Seventy Dollars

In between posts this evening I mowed my lawn, and every time I do it, every time, I think "$70 dollars."

That's what my co-worker told me, in 2005, what he was paying monthly for mowing/blowing service, along with the occasional fertilization and sprinkler head replacement. He told me it was the best seventy dollars he spent all month. So in doing the math most of us educated folks do, we determine that we make $50/hour, it takes more than an hour and a half per month to keep up the maintenance, so the logical choice, based on our own wage, is to hire out the work to others making a fourth of that, so we can get on to the other joys of life like, I don't know, watching Law & Order or shopping at the Galleria.

That said...I wonder if lawn mower sales are up here in my Elk Grove during this mild economic stoppage. Now that people supposedly have less disposable income to be blowing on hired hands performing work that they were too fucking lazy to do themselves, I wonder if they are now doing the work themselves. I wonder how many Elk Grovians, over the past decade of irrational exuberance and housal unit re-fi's decided to jettison their lawn mower at their yard sales as they determined that the good times must be here to stay and decided that lawn maintenance performed by others was now a perpetual feature of Elk Grovian living. "No more! Let the commoners perform those tasks! I'll watch them from my kitchen while enjoying fine Bordeaux without ever having to engage them. I've better things to do than pull weeds."

My co-worker died that year. I think about him every time I'm out sweating and swearing at my lawnmower, but then I stop and realize that since 2005 my mortgage is $4,200 closer to being paid for, for having not hired out this service. I push the mower a little further.

Sadly, my suspicions are such that more of my neighbors are doing this degrading, shameful work themselves. I was doing mine this evening...with head hung low. Oh, the humanity! Is there no justice in this cruel, cruel world?