a random spot of the shoreline and commence their digging. All this is still on instinct, I presume. And their hands are like flippers — that’s how I’m imagining this scene. If you’ve ever yearned for nice, pliable fake leather gloves, because you think it’s hard to dig your own grave with mittens, then try being born with pickle-green flippers for hands.

Now you back down into the sand and begin to deposit the eggs from out of your body. How many eggs do you think you’ll have, this time? A million seems like too much. Let’s say twelve. And their shells are dark gray, like a stormy sky, and they have a leathery feel, like bean-bag chairs. (I don’t have a clue how accurate any of this science is — I’m just making it up as I go.) Then, still following our instinct, which is to say, just because it feels like the right thing to do, we use our rear flippers to push the sand back atop of our masterwork until it’s safely buried. Then we…

What shall we do now? I guess we head out into the ocean and die. Or maybe we turn 180 degrees and head towards the big city, to look for career opportunities. So of course the first truck that zooms past smashes us flat: now our shell is cracked.

At least we didn’t end up in the zoo.