Against Lawnmowers

Welcome home!

This piece is intentionally given a slight misnomer to maintain grammatical continuity in my series against household items. Really, the concept of lawnmowing in general, rather than its proper item, is the subject of my irk.

Now, in the traditional norm of familial estates, where homes were not stacked atop each other but spaced out for agricultural efficiency, this practice is acceptable immediately surrounding the home. But take a short spin through midland suburbia, and you will observe houses jutting from the ground in perfect reiteration like computerized digits, each exhibiting a pink, heaving, abyssal demeanor, on the brink of vomiting out a black sludge of death. The only protective shield from this horrid spectacle, like epiglottal hairs in the respiratory tract, is the shrubbery of grass on the front lawn, perhaps the only signal that God’s mercy persists amidst the clawing depths of Hades. Lawnmowing (impractical and impossible before the Industrial Revolution) comes along to snuff the final ember of life: this completely non-functional task transforms our quarter-acre lot into a Mark Rothko square, proudly pronounces the eulogy of nature and the plasticity of all reality, and continually tramples down the earth’s erupting vivacity in preference of a sterilized vacancy, a nothingness that is clean in its eternal emptiness. Even primitive, tribalistic peoples are stereotyped to imbue the world with pistons and pockets of electrifying animation; we are further from civility than they, forever whirling the Horns of Satan to slash down green fingers that point desperately to heaven, and, whenever a bit of flora or fauna shine through with their beautiful promise, opting to stuff all of it up our bottomless assholes in frantic hopes that our neighbours won’t notice.

Deliver us from evil O Lord.