Buzz-Cut

I can have an ethical dilemma, even about hedges.

During our honeymoon in Bali, ethical dilemmas confronted us everywhere we went. In the artsy city of Ubud, it was the ethical dilemma about whether or not we ought to haggle on the street with a vendor with three teeth and five children to get an $11 painting down to $6.

In beach-front Lovina, it was the ethical dilemma of whether or not we should participate in the environmentally unfriendly, exploitative tourist-trap of going out into the Pacific Ocean in a tiny little boat, racing a bunch of other tiny little boats crammed with a bunch of sweaty Australians for the chance of seeing a few dolphins.

Back in Ubud, it was the ethical dilemma of whether or not to spend time at a dog shelter, playing with dogs we knew we would never even be permitted to adopt, even if we were crazy enough to do so. I fell in love with a dog named Bruno, and I donated $25.00, and bought a bumper sticker that said, "I <3 Bali Dogs" that my Focus wore proudly until the red heart faded to pink, and we traded the car in for my wife's Fit.

"Look," I would say to my wife as we fought ass-crack sweat tramping down unfamiliar streets, trying not to get hit by mopeds or eaten by feral dogs, "I just want to have a good time-- I don't want to have an ethical dilemma about everything."

An every-now-and-then ethical dilemma can, of course, be a good thing. It means we're not sociopaths, and that's kind of a good thing not to be. Too much of that horseshit, though, can be mentally and physically draining, as we found out many miles away in Indonesia.

Which brings me back to Pennsylvania, and our hedges.

We bought our house February of 2009. Our house is a charming little twin, built in 1928-- good bones. It has no lawn to speak of, certainly none that requires mowing-- it's all pachysandra. There are, however, hedges that ring the edge of our property, and run all the way down the side of our house, separating it from the neighbor's abode, and these hedges do require some suburbanite upkeep.

Otherwise, neighbors look at you. They keep the tsk-tsk'ing quiet, but their looks are loud.

Since we moved in, I have been tending to our hedges with a pair of manual hedge-clippers. You know the type-- they look like gigantic scissors. In 2009, these fuckers worked like the dickens. Nice and sharp, they sliced through those leaves and little twigs like a champ. Last year, I noticed that they had definitely lost some of their vim and vigor-- or I had. Really, though, I blame the hedge-clippers. Their blades were dull, the nut-and-bolt that held them together was loose and tenuous. Sure, I could have taken them to some hardware store and had them sharpened, probably for half the cost of what I paid for them in the first place, but I didn't think that was very smart. So, like a smart person, I persisted in trimming my hedges throughout the summer of 2010 with dull, fucked up hedge-clippers.

This late spring and summer, which has been unusually hot and unusually rainy, I have trimmed the hedges three times already. And, from the first snip, I knew the manual hedge-clippers days were numbered. On Sunday, I noticed that our hedges, after being trimmed last weekend, were sprouting bizarre, wayard leaf-arms, extending from the even base.

"Listen," I said to my wife, "I can't do it anymore. I'm going to ask my father if I can borrow his fucking electric hedge-trimmer."

Because, really? I didn't want to have an ethical dilemma about it anymore.

Sure, I'm still relatively young and (don't snigger) strong-- and, really, I should be able to take care of our hedges with a set of manual hedge-clippers. But, in temperatures that routinely hover at around 90, with humidity constantly over 80% and little gnats landing in your ears and sweat stinging your eyes-- why the fuck should I? Because an electric trimmer wastes electricity? Because it adds to the already increasingly nascent amount of noise pollution that is plaguing our neighborhood?

Look, whether I use the electric trimmer or not-- this one's still power-washing her deck with a gasoline-based machine, this one's using a power-mower, this one's buzzing her grass with a weed-whacker. There are rotating blades and little engines all over the fucking place. And, if one more is going to help me get the hedges done in half-an-hour instead of an hour-and-a-half so that I can spend more time doing something I actually give half-a-turd about: I'm all for it.

My father dropped off the electric trimmer Sunday afternoon.

"Here you go, Mummy," he said, handing it over to me like it was a golden calf, "and here is the power wire (see: extension cord) it's 100 feet."

"Thanks," I said.

"Now, Mummy-- you have used it before?" he asked, his brow furrowed in anticipatory concern.

Desperate to be spared of a lengthy tutorial in his loud and dubious version of English I lied and said, "Oh, yeah-- a couple times."

"Okay, good-- but listen, this is a trick I learned from Dr. Porter-- always, always run the cord through your belt loop, that way it is impossible for you to slice the cord with the blade."

Oh, Dr. Porter. Our next-door neighbor when we were growing up. An ancient, five-foot-tall troll-like humanoid with thick, black glasses, a nose that looked like the hood of a Volkswagen, and suspenders that hiked up his trousers to his nipple-line. He used to refer to my mother (to her face) as "The Bod" and, in casual conversation, he would routinely ask neighborhood kids if they were "getting any." He was a thoroughly ridiculous individual, but, nevertheless I heeded his safety warning. After all, how could you ignore a self-preservation tip from a man who fell off an eight-foot ladder into a honeysuckle bush below while trying to get a raccoon out of a tree with a broomstick?

No ethical dilemmas for that sonofabitch.

My Stinky Room

I now know why people move to East Moofongong, New Hampshire in a cabin with no television set, no furniture, no place to shit...

...and no neighbors.

Yesterday morning, at 6:55am in the pouring, cold rain, I was screamed at by an overweight, blonde woman who was wearing black stretchpants and some kind of small trash bag on her head. I had my two dogs with me, and, in my right hand I was clutching a bag full of their combined feces.

"HEY, (my name)!"

I was standing across the street from her, wearing one of those Gilligan bucket hats-- so I didn't look so chill myself, I don't mind admitting.

"Yes?" I said.

"HAVE YOU BEEN HERE LONG?!" she shouted across the street at me. High school kids were waiting for the bus at the corner in a cluster, and one or two turned to watch us. Great, I thought, an audience. Or maybe, actually, witnesses.

I didn't know what she meant by "Have you been here long?" Did she mean "in this neighborhood?" Because, no, it hasn't been too terribly long-- we moved here last February. If she meant "in this town" then, yeah, I've lived in this town my whole life. But her tone didn't seem to jive with some innocuous casual inquiry about my life's story. I didn't really want more information, but I felt that I needed more information to accurately answer her question.

"What?" I asked. Good, Apron. Prompting and probing questions-- just like you learned in grad school. Very good.

My neighbor freaked, gesticulating wildly to the general area surrounding her house.

"HAVE YOU BEEN OVER HERE!? HAVE YOU BEEN HERE IN MY STINKY VIOLETS?!"

I froze in place. This conversation had officially descended somewhere unfamiliar to me, and unsettling. I'm no horticulturalist, and I don't know what Stinky Violets are. I know what Stinking Bishop is-- it's a kind of cheese referenced in "Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit." But Stinky Violets? Wouldn't know them if I snorted them.

Which I didn't.

Not knowing how to respond to this question/tirade, I just stood there, looking at her. Her trash bag headpiece was starting to fly off in the wind.

"HAVE YOU BEEN IN MY STINKY-ROOM?!" she roared, pratically apopleptic.

Uh-oh. I was no longer sure that this wasn't a nightmare. I suddenly wished that I was a teenage girl, outfitted with a minican of mace and/or a rape-whistle.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," I replied calmly.

"NO?! YOU DON'T?!"

"No. I don't."

All of the kids at the bus stop were now looking at us, probably placing bets. She cocked her head and stared at me for a moment before shouting,

"WELL THEN GOD BLESS YOU! GOD BLESS YOU, FOR YOU ARE MY SON!"

I stared at her, my mouth agape.

"SEE YA LATER!" she yelled, and walked back into her house where, I can only presume, all of the walls are covered in feces, shaving cream, and egg-yolks.

Walking back into the house I unhooked the dogs and announced, "Well, we can add one more house to the list of places/people/things/animals I need to avoid on our morning walk."

When I leave my house in the morning to walk our two dogs, I have to immediately duck with them into the back of the house to avoid a potentially volatile confrontation with the guy who owns the muzzled black dog and the cairn terrier who is, without a doubt, on crystal meth. This little dog, this Toto, this crazy fucking fuckhead could eviscerate a German Shepherd in a matter of seconds if the two were left in a room alone together. His snarling, wretching, growling, gnashing can be heard from streets away. And he hates my dogs. Maybe he hates anything and everything that isn't his meth dealer. Maybe, though, it isn't meth. Maybe he's into steroids. Maybe he's got the Roid Rage. Whatever it is, I avoid him, his foaming, muzzled, black compatriot, and the asshole owner who still insists on walking past my house at precisely the same time I have to leave in the morning before Molly steam-pisses our rugs.

Walking down our back-alley is also something I try to avoid, because the mixture of feral alley-cats, squirrels dive-bombing into trash-cans and obsessive-compulsive birds beaking themselves to death on trees and poles is enough to drive poor Molly, a mere 9 months old into an absolute distracted panic. A fluttering leaf falling from a tree is enough to transfix her and make her forget why we are outside in the first place: pissnshittime.

If I walk past Cliff's house, it's invariably when he's leaving for work, and this often results in a fifteen minute conversation, during which I fantasize about removing both of my eyeballs with my bare hands and inserting them into Cliff's mouth to get him to shut the fuck up. Cliff's a jovial, no worries kind of guy, and that type of person drives me nuts. When I talk to Cliff, I think, "Isn't he going to be late to work?" and, if he is, what excuse does he proffer to his employer?

"Oh, sorry I'm late Mr. Stuffnstuff, I just had to talk my neighbor's balls off about the dogwood tree on my front lawn. Won't happen again."

"At this rate," I said to my wife in the kitchen, "I'll have to walk the dogs on the fucking roof."

Of course, it's leaking, so that's probably not such a hot idea. And, besides: what would the neighbors say?

Maybe It's Yours

The knock on our door was one of those ones that instantly scares the shit out of you, even if you aren't one of those people who automatically assumes tragedy or violence is about to occur at the sound of every telephone ring, bump in the night, or doorstep visitor.

It was a pounding, in rapid succession, a closed, large fist, rapping five times on our front door, on a Sunday afternoon following a 2-foot snowfall. My wife and I were upstairs reading, she a piece of F.F.F. (Fucking Female Fiction) and me my mammoth John Irving book. At the sound of the dramatic knocking, she and I both instantly jerked our heads up from our respective literary lands, far different from the others, and looked at each other in real fear.

"Who is that?" she asked me, I suppose rhetorically. How the fuck should I know who it is?

"How the fuck should I know who it is?" I answered, though in question, also rhetorically.

"Maybe it's Girl Scouts?" she suggested half-heartedly as I shakily inserted my book-mark in between pages 421 and 422. Prostitutes in Amsterdam were having sex and there was cum and metaphors everywhere.

"Bullshit," I said, closing the book, "Girl Scouts don't knock like that. Not unless they're Russian Girl Scouts and you owe them money."

I got up from my chair and walked down the stairs in my slipper socks with more than moderate trepidation thinking, "I'm about to be shot dead. In slipper socks."

The trouble with our front door is that there is really no way to see who is on the other side until you are close enough to it that the person on the other side can see you. My wife learned this lesson just last week when I went out to pick up Chinese and arrived home to find my wife, in her pajamas and slipper-socks talking to a clean water activist wearing green cargo pants and carrying a petition form on a clipboard. My wife, of course, is too short to see who is on the other side of the glass, the result of which is that my wife now supports Clean Water Action and we have now been demarcated on the Clean Water Action spreadsheet with an asterisk meaning "sucker."

Yooo-hooo!

This is a very ineffective design. There's a peep-hole, but it's been painted over, so you have to resort to sticking your face up against the semi-transluscent curtains that cover the glass panes in the door and, of course, if you can see the person on the other side, they can see you. And make you put your name down on petitions. And shoot you through the glass.

Every time my doorbell rings, or somebody knocks on the door-- especially like that-- I am convinced that I am but moments away from a most disagreeable death. People do not "drop in" on us, the way nobody "drops in" on my parents. Visits must not only be announced, but heavily scheduled. My mother keeps the burglar alarm on not only when she is away, and when she is asleep, but when she is simply inside the house, alone, during the day, say, during her lunch hour. While she sits at the kitchen table, drinking her half-glass of V-8 and eating lean, thin-cut turkey slices out of the wax paper, she can watch her "stories" knowing that she is protected by the ADT community/force-field.

If we had an alarm, I'd do the same thing.

But we don't, and so the only force-field protecting my wife, my dog and little old me is the force-field that emanates from my own vast supply of paranoia. Once, when I was fourteen years old and home sick from school, I was sipping orange juice on the couch and noticed, through the window, a man with a ponytail lurking around in our bushes outside. I leapt up, ran to the kitchen, and dialed the police (an unwieldy seven-digit number back in those days). Within three minutes, four police cars came racing down, lights ablaze from all different directions, converging on my parents' lawn. Officers jumped out and one tackled the suspect-- who turned out to be the new meter-reader, hacking his way through our bushes because he didn't know where our meter was. At least I'm slightly more sane than my oldest sister who, when she was home alone in the early 1970s, called the police on the vacuum cleaner.

I thought fleetingly about that as I turned the doorknob of our door, with its painted over peep-hole. I thought about lying in a pool of blood on our doormat, sprawled out there for the police and medics to see, that they would be joking around with each other, waiting for the coroner, making fun of my slipper-socks. Fuck them, I thought, as I opened the door.

It wasn't a burglar or a hired assassin or a meter-reader or even a Russian Girl-Scout, angrily clutching a tire-iron in her hairy, veiny fist. It was the old guy from across the street, who, two hours earlier, had come out of his house, in true suburban fashion, guilted into cleaning out his own car because we were cleaning the massive amounts of snow off ours. Even though I had just seen him two hours ago, I blinked several times upon looking at him, because, when I opened the door he said nothing to me, and it took me a moment to realize who he was. As is the case with all of my neighbors, we don't talk much.

"Look-a-that!" he finally said to me, stepping back and to the side so I could behold... what was it exactly I was beholding again?

"What?" I asked.

"Look! Look at how I cleaned my car!" he exclaimed, beaming.

I looked. His car was indeed clear of snow, just as ours was. But it was his wife's car. The car that he had originally started cleaning when we were outside wasn't there anymore.

"That's the wife's car, see, I already cleaned off my car-- it's in the back alley-- moved it, ya see."

I saw.

"I see," I said.

"Beeyooteeful job, yeah?" he asked, rhetorically, I presume. Both Italian and Jewish old people from this area say "beeyooteeful." I don't know why. This guy's Italian.

"My son-in-law-- well, my future son in law, he lives way out, waaay out, see-- he gave me this. Best thing in the world for clearing snow offa cars. Here, look!" he said, giving me no alternative as he shoved this weird orange thing on a stick two inches away from my face.

"That's very nice!" I said with my best mock-enthusiasm.

"Touch it," he bade me. "Go on, touch it!"

Even though this was getting weird, I obeyed and ran my fingers along the orange rectangle. It was foamy to the touch.

"Yeah? Yeah?!" he said, his eyes getting wide and his eyebrows going up and down. "You like that? I get another one, maybe it's yours."

Hmm. "Maybe it's yours," I thought to myself. Gee, thanks. Maybe.

"You gotta name, fella?" he asked me. No, I wanted to say, they call me "The Situation." I told him my name. He told me his. It was something Italian. And then he turned around and walked back to his house. I shut the door, double-locked it, and walked upstairs, thoroughly bewildered.

"Who the hell was that?" my wife asked.

"The guy from across the street, who was cleaning off his car with us."

"What did he want."

I thought about that.

"I guess he wanted to brag," I replied. "Maybe."

Innocent Until Proven Jewish

As we attempted to dig my wife's Honda Fit out from 18 inches of snow on Sunday, our neighbor, Thomas, was just arriving, sailing his Chevy Trailblazer into his pristinely-trailblazered parking spot. He exited the car with a couple of white plastic bags and made some genial, unhelpful comments about shoveling and snow and winter in general.

"How was your holiday?" he asked.

And I answered, "Fine. Thanks. It was quiet, which is just how we like it." As opposed, I guess, to a particularly loud Hanukkah, though I don't exactly know what that would sound like-- a load of tanked-up, kinky-haired frat boys shouting the dreidel song in a slurry, discordant cacophany while pounding Manichewitz wine out of red plastic cups and peeing in our bushes.

I turned away from Thomas and drove my shovel deep into the snow, sending, I hoped, the unmistakable signal that I was finished talking to him, and done being P.J.

Presumed Jewish.

Though I don't want to be perceived as a whiny Jew, being a minority isn't easy. As I looked at the Asian guy waddling down our alley, offering to share his bag of Halite with anybody who needed it, I thought, would Thomas approach him and say, "Hey, did you enjoy yourself some Chop Suey last night?" Why is it that some people think it's okay to make assumptions about a person's religious affiliation?

And, by that same token-- why does it bother me so much?

I know I've blogged about this before-- I'm too lazy to sift through the archives to be absolutely sure, though (if you want to, go right ahead) and I don't really know what it is about the fact that people who don't know me just assume that I'm Jewish. It's not as if I'm particularly ashamed of being Jewish. I'm much more ashamed of the fact that I have toenail fungus and that, when I was in middle school I used to get hard looking at the models in the Wintersilks catalogue.

I guess it's just the presumptuous, ballsy attitude one takes when making assumptions about someone else that pisses me off. I would never wish someone a Happy Ripened Ovary Day unless I was sure they were ardent tomato worshippers.

Even if you're right-- don't assume. Because it's embarrassing if you're wrong, and it's offensive if you're right. Or wrong.

A few days ago, there was a thread on http://www.20sb.net/ that asked the question, "Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays--Which Do You Say?" Well, I don't see really how you can in good faith go up to somebody you really don't know and wish them a "Merry Christmas" or a "Happy Hanukkah" for that matter, if you don't know that's what they celebrate-- that this is their faith. How are you acting in any sort of benevolent holiday spirit by making a judgment about someone else's beliefs? Maybe if they're wearing a green and red goddamn snowflake sweater with Blitzen's ass on the back and a red flickering light where his hemmhroids are, and they've got a crucifix around their neck the size of a windshield wiper and Jesus Air sneakers, fine, maybe you're safe wishing that person a "Merry Christmas." But, you know what-- maybe they just have eccentric taste in clothing and personal adornment items.

This holiday season-- play it safe. Wear a condom. And sunscreen. And shoulder pads. And don't make assumptions.