I just finished mowing my lawn with my John Deere lawn tractor: V-twin with a hydrostatic transmission, and chains and a plow for clearing the driveway in the winter. It is a sweet ride, I rode around with the mower blades off and let my little girl steer, she was grinning from ear to ear. I feel fortunate to be at a place in life where I can spend thousands on equipment, and have enough grass to provide what looks like a private park for my children to play in. I’ve taken pride in my lawn since I was a kid in Florida. You don’t need fertilizer or sprinklers there, it grows more than you want. Where I’m at now is semi-arid, so I’m partially xeriscaped, and spent a hard several days installing an efficient watering system. I don’t keep my yard up because the HOA says so (screw those people), I do it because I take pride in it, and take care of the things I own.
But then I read this article. I like reading about grass, and thought it would be good. But it isn’t. It reads like an essay from some college kid who thinks he just figured out what is wrong with the world. Fine, lawns waste water, and have toxic runoff. But when I read things like, a fiefdom for the common man who might be a schmuck at work but, astride his John Deere riding mower, is master of all he surveys, all I can say is fuck you Mark Dery. You are a nihilist asshole who can’t make a point without being insulting. Does writing pieces like this make you feel all superior to the intellectual inferiors that don’t share your awesome sense of enlightenment? Wait, did you hear that? The people in the apartment upstairs flushed their toilet again.
