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.

Scout's Honor

So, maybe you remember that we're gardening.

Well, a little while ago, in the process of watering said garden, Mrs. Apron broke our hose, right off the spigot of our house. I know, something in/on our house broke and I wasn't responsible? Believe me, I was as shocked as you.

In order that we may attempt to perpetuate photosynthesis in our little patch of earth, we went to the local hardware store to purchase a hose. Mrs. Apron decided that the hose must be kink-resistant. After I chided her for being anti-Semitic, I decided that the hose must have a trigger-like attachment with multiple flow settings, like the shower-heads preferred by 9 out of 10 masturbators. My wife agreed to my decision, and I to hers. See, every relationship and everything in a relationship has its non-negotiables.

The hose-head attachment that we purchased has eight different flow patterns, ranging from Soak to Stream to Shower, Spray, Mist and Flat. And others. Two others, to be precise.

Anyway, when we put the new hose in and attached the trigger thing, we were so excited that not only did we water the garden, but we washed both of our cars in the driveway, like real suburban grown up adult type people.

As happens every time I wash my car by hand, it rained the next day. Not only that, but, in a matter of just a couple days, the roof of my car was absolutely littered with a delectable helping of bird shit.

Fortunately, none in my eye.

This weekend, my wife and I "vacationed" with my family at the New Jersey shore. We went in my car, because it's a compromise-- the Fit gets better gas mileage, the Volvo has better seats. This time, better seats were the non-negotiable. Yesterday, coming back to the beach house from a bizarre, only-in-my-family errand, I spotted a familiar sight: that of young, scantily-clad girls washing cars. In the parking lot of the local Elk's Lodge. This frequently happens in my neighborhood, at a Sunoco station. Usually it's to benefit a cheerleading squad, or a softball team. It's always cheap, and that's supposed to be funny.

I never stop, because, well, you know. How can I participate in the sexualization of young women by permitting them to slather my car full of soap while they're wearing little shorts and sweating and such? It's, you know, weird. Maybe this is just me overthinking things the way I am known to do, or maybe everyone else is thinking it too, and they just do it anyway. Maybe the middle-aged housewives do it because they remember doing it when they were young, too. Maybe the middle-aged men do it because they have raging hardons for young chicks. Maybe some people actually do it because $5.00 is a good price for a car-wash.

On Sunday, I drove into the parking lot. Because my roof is absolutely covered in birdshit, I told myself. Because I have to get over feeling guilty and perverted about everything. Because sometimes a car wash is just a car wash.

Besides, it's the Girl Scouts. What could be more wholesome than that?

A bronzed, sixteen-or-so-year-old blonde girl in a lilac-colored bikini bottom and dark purple tank-top bounded over to my car window. I handed over my five dollars, and I felt like the most disgusting human being on the face of the earth. It was around 700 degrees out, so I stayed in the car. I stared straight ahead while the car got, you know, washed. It only got weird when a girl in a white tank top leaned over the hood to scrub it. I stared at the headliner of my car and noticed how it contained tightly interwoven strands of fabric, as opposed to cheaper cars whose headliners are just a solid piece of fabric or, worse, vinyl.

Really, the more I think about it, the less I blame myself. I kind of blame the Girl Scouts. And the basketball teams. And the cheerleading squads. Whose idea was it to send teenage girls out into hot parking lots with buckets of soapy water in barely any clothes to go wash cars for money? Haven't these fucking people ever heard of bake sales? I would be happier if they sold flowers in the airport like the Hari Krishna whackjobs used to do in the 1970s. I know the Boyscouts are trying to turn America's male teenagers into duty-loving homophobes, so I suppose it should come as no surprise that the Girlscouts are trying to turn America's teenage girls into soapy sex symbols.

When I got back to my the beach house, my wife and sister were playing with my nephew on a sheet on the floor. Guilt weighed heavily on my conscience so I told my whole family where I had been and what I had been doing there, in case a neighbor came by to report me.

"The Boy Scouts washed your car?" my father asked after I had finished my Strindbergian monologue.

"No," I said, "Girl. The goddamned Girl Scouts washed my fucking car."

"Oh, okay," he said, skimming through text messages on his phone. I shook my head and guiltily schlumped into the sofa.

"What color sashes were they wearing?" asked my mother.

"Sashes?!" I exclaimed, "you think they were out there washing cars in their fucking uniforms?! They were dressed like pin-up models." I closed my eyes and put my head back into the cushion, hoping it would suffocate me.

"It's okay, honey," my wife said, "you just got sold sex for $5.00."

"But the car is really clean," I replied.

"I'm sure it is," said my sister, smiling, "did they rub their little tussies all over it?"

Can I Get You to Read a Post About Dog Shit?

Typically, I'm not terribly into setting challenges for myself.

Sometimes, however, I get kind of into it. The excitement, the thrill, the dipping of the toe into the pool of the unknown, the uncertain outcome-- will I succeed? Will I bellyflop onto the murky pool of life wearing a pair of "BUDWEISER" swimtrunks?

Gee, I don't know. But it'll be fun finding out.

Since my wife and I adopted Molly, our lives have increasingly revolved around dog shit. Finley, being an elder statesman of sorts, is predictable and reliable and knows that vacating the contents of his bowels occurs outside. Molly, being an impish puppy, hasn't really grasped that point yet. Oftentimes, when I enter a room she has been in unsupervised for any length of time greater than two minutes, my eyes furtively scan the floor for mini-muffins or the rug for scat streaks. We have a stalwart supply of rug cleaners/pet stain remover products under our kitchen sink, and it is with these tools that we do battle with our 24-pound puppy who is slowly but surely making me obsessed with shit, in much the same way that a 15-year-old boy is obsessed with the red-head down the street, his own penis, and becoming a meteorologist.

In case you've never lived in suburbia before, I would like to warn you that, if you ever do decide to make the great white move, you will become gradually or instantly obsessed with dog shit, depending on your level of consciousness. Also depending, of course, on whether or not you own a dog. If you don't own a dog, trust me, you will still become obsessed with dog shit-- it will just be the dog shit emanating from the bungholes of other people's dogs. My suburban guilt meter is positively off-the-charts, such that as soon as either of my dogs' rear legs start to bend, I am swooping down with the plastic bag, beginning to catch shit before it even hits the grass.

Yes, I have been known to catch dog shit in the space between my dog's asshole and the ground. Mid-air. The space between. Take that, Dave Matthews. Defying gravity. Take that, Elphaba.

Of course, I feel my diligence slipping now that I have two dogs. When walking them together, I'm not able to be as agile, as coordinated, as graceful. I love when they cross paths and lace me up like a fucking Victorian corset with their leashes. That's classic. If the shit-filled plastic bag gets squeezed in between leashes, it's even better. If the bag rips: instant classic. Just bust out those cameraphones and say "YouTube!"

My wife and I try not to be brand-whores when going to the market. For instance, we're pretty diverse when buying "chocolate sandwich cookies." We won't really eat Oreos, because they have gross things in them (seriously, check it out. Like, octopus bits and shit), and our favorites are Newman O's, but we'll buy Tuxedo cookies or even the store brand if we're really hard up. Even if the creme in the middle is sickly-sweet or if the cookie part is a little chalky, we get through it. We care even less when it comes to dog food. And, really: why should we? Molly eats wristwatch bands and her own shit, and Finley prefers soymilk and broccoli, so why should we sweat Purina vs Science Diet? We don't notice any difference in the shininess of our dogs' coats, the sweetness or foulness of their breath, the vavaciousness of their jump, the decibel of their bark or the springiness of their step no matter what we feed them.

Maybe that just makes us assholes. I don't know.

My wife recently bought a bag of "Kibbles & Bits." I have finally noticed a change in our dogs. The name of this particular dog food should be called "Kibbles & Mountains." The sheer amount of fecal matter that this food produces in our dogs is nothing short of elephantine. I am thinking of obtaining a Class D license so that I can follow our dogs while driving a front-end loader. As if the quantity increase wasn't bad enough, it has also tinted their shit seafoam green. Which is just wrong.

Thank you, my loves, for reading a post about dog shit. I don't know for whom this speaks the worse: you or I.

Tales of Suburbia: Leaves Me Alone

One day, my neighbors will probably call the police on me. It's pretty much inevitable.

First of all, our houses are all really superfrickingclose together, so chances are pretty good that my abberant behavior will not forever go unnoticed, even when inside my heavily mortgaged walls.

I play obscure Gilbert & Sullivan operettas on the phonograph (and not the normal ones, like "The Mikado" and "H.M.S. Pinafore"-- I'm talking about the ones only the hardcore buck-toothed gits know, like "Utopia, Ltd," "Ruddigore," or, if I'm in a really oddball mood, "The Grand Duke"). Not only do I play these on a phonograph, I do so loudly. And I always sing along, too. And I do so loudly.

Sometimes, when I'm in a playful mood, I can be seen (well, hopefully not seen) leaping about in various stages of undress, prancing around like a lemur, screeching in a high-pitched tone, eyes bugged, for no real reason other than boredom. Sometimes I just sit around at the computer and shout profanities when blog material doesn't come to me effortlessly.

It seems to help.

While my neighbors may think I have a personality disorder, or Tourrettes Syndrome, or a closed head injury, they don't bother me much-- and maybe it's because of that. This morning, I was out front raking leaves and laughing my ass off. My dog, who I routinely tie to the iron bannister while I'm outside, watched me demurely as I scooped up huge armfuls of wet leaves and dumped them into the bag, only to see about 75% of the leaves fall to the pavement again as the bag crumpled and shifted under their weight.

"AAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!" I roared in hysterics. "Is this what my life has become!? Jesus fucking Christ!" I screamed to the clouds above.

I have no doubt that somebody would have called the police, if the rest of the residents on my block-long street hadn't been at work or AA meetings. I mean, I admit it, I'm strange-looking. Thanks to the show I'm in, the oddity that is me is only now compounded by a walrus-moustache and side-burns that would only look appropriate on a steampunk artist or Civil War colonel. And there I am, laughing, in corduroy pants, a dress shirt and sweatervest as I ineptly rake leaves. While my dog's tied to the steps, watching me, thinking, "No, that's not my Daddy."

I wonder which neighbor's going to narc on me. It'll probably be Kathy who lives next door. I can tell she doesn't like me. She thinks I'm queer, in every sense of the word. I know it. And that's okay. I think she's a passive-aggressive bitch. While I was conversing with her the other day, she clipped an overgrowth of hedge right in front of me, while we were talking. My hedge. As if to say, "You are too irresponsible to do this yourself. Faggot. Shall I come over and dust and Febreze and maybe wipe your faggot ass for you, too?"

At first I thought she was nice, and helpful. Pointing out poison ivy that was growing in our yard, and giving us a bottle of poison ivy killer to get rid of it. Then she started to get manipulative, and condescending. I mentioned to her that we were having some stumps removed from our flower bed.

"Oh, good," she remarked, "then you can finally do something in there."

Really? Maybe I'll come over late one night with no pants on and do something in your flowerbed, honey.

I guess then she'd definitely be the one to call the police on me.

I'm not altogether thrilled with the people on my street. Sorry, Mr. Rogers, but it's just not working out. The Asian family never says "hi." Ever. I even rang their bell one night to let them know that they'd left the lights on in their CR-V. All the woman said was,

"Oh no! Hurry hurry! I fix! Oh no, no, no!"

You might remember the guy in the black Passat wagon. He yells at his kids and his dog. A lot. One day, I hope I don't have to call the police on that angry, bald humptyfuck.

I don't like the self-described "part-time accountant, part-time comedian" because he's very nosey, and, one day, I saw him standing on the corner dressed in some sort of full-bodied, furry mascot costume. And, when you're sixty years old, that warrants a call to the police, just by itself.

I do like the elderly gay man who wears glasses with plum-hued lenses, tweed sports jackets and cologne. When he talks, his turkey neck flaps around wildly and his capped teeth gleam in the sun. He's married with four grown children, and he's gayer than Oscar Wilde's neckerchief collection. Unfortunately, I don't interact with him much. He doesn't rake his own leaves.

Life in suburbia has its challenges, and I think, the more I live her, the greatest challenge I'm going to face is making it without getting the cops called on me. In the city, you can deal drugs to children, keep sex slaves in your basement and stockpile enough ammunition to put North Korea's arsenal to shame and nobody would ever even think to dime on you.

But, in the suburbs, you've got to watch your ass.

The Guilt of Suburbia

It only takes one.

One neighbor. One lawn-mower. One weed-whacker. One whiff of freshly-clipped grass.'

It only takes one.

Instantly, upon hearing a lawnmower roar to life two doors down, I am instantly filled with the guilt of suburbia.

It's a well-documented fact that, as soon as one asshole starts buzzing his hedges, seven other homeowners will gradually trickle out of their houses and sheepishly grab their clippers or their buzzers or their trimmers and silently, diligently go to work.

Today, I learned that I am no different.

Our street is one block long and it is populated by twin homes built around 1928. Our house is connected to another and the houses themselves are cuddle-up-close to each other, so, when one neighbor fires up the Toro, well, you just can't sit back and pretend it isn't happening. Because it is. The 60-year-old widow next door with her hairsprayed pompadour is sweating behind her John Deere and, brother, so should you.

Hell, you should be mowing her lawn for her, let alone your own.

Our hedges were severely out-of-whack and I had ignored them for three weeks or so, since the last time my wife clipped them. We pointedly refuse to purchase an electric hedge trimmer, because we enjoy the intimacy of getting lip-to-leaf with our hedges. Plus, really, our property is so small that, seriously, it's not that much work. That said, though, to clip the hedges with our manual clippers and to do it well, it takes around an hour. To do a shitty job, with the left side obviously higher than the right, it only takes around forty minutes. That's what I did today.

If you didn't know me better, you'd think I'd been drinking or inhaling ReddiWip.

I would love to bravely exclaim that I am immune from the guilt of suburbia but, obviously, I am not. I cannot stand knowing that there are others out there spending countless hours tending and mending while our flora casts a pall over the street. I watch these middle-aged and elderly people breaking their backs over weeds and and lawns and gardens and I feel responsible, not just to my home and my pride, but to theirs as well. I love to shop myself around as a don't-give-a-fuck guy, but I'm not. I do give a fuck.

I can't help it.

I don't give a fuck, though, about my hedges. I could let them grow until they're thirty-six feet high-- wouldn't bother me a bit. In fact, I'd probably prefer it that way. I don't like people looking at me, so a shroud of shrubbery would suit me just fine. But they'd still look at me, even with a thirty-six foot high shrub. They'd look through the fronds at me. The heat of their glowers and their glares would penetrate the leaves and twigs.

I know it.

See, the people who lived in this house for sixty-three years before us kept house very well for a very long time. They are mythologized by the neighbors who remember them in their heyday, through the rose-colored Victorian glass of sentimental memory. The neighbors recall the former residents of our home fondly, they recall a sweet couple who kept their garden and the gentleman who trimmed his hedges constantly and measured his work with a yardstick. Our next-door neighbor recalls them with a misty-eyed fondness that I cannot help but receive with jealousy and scorn because only my wife and I know the modern, unkind truth about the former occupants of our home-- deed transfers up the wazoo, second and third and fourth mortgages on the house, reverse mortgages, unpaid mortgage payments, unpaid school and real estate taxes, even unpaid sewer rental fees, summonses from lawyers, creditors, banks-- and the inside, left to rot in a detritus of old lady wallpaper, a hopelessly outdated kitchen with a fucked up oven, broken two-by-fours, roofing shingles left on the backyard lawn for half-a-years, all held together by strapping tape... on... everything.

And still, I am motivated to get out there and keep house, not just by the sounds of my neighbors lawnmowers, but by the undead spirits of the former owners of this house, whose tenure here ended in a personal shame that could not overshadow the great glory they had built for themselves amongst the diehards. I know that, no matter how hard I try, no matter how I may slice up my hand while tearing stumps out of the ground, no matter how straight I try to cut my hedges, no matter how much I water the pachysandra or keep clean the front porch that nobody will ever remember me when I'm gone with wistful and melancholy compliments of my yardwork, for a green thumb have I not.

And nobody sings your praises for paying your mortgage on time.