Neanderpundit

the backyard, all summer long. It has not been pretty. It is a veritable jungle now. And as the weather breaks it is my intention to get to it, and make the mess go away. It has been far too hot to be concerned, but the moment of reckoning will soon be at hand.

To that end, I will be on a very steep slope, running a chainsaw on a remarkably regular basis. I would like very much not to chainsaw myself. I feel I am in need of some kind of cleat to help keep me from sliding down the hill; I have looked at golf and football cleats and do not find them to be what I’d consider sturdy enough to be chainsawing in. I have very aggressive boots but they don’t come near to being as grippy as I need them to be. Any suggestions?

And for a very, very long time I did not know that. A fact that causes me no end of personal embarrassment, even now.

See, I used to like to sing when I mowed. I mowed a lot of lawns. I just naturally assumed that the lawn mower noise drowned out my singing.

I was wrong.

And I didn’t find out until many years later. I was talking with a woman and found out she was from the old neighborhood; I barely recognized her, and she didn’t recognize me at first, but then she lit up, and said: “Oh! You’re the singing lawn guy!” My heart sank.

She went on to tell the rest of the people assembled how when I was mowing, everyone in the neighborhood could hear me, and my voice was excellent. Well, maybe over the lawn mower. Anyway, it was apparently a standing tradition in the neighborhood to open windows when I was mowing, so they could hear me. Most of the time, it was showtunes, my impression of Paul Robeson singing “Old Man River”, Giorgio Tozzi singing “Some enchanted evening”, Gordon McRae singing “Oklahoma”. Sometimes it was gospel. Sometimes it was pop music. And I never knew that everyone could hear me, I just assumed the sound of the lawnmower drowned it out.

So now I have twenty years of things to be embarrassed about that I didn’t even know about a year back. Oh, she says it was good, and of course that was many years before I started smoking. But I know she’s just being kind. And now I don’t sing when I mow, of course. But I still get songs stuck in my head while mowing.

I am the worst thing he’s ever encountered, apparently, but he still wanders by every once in a while to shit in comments. This is a typical internet coward, who will say all kinds of things from behind a keyboard but doesn’t have the balls to say them to anyone’s face. Ah, well. Sir Frederick, who styles himself “Glenfilthie” is such a specimen of manhood that his own daughter decided to be gay rather than to have anything to do with men, considering the example before her. Hard to blame her really. And he makes big noise about having rejected his family, when it is obvious, that they have rejected him. And rightly so. Sorry, Glenfilthie; coward, moron, overeducated asshole, without the courage of your convictions to say what you have to say to my face, you’re just another in a long list of fools that I enjoy ignoring. A battle of wits with the unarmed that I have no interest in fighting. And I have yet to see a list of your monumental accomplishments. Wait, there are none. (Unless you count being a jerk)