Prune Back In Anger

The earth's fragile, beautiful biomass. Kill it first before it kills you.

Greg:

Got a yard? I wouldn't know. I haven't seen your new place. If so, does it have dirt in it? Hey, it's a fair question. Some places just have concrete or rocks or whatever that they paint green. Okay, so if it has dirt, are there any plants growing out of it? If so, -

KILL THEM NOW.

Scorch the earth. Pour salt on it. Get thirty eight dogs, make 'em drink six quarts of coffee each and have them piss all over the whole deal until it is dead dead dead. I've seen what happens to a yard when you have plants and you let them grow, and let me tell you brother, it ain't pretty.

First off, just get used to the fact that plants hate you. They're not "pretty". They don't want to "coexist" with you. They don't care about whether you need the oxygen or not. They know that all you see when you look at them is salad. I have a blackberry bush all the way at the far end of my yard that is just itching to strangle me. Every day when I get home from work, I notice that it has grown five more tendrils of six feet each. I just know that one night it's going to creep in through my bedroom window and wrap itself around my tender, tender neck and choke me 'til I'm dead dead dead. (...or "dead cubed". -Ed.) Why? Because I eat its children with abandon. I make them into pie. I put them in fruit salads. The blackberry bush knows this and has worked itself into a bloated, vengeful rage. It will not rest until I am deep in the humus. Good thing I'm the one with the pruning shears...and the opposable thumbs.

This does not explain why my lilac bushes are such bitches to me. I don't eat their kids. I thought I was doing them a favor by deadheading all of them and clearing out all their dead brush and suckers. Well, they returned my kindness by sending legions of now-homeless spiders into my house to set up shop in my dishtowels. (I know the spiders must've been told to do it. They're smarter than to come inside where my spider-eating cat lives.) Anyway, fuck them lilacs. Just fuck 'em. Who cares about a plant that doesn't pull its own weight? It blooms once, and then it spends the rest of the year taking up lawn space that I could be using for suntanning or burning tires. If the wife wasn't so fond of them, I swear I'd have a nice crackling lilac-wood fire in the fireplace right now.

Don't even get me started on you, pampas grass (rhymes with "pompous ass"). Your day will come, señor. And that day is this Saturday. You'll be staring straight down the blades of the shears that I have nicknamed Los Diablos Dos. I will first give you my special "butch" cut, the Howie Long special, The Flat-Top To End All Flat Tops. Then I will take my shovel, stab it into the earth, and tear out your still-beating heart....er...roots.

And you, House-Eating Camelia - I want you dead. I want your parents dead. I want your family dead. Your dog - if you had one - dead. Hamsters - dead.

So what kind of plant do I like? That's easy. Corn. It's tasty and makes a great fence. Think of it as "bamboo with benefits". And I like my cedar tree. It stinks pretty, keeps the bugs away, and provides shade for my surly old cat. Someday its mighty branches will be home to my Dubble-Seekrit Klubhaus (No Girlz!). And my three apple trees. Other than that, I could seed this whole place with alfalfa and be happy. And by that I mean that I could bury former child actor Carl 'Alfalfa' Switzer in my yard were it not for the fact that he's been dead since 1959.

Hey, speaking of which, who are all those guys who are allegedly shaving the Amazonian rainforest down to the nubs? And what's their phone number? I have a job for them.

Shears,

-Thaddeus