07/05/2008: "Gardening"

Hi All,

Some people love gardening. They have gardening in their bones. Some people take to it later in life. Some who you'd never peg as gardeners. My uncle John, for example, who in his youth was a drinking-poolhall-fighting-carousing sort of guy, gets misty-eyed talking about the cucumbers he's growing. My Mom's a rabid gardener. A rabid pruner. We were golfing once and while waiting to tee off she was picking all the dead petals off the petunias and zinnias planted along the tee-off box.

Me, I really hate gardening. In fact, I don't garden. I'm a greenery ripper. I don't plant anything. If I could salt the earth of my backyard or cast some voodoo spell to keep the green stuff from growing, I would. Today I had to go out and do my twice-yearly (if I'm lucky) 'gardening.' This means I put on a gloves and rip every green thing that's managed to grow in my postcard-sized backyard. It's mainly all covered in flagstones, but still, shit grows.

I wouldn't do it at all but I took a look the other day and it'd pretty much turned into a botanist's wet dream out there: all manner of weeds and prickly fauna. Jungle-like. I figured before long the Neighbor's Association would be rapping on my door to tell me my yard was driving property values down. Plus everyone's roofs got reshingled last fall and there are still some stray roofing tiles in my backyard, so I figure they'd 'mellowed' enough to be picked up at last.

I'm the grim reaper out there. If it's green, I rip it out. There were some old plastic tags stuck in the dirt, put there by the house's previous owner I guess, which potentially identified some of the greenery I was tugging out as perrennials, or wild chives, or Fountain of Youth weeds, but anyhow, I tossed the plastic tags into the trash sack, too. But it was a pretty rough experience. I accidentally kicked a paving stone which stirred up an ant's hill. This reminded me of the time when I was maybe seven when I booted this giant football-sized anthill at my elementary school; everything was just hunky-dory until those ants started climbing up my trousers and I ran around the playground, shreiking and blubbering, rolling on the ground like I was on fire. Those weren't biting ants, either---the ones I disturbed today were. Biting, stinging, whatever. I watched one climb up my shoe, onto my sock, my calf. What an industrious little critter. Then it bit the hell out of me! I did that weird little frightened dance where you swat half-assedly at the thing that's bothering you then sort of hop around a little. Then feel like an idiot.

I didn't know there were stingy-biting ants in Calgary. I thought that was down in the Brazilian rainforest, where you have to watch out for pirahnas and those things that swim up your urethra and release little spikes into your urethral walls. And as much as I admire the ant for taking me on---it would be like one of HP Lovecraft's Elder Gods showing up and me clambering up on its tentacle to bite away at it---I had to try to be noble enough not to spray the hill with weed killer. I didn't. I almost tried to pit a potato bug and an ant in mortal combat, also something I'd've happily done as a kid, but I'm really too old to harbor that sort of gruesome curiosity.

Then I accidentally sprayed weed killer on my hands, which apparently is caustic---who knew?---and so they're still tingly and itchy as I write this. Then I saw a millipede, which are bar-none one of the most disgusting creatures in the world. If I had to chose between waking up in the dead of night to find a hissing cockroach eating my toenails or a millipede squirming between my toes ... probably the cockroach. Plus millipedes (or centipedes) grow big as hell and even eat mice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CL2hetqpfg

...did you watch that? Jeez, you really shouldn't have. Try getting that out of your head.

I hate gardening.

All best, Craig.