Fuck the grass.

Given some water and strategic windowsill placement, the yacon starts have regained their proper appearance!  While I do enjoy getting healthy plants in the mail, I'm a little worried at how big they are already.  Hopefully I can get them through to this year's "safe from frost" date and into a garden bed before they take over the kitchen and start making demands.

Tonight I indoor-seeded some basil (Purple Petra, Genovese, and Tulsi) and squash (Lemon, Pen. Crookneck and Pipian from Tuxpan).  I've never had much luck direct-seeding squash, so I thought I'd try to remove some potential-for-error by starting it indoors.  My best sources say that this can work fine so long as you don't let the starts get rootbound or disturb the roots when you transplant them into the garden.

Pipian From Tuxpan squash seeds are huge!

Today was a picture-perfect day to work outdoors, and sadly I had to spend it on routine lawn maintenance.  By the time I was done mowing the entire property (around 3 acres or 1.5 tanks of gas in the Ariens) and string-trimming around trees and garden beds, I was both plum tuckered and plastered with shredded plant matter (to which I am ironically allergic).  The itchy loss of an yet another otherwise productive day is but one of many reasons I loathe the American fetish of lawn cultivation.  Why, you ask?  Well, I'll tell you!

I can confirm that I killed two snakes and one frog today during my mowing excursion.  I spied their gruesomely mangled corpses strewn atop an even plateau of green as I rode my roaring mount around the required concentric paths... and I can only assume that I killed more whose remains happened to display less dramatically.

Now, here on the farm we have nothing if not plenty of frogs and snakes, and I'm not one to cry over every individual drop of milk (or, in this case, snake blood) that's spilled... but that's at least three distinct beneficial organisms that are now wholly removed (save for their decomposition) from my ecosystem... for no real purpose whatsoever.  They died, along with my usable work day, because somewhere down the line our society decided that everyone is supposed to have a lawn.

As best I can determine, our American fascination with lawns represents an ironic and masochistic impulse to symbolically and retroactively compete with the landed elites whose idiotic policies our ancestors braved a dangerous trans-Atlantic voyage to escape in the first place.  It's a holdover from the days when ownership of land was a sure sign of personal status, furthered by the means and willingness to arbitrarily maintain expansive areas of a variety of plant (whose natural height is several feet) at a  height of just under three inches tall.

This stunningly logical ritual comes to us from the same society that at one time saw the wealthy gentry building largely windowless mansions complete with the facade of previously existent windows because the presence of bricked-up windows was seen as a status symbol at the time.

The culture of lawns also plays directly into our delusions of power over nature.  The violent act of "cutting the grass" is in fact nothing more than a scheduled assertion of our dominance over nature, a flashing neon sign regularly reinforcing the idea that we alone control the land we own... not only it's borders and obvious contents, but also the exact manner in which the organisms within shall develop and exist.

But in this instance, as in all others where we imagine our human goals and methods to be superior to those of nature, we are humorously mistaken.  The poor bastard who is forced to spend his weekends shirtlessly riding a smoking machine in circles around his property (and I must unhappily include myself in this group) has found a master in the grass, and never himself becomes the master by doing so.  If I live to be a hundred and twelve, and mow it down until religiously until my last day alive, it matters not.  Given enough time, the grass will win.

So why do we bother?

The grass on my lawn does not provide me with anything.  It does not nourish enhance the soil in any way, and the meager benefits it does provide (aesthetic appeal, erosion control) could easily be achieved with a variety of other plants that would also provide a greater benefit besides (lawn-space lovers please note here that my primary gripe here is with the grass itself, not the usage of space).

Even the benign varieties of grass constantly fight and compete to choke out and kill any tree, shrub, or vine I attempt to plant in it's midst (and has succeeded on more than one occasion).  The more obnoxious strains (quack grass, for one) prove themselves on a daily basis to be a pestilent weed without equal.  

Due to the size of the lawn, I have been forced to spend thousands of dollars on specialized equipment and fuel to maintain it in the accepted way, a process whose accomplishment itself consumes not insignificant amounts of my quite meager (and thus quite valuable) free time.

So, in short... fuck the grass.

The only consolations during my long mowing expeditions are the fantasies I allow myself, of turning over large areas of what is now neatly mown grass to productive pasture, where some manner of mammal (I want goats, Leah wants alpacas, and I'm pretty sure we both want pigs) can make better use of grass' perpetual nature than I can on my own.  My mind dances and twirls with childish delight as I imagine a large auger bit tearing through the sod, the fence posts going in, and the fencing being pulled taut.  I plot out the fence lines constantly... which animals might fare best where, how many I can reasonably hope to support on the space I have, etc.  I picture stepping out the back door and towards the treeline... not into an endless flat lawn, but a pastoral pasture complete with a small earth-topped shelter to house my as-of-yet imaginary critters.

It is usually at this point that I am forced to stop the mower to scrub a loose fistful of airborne clippings from my eyes and mouth.  Even in it's temporary defeat, the lawn laughs at me.

A man can dream, can't he?

Link: "An Eerie Winter"

Kurt Cobb over at Resource Insights has many of the same misgivings I do about this winter/spring's odd weather patterns.

His piece just happens to be a lot better researched and written than mine.

Definitely worth a read.

It's not May in March

The news and weather media are abuzz with the undeniable joy of a Spring season come early, even as last week's headlines of devastating weather across the country still sit in the recycling bin waiting to go out to the curb.  Unseasonably warm temperatures are sweeping across the country (20-35 degrees above Mid-March averages in much of the U.S.) this week, "vaulting us into record territory."

Setting records is something to aspire to when you're running a race, or even (god help us) competing to see how many grilled cheese sandwiches you can eat in a minute, but in this case I think it's cause for concern as opposed to celebration.

Displaying the standard myopic approach to the news, media outlets are taking the opportunity to herald the wearing of shorts and the early arrival of golf-and-barbecue season without devoting any space whatsoever to why the weather is so pleasantly odd.  The closest thing to critical analysis I've seen is a few articles on whether or not the unseasonably warm weather is goosing the national economic figures.

In all fairness, I must admit that I too am susceptible to the wiles of springtime.  It's positively lovely out there.  Trees are swelling into bud, the frogs are proudly croaking away in the woods, and it's almost too easy to forget that this time last year, I was slogging around the snow-covered back roads of Geauga county during the apex of a frosty maple sugaring season.

Trying to hold memories of that same time last year whilst walking around today produces a bout of cognitive dissonance that far exceeds my recent ill adjustment to Daylight Savings Time.  And so I'm left wondering... what's going on here?

You would think that Americans would join me in scratching their heads, especially as we collectively waltz out the other side of one of the mildest winters in recent memory (those of us whose towns weren't wiped off the map by severe tornadoes, that is).  But most people seem content to simply shrug and go on about the business of enjoying the comfort they happen to be enjoying at that particular moment, without concern for what comes next.

In a country where the subject of climate change serves as a litmus test of of ideology more often than a topic of serious debate and discussion, the most pressing issues of our time can be easily identified as the ones being most pointedly ignored by the population-at-large.  Most Americans remain hopelessly adrift on a shaky raft of misinformation, politically expedient pipe dreams and industry-funded propaganda that have little support from actual science, but whose soothing tone has reverberated deep enough to muddy the waters of any informed debate on the topic.

Put simply, people hear what they want to hear.

News comes out today that 4 million Americans will (proverbially) be underwater by the end of the century.  I have little doubt these and other numbers will be revised continually upwards, as similar such numbers have been in the past.  Not only do we have a history of underestimating such environmental impacts, but we as a species don't seem to be in any great hurry to stop or even slow the acceleration of the very behaviors that are driving such results.

I continue to hope that at some point, modern society will look up from it's own navel and finally catch the scent of something big happening all around it.  It might be too much to hope that our major news media (whose job it would seemingly be to inform the public) would aid us in that goal, as opposed to just handing us a bottle of sunscreen and commenting in a neighborly way "how nice it is outside."

I wonder if the headlines will retain their chipper tone this summer if we find ourselves in the midst of similarly record-breaking temperature trends... when the results might make us all far less comfortable than an early spring day.

Talking about my generation...

I am 28 years old, and not prone to weeping, per say. But if I were, I would do so profusely for my generation... defined loosely as those at my age or near to it.

We face a future that will most likely be harder than we can imagine, and one which will require of us a degree of personal grit and sacrifice to which we are almost entirely unaccustomed. Our standard of living will be lower than we planned... perhaps lower than we can possibly imagine. We will have to work harder and longer, for less. Many things that we grew up taking for granted will slowly shift into the realm of the uncertain and unreliable. We will feel the first pangs of a hangover from the party that the highly industrialized world has been throwing itself for the past hundred years or so, and in doing so we will be forced to make the hard choices whose consequences may well chart the course of the very societies in which we live, and even the species of which we are a part. And yet, I fear that we lack the basic skills necessary to even understand the tremendous task set before us, let alone deal with it in some kind of meaningful and practical way.

Tonight, on the way home from work, I winced my way through yet another anecdotal pity piece from modern victims of the hilariously mis-titled "Great Recession." Interviewed on the APM program Marketplace, Caitlin Shetterly, author of "Made for You and Me," and her husband Dan Davis recounted (without a trace of irony) the sorrowful tale of their fall from upper middle class entitlement to the wretched condition of (gasp!) the majority of this country's population.

Caitlin (a writer and freelance radio reporter) and her husband Dan (a photographer) pulled up stakes from Portland, Maine and moved to Los Angeles to pursue their respective "careers." Enter the villain in the form of the economic downturn, and suddenly the future to which they had previously been entitled (on account of their having "dreamed" it) is called into question, at which point they fancifully cast themselves as the piteous victims, standing alongside the likes of the protagonists in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

A particularly telling paragraph from husband Dan:

There was one moment when I was in a strip mall in Culver City, looking for work. And I had parked my car at the end of the parking lot, and started to make my way down the row of department stores. And by the time I got to the end, something in me just couldn't turn around and walk the same direction. I just felt so ashamed that I had a college education and I felt like all of my hard work didn't mean anything anymore. I walked around to the backside of all the buildings and walked back through the back parking lots so nobody could see me. I just felt too beaten down and too embarrassed to turn around and walk past the same people whom moments before I was just asking for a job.

Despite feeling no small connection with Dan (I myself possess a meager bachelor's degree in fine arts, and indeed was a scant six credit hours from having a second one in his very own field of photography), this part of the piece had me rolling my eyes to their very extremes. Now, I have never seen Dan's photographs... he could indeed be very talented. And I respect photographers tremendously as both artists and valuable contributors to the societal fabric. But as I have been through most college art and photography classes, I can safely say that to classify them in the same terms that Dan does requires an exceptionally broad definition of "hard work." I myself did not pursue those last (admittedly easy) six credit hours to achieve a BFA in photography because I understood such a degree to be largely worthless, even in 2005's heady times.

In short, I think the "terrible ordeal" that finally formented the book deal on which their lifestyle apparently depends rings terribly hollow, even to those of us who do not count genuine personal hardship amidst the shadows of our past. In short, I feel not a single ounce of pity for the terrible shame that Dan apparently felt when he was almost forced to take part in a kind of work which was not his absolute personal ideal. In short, I call bullshit.

And, to Dan and Caitlin, I say the following as kindly as I can: "Hold on to your hats." Because you haven't even met the distant cousin of Hardship. Because the future whose boundary we're currently toeing has little need for freelance radio contributors, or freelance photographers, or boutique cupcake proprietors, or social media analysts, or professional bloggers, or people who "tweet" for a living. To you and all of them I regretfully report the increasingly obvious, that we have all been sold a false bill of sale, whose goods will never be delivered. That world, so long in forming, is already in serious decline. Your dreams, however grand, no longer matter. That bubble, as they say, done popped.

The tasks we collectively face would prove daunting for any generation, at any given point in history. And yet we now are not the "the greatest generation," whose young men and women who faced a terrifying new world and war unfolding before them in the 40's, and yet found the courage and iron to bend history to their will. We are not the generation that took to the streets in the 60's to protest injustice and buck every social norm with the notion of ushering in a new world order based on far loftier (if not terribly naive) beliefs. We are now merely a generation of dreamers, of self-indulgent children who have been thoroughly convinced and coddled into the notion that the small and selfish act of shouting loudly into the wind could (and should) fill the space of the legitimate careers whose humble diligence consumed the time and lives of our forebears.

And it is not with bitterness, or envy, or the hollow joy of loosely pertinent prophecy that I say this. It is merely, as they used to say, brass tacks.

The times are changing fast these days. The evidence is pooling around our feet. We who are young and still strong must be willing to stretch the boundaries of our own expectations and comfort. We must be willing to cast our expectations and entitlements aside in exchange for the unglamorous opportunity of putting our own nose to the grindstone. We will most likely experience true sacrifice and hardship to a most uncomfortable degree, and will hopefully emerge stronger and more worthy of the mantle that is being passed to us... however undesired it proves to be.