Tuesday, May 20, 2008

the Sadim Touch

You know, the opposite of the Midas touch. Apparently I have it.

Seems whatever happened to our crappy old lawn mower rendered it beyond repair. And I so desperately wanted to believe that I could fix it that I put off buying a new mower. Well, the grass - more precisely, the weeds - reached thigh height and I started getting nervous.

In a town this small, nothing goes unnoticed. Everyone on Liberty Street knows that I am a recluse, and that when they see me out of the house...it's a cold day in hell. They will actually comment about it to my face. Everyone in this town knows who I rent this house from, and they know where she lives, and they know that if something's amiss at Manson Homestead, they get better results when they bypass talking to me and just go straight to the lady that cashes my rent checks. So I knew it was just a matter of time before someone called her up and complained that the crazy, shut-in cat lady on Liberty Street was trying to see how tall she could get her grass before the city got sick of it and came to mow it for her.

Believe you me, as much as I would like to have the stooges from the city mow my grass while I sit on my shrinking ass and watch, I saw what they did to the foreclosed house next door. They scalped that yard. Thank you, but I can push a mower myself. Sid and I spent way too much time spreading grass seed last year for anyone to come along and scalp our (finally) beautiful lawn.

Anyway, like I said, the grass was thigh height, and I knew that if I didn't soon work myself up to do something drastic, like buy a new mower, the whole neighborhood would be ringing up the landlady, demanding my blood. I wasn't just putting off buying a new mower because I couldn't bear to spend the money, but because I knew I would have to use Sid's car, and that meant taking off the stupid cover and getting pollen and birdshit all over myself.

But I did it, and it was even worse than I had imagined. It's rained a lot lately, and that cover did fuck-all to keep the water and dirt out. That car was caked in yellow pollen. It was embarrassing, even to me, and I usually don't worry myself over the dirtiness of a car.

But that's not the best part. Oh no, the best part was when I got to the store and picked out my new mower, and had the guy bring it out and put it in my trunk for me. He says, "You know you got ants in here?"

Yes, you read that correctly. There were ants making a nest in the metal framing around the trunk. I feel no further comment is necessary on this, as thinking about it makes me twitch.

So I get the mower home, get it out of the trunk, and get it assembled. I fill it up with oil and gasoline and I'm psyched. I put together a lawn mower! I'm independent and industrious! Yay starky!

And then I couldn't get it started. I primed that thing, and yanked at the pull cord for a good ten minutes before I decided that one more failure would result in me taking a mallet to this spiffy new mower. In desperation, I went across the street to beg help from the neighbor man.

He started that thing on the first goddamn try.

It's the Sadim Touch, I'm telling you.

2 comments:

Queermo said...

You're too awesome for words.

Andrea Frazer said...

Thanks for visiting my BabyCenter site. I will read more about you when I'm not bbqing for 24 people. Wish me luck. And hang in there.