It is Sunday morning here and it is pouring rain. Rainy and cold.
If you had to be outside today, you’d prefer it to be ten degrees colder and snowing rather than a freezing soak.
And I have to be outside all day today. I will be watching the Ultimate Frisbee team I help coach play meaningless games no one has the smarts to cancel.
This is unfortunate for me, but it is a choice. It comes as an obligation to the choice I made to be part of the team.
This all reminds me that once upon there was a book that offered impossible decisions based on slightly amusing forms of hell.
You could, for instance, spend the rest of forever with poison Ivy or be locked in a room with an insufferable person—Ted Cruz say—who would not shut up. A never ending root canal or an eternity in wet socks. Stuff like that.
While I’ll gt a taste of the sock thing today, but at least I’ll get to take a shower in before dinner.
Besides, I got a good taste of my actual hell this weekend since this past week included nothing but leaf blowers everywhere near where I live.
While today sucks, summer came to my part of the world this past week. Bright sun, a few puffy clouds, and temperatures in the low 90’s. Even a one day that peaked closer to 100°.
Every day, though, and for many hours a day I could hear that horrible leaf blower noise, all of which was directed toward defeating hat horrible enemy: Grass.
We must cut the grass, we must gather the grass, and yes, we must blow the grass.
What is it about suburban life that makes tallish grass unbearable, but the worst sound ever invented O.K.?
Now far be it from me to say that blowing leaves in the fall and blowing grass in the summer is not work. It is. But if the devil offers me wet socks or blowing leaves, the choice is clear: Soak those babies well and good.
Yet, the noise everyone I know finds unbearable is entirely unnecessary. While I can think of better forms of spending eternity raking leaves, I think that is nowhere near the leaf blower option and is surely more tolerable work. It is Meditative, bound to nature, and has clean lawn as a clear goal.
Surely, too, three people raking would be just as speedy as one guy, with a blower (I never see women doing this work. They are too smart for that, I guess.) I even bet that if you add up the equipment costs and the gas costs and the truck costs and especially the social cost the neighborhood-ness of the neighborhood, the economics would not be all that distinct.
Although for some reason, I guess raking leaves is considered lower status work than blowing leaves, although a rake is somehow noble if it is in the hands of the person who owns the property.
It is also true that since jobs are about to take a giant AI hit, the more things only a human can do will be required for society to remain sane—not that “remain” is the right word there. We need more nurses, more kindergarten teachers and yes, more landscapers.
Where I live a beautiful day in the summer, as in the spring and fall and snow covered winter, you get better than a glimpse of nature’s paradise.
And yet we so often make our days not only worse but hellish.
There are old stories about all this, I think, our final damnation the self-evident truth that the choice is ours.
My time now, to put on my Raincoat and gather-up all my extra socks.