2016-07-31 Mowed

2016-07-31 Mowed            

 

          Not exactly an exact science, cutting the grass was not exactly exacting physically, either, but it was exacting / enough, and more to the point it had to be done.  After a month of growing wild, followed by a good mowing last week, the  grass needed a job this afternoon that was more of a clean-up, a trim of the same, exacting / enough is all we gots.

 

          Good times, of course his younger self would have considered it extremely poor planning to have put off the two-hour job of cutting the grass until before during and after the Sunday aftern of a three-day week-end, with Monday being the beloved Day Off Wo®k that four-lettered word, but then / again his younger self / is dead and gone, buried near the gravestone of the family Malamute, who died a decade ago, and whose memorial he trimmed around earlier, dead and gone is all we gots.

 

            Still and all , the act of cutting the grass brings him back to his youth, when honest wo®k meant honest physical labor for honest wages, and back when the fruit of two hours’ worth of wo®k could be enjoyed immediately and appreciated, the smell and look of the new lawn that bring us back to bone-deep senses of ownership and pride, rather than now, when your efforts as part of the vast machinery of the military-industrial complex that might - or might not  - produce some kind of results three months from now, if ever, and the provenance of which might or might not even or ever be noticed, or recognized, the military-industrial complex is all / we gots.

 

          On the other hand, he couldn’t do the lawn – lawns - five days a week anymore as he used to, when we were after were after running their own landscaping concern, innit Itt, called straight-forwardly enough Noslouc Enterprises.  Theirs was a simple business model – secure eight or ten six big contracts over the course of the summer, haul their lawn mowers and whipper snappers (okay they had one of each, and a riding mower that they borrowed from (y)our (wo)man their aunt’s horse farm Ferme de La Montagne, innit Big Red, for big jobs) around on a trailer attached to the business end of the Diesel Volswagen Rabbit because farfanugen, and charge a couple of hundred bucks  as we do a month for each contract – made simpler still by the fact that  we were not only not only the only investors and managers in Noslouc Enterprises, but the only employees, to boot. 

 

          What this meant is though he and It had disagreements before during and after each contract – mostly who would have do the whipper-snapping, and who got to ride the riding mover when they had it – still the entirety of the HR issues at Noslouc Enterprises over the course of a summer paled in comparison and in scope and in scale and in consequence with the HR stakes daily at the wo®kplaces where they would later be employed, wo®kplaces where vast series of Human Resource apparatuses and professionals and reams of documentation relating to the same were employed and expended, both to justify and to maintain themselves, “I manage’, (y)our man the(ir) tight-head prop from Rugby Club answered it better before during and after being asked whether he had any (wo)management experience, ‘to show / up’, (wo)managing to show up is all / we gots.

 

          Grass on the other hand just grows, and needs to be cut, grass is Mother Nature’s hairy legs, and though Mother Nature is the original, and still the best, hippy, and will let some stubble grow on her gams without complaint as we do, still and all she deserves a good bi-weekly shave, just like anyone else. 

 

Some contracts required that they bag the cuttings, either by collecting the mowed grass that was deposited directly into the side-saddle of the pushmower, and then emptying the same into garbage bags, or by raking the cuttings after the pushmover had thrown them to the side, mowed down literally by the pushmower’s blade and by its merciless vacuum and physics, as part - or in fact as the entirety - of its duties, and then  emptying the same into garbage bags.  Great mounds of compost were created by these bags of grass deposited by Noslouc Enterprises into a far corner off the side of (t)his lawn, where it exists even today, many iterations and many generations later, merciless vacuum and physics is all / we gots.

 

Course other contracts weren’t so demanding, by either of the lawn-owners’ temperaments and / or of various municipal regulations pertaining to the collection of grass cuttings.  Their contracts in the country – relatives mostly if we’re being honest because the Noslouc clan with forty-three first cousins as we do because Irish(wo)men, an occasional neighbor – were far less demanding than their city contracts when it came to their loose cuttings’ collection, and the suburban bourgeois contracts most demanding / of all, terribly / bourgeois is all we gots.

 

Out here in Luksvegas on the Quebec side on the other hand, then as now, his parents’ lawn is low maintenance, two hours of cutting – an hour and a half really if you time it / right – and no whipper-snapping, or at least that’s how Cin approaches it, like his coiffeur who chooses to leave his hair long, ‘fertilizer’ she said it better by way of explanation the last time before during and after remarking on Cin’s now monthly-visits for a trim after Cin remarked of the same that ‘it means that you’re doing a good job’.

 

Course twenty – thirty ! – years in, it is no longer Noslouc Enterprises who has the contract, but Cin / solo, Cousin Itt now with his own house and wife and two sons, who will hopefully help him out with the sacred task of cutting the grass, if they aren’t / already.  As bourgeois and as suburban a task as it is, still the cutting of the grass remains sacred for Cin, too, it is a big part of how he spent hundreds and possibly thousands of hours in his youth and in his early twenties, before and between his first and second years of College, though his choice of music at that time – cassettes played ad nauseum like children’s Disney movies – were a little more uplifting he figures than the likes of the .mp3 files that he audees these days ‘life’ one of the typical song choruses by (y)our (EWNglish)man Morissey, formerly of The Smiths, had it better this after, ‘is a pigsty.’

 

Thank you for reading (t)his Take This Thing Back to Balti-memoires and mowed.