it's 5:21 p.m. here in ohio, though it feels more like some doddering 3:12 a.m. trying to pass itself of as a much better hour at some tawdry masquerade ball of times.  the hopelessly july-stuck countryside remains feverishly sun-infected.  the mind masochistically fingers the hours i spent out in that countryside this morning and this afternoon, mowing grass. of all the things one can mow, grass is the worst.  a sensible plant would take a hint after one, two, three complete beheadings with a rapidly rotating blade, but not grass.  grass comes back for more and more, week after week, a crazed serial disprover of the buddhist belief of perfection through reincarnation.  grass comes back again and again merely to be cut down again and again, and i - i'm its reluctant co-conspirator, the indentured eagle to its promethean liver. 

i hate liver.  i've always hated liver.  in 1971 when our downstairs neighbor/landlady offered me some of that dreadful organ prepared a "special way" i was "sure" to like, i begged to differ.  she insisted i was wrong and goaded me into trying it with her version of a money back guarantee - "you can spit it out if you like."  i tried it.  i spit it out.  

things were never the same between us....

it wasn't even my own grass i cut today.  it was my neighbor's.  different time, different place, different neighbor.  this neighbor is not my landlady.  neither has she ever said "if you don't like cutting my grass, spit it out."  guess word about me has gotten around in the last 28 years.  guess i'm stuck now cutting grass forever.  at least it doesn't taste like liver, and this neighbor doesn't mind an occasional eagle feather in her yard....

even with a new 6.5 horsepower self-propelled mulching mower, it's hard for me to "whack the green."  it's work, after all.  sick work.  and even with a bicycle horn on the handle, there's always the chance of accidentally decapitating an innocent beetle or ant.  the roar of the engine drowns out the horn; the airbags deploy too early, too late; the whole thing explodes into flames far too easily when hit in the rear by an ugly-seeking missile.  at least i finally have a 5000 watt amplifier for the horn.  now, even if the insects don't hear the horn,  the sonic shockwave will toss 90% of 'em out of the way.  still i worry: does that 90% include the most important parts?  will any of them ever be able to play the piano again?!

at least i don't have to carry the burden of guilt that guy in columbus has to.  he heard about cow catchers on the front of trains, so he put an ant catcher of his own design on the front of his john deere.  a gang of holsteins near chicago heard about it and rushed right over to beat the hell out of him for copyright infringement in his own back yard, trampling a couple thousand anthills in the process.  

some people are just so stupid....

but all of that's neither here nor there.  what i really want to say today - what this whole entry has been building up to - no, what this entire online journal has been the mere prelude to, is this:

ahhh, i feel so much better now!  to have finally summoned up the courage to share with the world the hard-won wisdom of a lifetime, however sexually titillating it may be!!  to have finally fulfilled my destiny!!  to have reached my peak as a writer, an artist, and a human being!!!

at last i may now drink myself to death a happy, happy man!!!!!