Pesticide Mania in My Yard

If I am the cause, I apologize. If it is me who has ruined the environment, poisoned the drinking supply, caused a tear in the ozone layer like a run in stockings, and dried up the schools of tuna who used to swim the oceans free, then to future generations I say I’m sorry. I’m a bad man who doesn’t follow directions. It’s spring, so I’m out fighting bugs, fungus, grubs, clover, root rot, jumping circus beetles, a clan of armed, horse-riding Turks and strange crop circles in my grass that read: “Land the mother ship here!” Actually, it’s mainly just clover, and I’ve waged war on it with some clover killer I wrangled up down at the hardware store. Not that I know what I’m doing, and certainly the packaging is no help. Look, there’s only so much of these directions and warnings you can read on a bottle of pesticide or weed killer before you throw up your hands and shout, “Mama mia, that’s a lot of meatballs!” I look for big warnings — warnings I can relate to: “Has been known to cause cancer in laboratory rats AS WELL AS extra limbs growing from their rumps, talking like Michael Jackson and giving money to the IRS.” Oh, man. Better wear gloves! Not that I pay attention much. I mix these things into such strange concoctions using highly questionable containers and sprayers that just the week before held other high-threat toxins. And I wonder why blue puffs of […]

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Caught Up In the Digital Revolution

It struck me in the car, on the way to get a pizza, just how far technology has come, and how much a part of our lives these days it is. I was listening to a CD, one I had just bought online. I had purchased it with the click of a finger, and downloaded it to my computer where I burned it to a disc and minutes later had it spinning on my automobile CD player. Was it always like this? So quick? So convenient? So easy to spend money that you never held in your hand? So impersonal? So digital? Am I a part of the technology revolution or what? (Forget that I still get lost on a fairly regular basis, or that I have a receipt sitting on my dresser that I can’t for the life of me figure out what it’s for.) What a technologically amazing world we live in. I wake up early Saturday to watch English soccer on my digital cable. I have high speed access that allows me to spend even more time in front of the computer at home than I already do at work. (Wait a minute, benefit where?) And I carry computer files home on a little portable memory device no larger than a peapod, but capable of storing more information than the computers of yesteryear which were large as houses. But there are always downsides. Why is it the more advanced we become, the harder it is to tape […]

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Who will win the worst road trip championship?

So it’s a competition, eh? My parents, divorced since the invention of rocks, can’t stand to let the other one win. Competitive parents. And not competitive in anything that matters. What’s the game? Who can have the worst road trip to St. Augustine. In the left corner, weighing in at two sacks of flour, my mother, who won the heavyweight champion of the world title a couple months back when she got speeding tickets both to and from Tampa. It cost her a whopping $380 to J.Q. Law, and landed her in Internet traffic school. In the right corner, weighing slightly more, my father, who took a stab at dethroning her this past weekend, and landed a couple of good upper cuts that might just put him over the top. Ding, ding, ding. My father, whose favorite driving move is to back into those yellow pipe bumpers that gas stations use to keep people from running over fuel pumps, came from Tampa late Friday night. He decided to take the route through the Ocala National Forest because, like my mother, there is too little that can go wrong when you get on an interstate, set the cruise control and kick back for the ride. It was this haunted forest that became his undoing. Not long into it he heard a sound coming from the passenger seat where one of his two dogs was sitting. It was a sound you could identify through jet engines and a heavy metal concert — […]

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