Grass Roots Suburban Protest

The lawn is waiting for its last manicure appointment of the year. There was frost on the lawn this morning, an elegant silver sheen punctuated by birch leaves lazily cast from a neighbor's tree. Still morning air, frigid and brisk, catches my breath like comic dialog balloons
around my head. There are so many thoughts. My head is encircled in a fog.

The deck stain is scratched and scuffed, and is only a year old. There are things to maintain. Entropy to resist. But not now. I just don't want to. I could break open a laptop and work on something for the Man, but that's not satisfying either. The air feels good, freezing slightly as I inhale. My bare feet burn from the cold of the sugar frosted deck.

Maybe I'll mow later when it warms up. Maybe not. Maybe I'll sleep instead. I'd rather sleep. Its been one of those nights as a parent when you have to earn your title. Sick kids vomiting their way to new sheets and a surprise load of midnight laundry. Awake more than asleep, I
can't feel anything. Not exhaustion, not pain, not love. Not even my feet, which should be bright red with cold by now.

I have these two choices. One I'd do for the neighbors, not me, the other for me and not the neighbors. I'm thinking I'll nap. Let the association fine me for not having the grass cut, or for having cars parked in the driveway and not in the garage. There is something stupid and
rebellious about my refusal to cooperate.

My mind skips back to a day last summer when my friend Hunter pulled into the driveway to find me cleaning my minivan to Rage Against The Machine. I'm armor-alling the dash, vacuuming the floor, cleaning fingerprints from the side windows, all to a background chorus of "fuck you I won't do what you tell me". Hunter saw me and broke into a fit of laughter, saying this was not exactly the revolution they had in mind. Sure I saw the irony. But it wasn't like Bullet In Your Head was muzak or anything... Yet. Now, however I realize the truth of that moment, not the irony.

I imagine a day 85 years ago when my great grandfather sat in a trench in France during WWI, a third of his company dead from mustard gas. The bodies still unable to be properly attended lying around. Guys he knew. He spoke good , but not perfect English. As an immigrant, it was not his first thought. Arabic was. He was a long way from either home... Lebanon or America, but by choice. The still morning air there would have been unsettling, like the eye of a
hurricane, or that moment before a storm breaks, but he wanted it this way. The injustice. The murder. The rape. It had to stop. People had to pay. He came to America and enlisted for the opportunity to fight against his oppressors. When the Turks sided with the Germans, it was clear he had to leave. He could make a bayonet just as gruesome a weapon as they did. But he wasn't catching babies on them like those bastards. Whose God could condone such an act? He was supposed to stay and take it. Agree to be cowed. Allow the rapes. Look away from the abuses.

"Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me."

He left it all behind and standing in a damp trench in the middle of the European Theater, he'd seen more death than he could have ever imagined. It would haunt him for the rest of his days. Except there were just Germans. No Turks. Same side. Same score to settle. And it was hard living. Hot and cold, hungry, unclean. Scarred by shrapnel, cold and silence. He felt worse for it all , now better. Damp trenches freezing your feet in the morning dew.

Maybe I'll stain the deck. It'll rot eventually if I don't. I really don't care if it does. Not today. I'm all thought right now and no action. My mind is wandering through all these honey do items and a parallel thought occurs to me: I don't care. Its not the mountain I am prepared to die on.

Would the 'association' fine me for my sloth? Would I pay up? Listen? Repent?

"Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me."

These associations are not tossing anyone on a bayonet. They aren't evil. They are formed with people who are seemingly normal. Formed with best-practice ideas on structure and function. Forms with a large predatory bird as its logo, oddly reminiscent of the Third Reich. Form with. With Form. Conform.

That's asking me to be like everyone else, for the sake of everyone else. A terrific bit of circular logic, since each person, their snowflake soul a divine original work, must homogenize to a lowest common denominator. Everyone. Casting away that which is divine for that which is less urbane. Suburban.

Its not that these people don't have souls, its just easier to keep them hidden, like everyone else who keeps theirs hidden. Its easier to dislike and hate people like this. To snicker about their lawn edging or catch someone's kid on a bayonet. You just aren't real if you hide
your humanity. Your fears, loves, hopes. Hide them, the society says. Seem normal. Average. Blend in.

"Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me."

Progressive

It is finally happening. In the back of my mind I've wondered if we would, when it should, when we could. There is no rehearsal for this surreal play. You just show up on stage with whatever props are laying around. If you'd like others, maybe the Director will write in something useful like a burning shrubbery... nothing too big mind you. That's happened once.. maybe. I am not crazy about the odds of waiting that long for random luck. Priorities ebb.

Today was momentous because it ebbed low enough to buy flooring. It lurked somewhere in the lower pantheon of life's necessities for a few years. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is peculiar in this regard. Its not like Bingo. You can have some moderate degree of food and shelter before going on to seek employment and eventually the Nirvana of self actualization... whatever that is. I think its done in layers. You double back to upgrade... Mrs. Maslow could have pointed this out to Abe at some point during a home renovation. In my case, life has not recently presented a near-death experience, job loss, or natural disaster. Blame it on Spring.

The removal of the dead tree was proof I was capable of getting around to the things at the bottom of the To Do list, but the turn toward summer has me seeing all of nature fixing up their nest. Why not mine? I know it will not last, but it is a good feeling having temporarily given the finger to entropy. And that rude neighbor kid that came by last year and commented on how bad the flooring looked? She can complain about the deck instead.

So its done. Trigger pulled. Poof. In three weeks it will be done (and most importantly, by someone else). I have to admit this particular item has been bugging me for a while. I've noticed it and disliked it for some time... but wasn't sure how to get around to the actual change. Marriage is of course a factor, but not really hindering this. In fact, it can only help, since I have no real confidence in any color matching at all. My wardrobe is really not evolved successfully past the Garanimals era of my youth. My wife knows what ocher is. How sandstone is different that willow. I am a deer, wholly dazed in the glare of these light tones. I don't know why it took so long, but its done. Now I'll fixate on some other insignificant thing to prove I'm getting somewhere.

Progress is a funny thing. It defines a relative movement between two places. Does it mean you are getting anywhere? Yes, I think, just not anywhere that's necessarily important, so that also sounds like no. It reminds me of the conversation every kid has with their parent: "why do I have to clean my room if it just gets messed up again?". A fair question. I usually answer "because I said so" since their statement is a gratuitous assertion. But at the root is a question that never really seems to go away. It sits, like my tree and carpet, at the bottom of this long list of unanswered questions. How do you know if you've made progress? Do you have to do anything to progress?

The American myth is told with its saccharine aftertaste, lauds hard work as the root of success. Perhaps that is true and there are 200 million different definitions of work out there. The "land of the free, home of the brave" seems more aptly a roost for the doughy and indeterminate. Clearly then you can have progress without hard work... can you have progress with out work at all?

Well initially I would have thought no, but then I ran into the Infinite Monkey Theory. It turns out if you wondered what would happen if you never cleaned the kitchen again, if your kids didn't clean their rooms anymore, they might actually have the means to clean themselves. So the theory has been posited that an infinite number of monkeys pounding away at keyboards will eventually bang out Hamlet. They produce nothing nothing nothing to nearly infinity, then... poof: Something's rotten in the state of Denmark. It sounds like entropy itself could wear things to so untenable a state it actually organizes, given enough time.

Is this possible? I don't know. First of all, if chimps wrote Hamlet, I would think there would be a banana or a tire swing mixed in somewhere for dramatic effect. Yet then I remember we have a mega-lotto jackpot in every state so any shlub with a buck can get a few hundred million. If I didn't replace the carpeting, it would eventually wear through to the floor, which would perhaps wear until it broke and we all fell to the basement and walked on the concrete. I am not sure the theory works that way. Perhaps an unclean kitchen gives rise to a super strain of antibiotics. Penicillin was first found on bread. But does this new antibiotic do my dishes? That's what I want. I want to know if a life of sloth nets out the same result as one of furious labor. In the end, I suppose each consumed 1 unit of life, its just when I look at it, one seems to have been dead for a lot longer. I just can't tell which one that is.