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 smoke like laughing dragons race off into the atmosphere.

I never get the mix right. You need physics and algebra, and I failed third grade math. It tells you, “For 500 square feet of yard at a 10 percent grade with a train arriving from Hyannis at 3:22 p.m., take the square root of 14 and multiply it by 3 oz. Then add 1 gallon of water and shake well.”

Well, I don’t have a gallon sprayer. I have some sprayer that only holds 32 ounces. So figure that mix out, Mr. Smartypants.

I consult the New York Public Library Desk Reference for measurement conversions and find that I must first turn ounces into pints, then into kegs. Then it tells me to multiply by 6, add a teaspoon of sugar, convert it into Chinese ounces and voila! The answer is 3.

The answer is 3? Three what? I don’t know what the heck I’ve figured out. Miffed, I just start pouring into the container. No idea how much, no concern for what my actions may bring. I pour until the fumes start to tickle my nose and I get woozy.

I add water, shake vigorously and attack my yard.

By this point, the substance has eaten through the plastic and is running down my legs. Ooops! The hair is instantly evaporated, and that can’t be a good thing.

Recently, I’ve started using a sprayer that attaches to my garden hose. I’ve met with considerable difficulties from the Yard Gods who laugh at me. For starters, I always seem to spring a leak that sprays highly toxic poison over my, how should I say?, private region. And then I spray the yard only to realize I’ve painted myself into a corner. Coming to this realization is quite demoralizing, and with the yard sizzling from the toxins I’ve sprayed on it, I plop down and wait for it to dry.

“Don’t worry, honey,” I call out to my wife. “It says in three weeks the grass will be walkable again. Until then, I’ll just gnaw on this piece of tree bark.”

She is wearing a gas mask and has poison control on the line.

I will say this: My clover is dying and my grass does appear to be alive. The yard’s looking up. I’ll take some comfort in that, as well as my measurement skills. But if you’ll excuse me, I need to go trim the fingernails on that extra limb that appears to be growing from my backside.

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 something on television? Take my digital cable for example. Once upon a time all I had to do was program my VCR, pop a tape in and cross my fingers that I had punched in the correct date.

Now I must consult a checklist that begins with a warning — “Failure to follow these instructions could result in death by static electrocution, or worse, taping C-SPAN instead of ‘Survivor.’”

I feel like an airline pilot preparing for takeoff. “Rotary flaps set?” How would I know? I just want to see “The Amazing Race”!

I have to switch the switcher, make sure the digital cable is on the right channel, program the VCR in some precise order so it doesn’t get an attitude and eat my tape, sacrifice a chicken, read and re-read the instruction manual, check the atmospheric pressure and then cross my fingers that I punched in the correct date.

I go to replay the tape after all this and find that while the TV volume was up, the digital cable volume was all the way down. Now I’m watching my show trying to read lips.

Thank you technology.

I’ve got an Internet connection that sometimes gives an error message that is longer than Idaho, and mixes in with code I can’t understand two messages that I can — “up the creek” and “consult God.”

Thank you technology.

On the one hand, I love this plethora of modern technology that surrounds me. (I’m making use of it right now, and if it weren’t for E-mail, this column would get to my editor even later than it already is.)

But on the other hand, I’m plagued by it, constantly caught in a giant shoulder-spasm of a panic attack while trying to figure out error messages or blinking red lights that have no meaning. I’m suffering from digitization.

While I feed on it, I also sometimes wonder if we’re not better off without it. Maybe we should go back to reading books, drawing pictures, sending mail, listening to tunes on record players and ruling technology, instead of it ruling us.

Or, I could just order another CD online and drown my misery in some downloaded digitized tunes. Back to the computer.

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 — someone was throwing up. Now, it’s not a big dog, quite small in fact, but those are the ones who do the most “damage.” And damage she did. My dad pulled over and screamed for clean-up on aisle 6.

To spare you, we’ll move the story along. At some point he was back in the truck, back on the road and pointed toward Palatka. But not long after he was hit with another of those unmistakable noises — flat tire.

Now, there are flat tires, and then there are flat tires at 10 p.m. in the middle of a desolate national forest, in the capitol of nowhere, on a stretch of highway where gangs of bears are known to take your credit cards and order peanut M&Ms.

Changing a tire anywhere is terrifying. I always fear I will kick over the jack by accident causing the car to tip over and pin me by my pinky toe. But on the side of a dark road in the middle of the night is the making of a bad slasher film.

Yet, tough as it must have been, at this point in the story I’m thinking he’s a lightweight.

“Wait!” he says. “There’s more. So I got to your brother’s house. We have a beer while I tell him about the expedition, and after awhile I decide to go out to the car to get my bag, only … IT’S NOT THERE! I left it on the side of the road in the middle of the forest.”

So in the middle of the night, with my brother in tow, he goes out looking for his bag, which had to be found because it had his favorite cargo pants. They raced an hour and a half back like a cruise missile, eyes all-the-while trained on the side of the road until somehow, they found it. The trip ended at 3:30 a.m.

Judges?

“No way,” said my brother Scott over lunch at Ann O’Malley’s. “His is more cost effective. All he wasted was gas, time and a few burned-out brain cells. Plus, he found the bag. Mom racked up hundreds of dollars in speeding tickets, points on her insurance and a dump truck full of brain cells. Only an alien abduction could top that.”

I couldn’t tell if my dad was relieved or disappointed when the scores came in. Will he hang up his gloves, or try to knock out the champ next time?

Only time will tell if a rematch awaits.