Lawn Mowing Quotes

Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.

In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn; color your hair; watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five. In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world; or you can just jump off it.

Bran was stripping her futon down to the bare mattress when she entered her apartment. It was sort of like watching the president mowing the White House lawn or taking out the trash.

Grow the lawn and mow the lawn always keep the TV on, brush your teeth and kill the germs, poison apples, poison worms.

[...]Are both of you...?" "Manscaped?" Dante smiled. "I'm fucking Italian; I been mowing my lawn since I was thirteen.

You wouldn’t try to mow your lawn with an electric razor, like it was a green beard, so why would you try to deny the existence of nonexistence?


I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However...who said that thing about "the littleness of life that art exaggerates"? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life. But time...how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but we were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

Everybody has a ‘gripping stranger’ in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it’s the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library—a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying ‘Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,’ you’d follow them.

My bodyguard was mowing the lawn in a pink bikini when the body fell from the sky.

We don't really believe in mowing the lawn; we do it only to avoid unnecessary engagement with the neighbors.

If one has failed to develop curiosity and interest in the early years, it is a good idea to acquire them now, before it is too late to improve the quality of life. To do so is fairly easy in principle, but more difficult in practice. Yet it is sure worth trying. The first step is to develop the habit of doing whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention, with skill rather than inertia. Even the most routine tasks, like washing dishes, dressing, or mowing the lawn become more rewarding if we approach them with the care it would take to make a work of art. The next step is to transfer some psychic energy each day from tasks that we don’t like doing, or from passive leisure, into something we never did before, or something we enjoy doing but don’t do often enough because it seems too much trouble. There are literally millions of potentially interesting things in the world to see, to do, to learn about. But they don’t become actually interesting until we devote attention to them.

I work for a mom and pop business. They’re my mom and pop, and by work I mean they give me an allowance. But that’ll end soon. By age 30, in just a few months, they said it’d be time for me to earn a living. I guess that means they’ll want me to start mowing the lawn.


It was at this time I learned that the human mind is a blackened overgrown place. Society tries to mow the lawn and trim back the plants, but every one of us is just days away from a wild jungle. And it's the jungle that interests me.

Yeah. I told you he was crazy, right? I heard he does some weird stuff at home, too.' He said it with a conspiratorial stage whisper. 'Like mowing his lawn, and trimming his peonies.' 'Peonies?' I balked. 'God, he really is a freak.

Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” Jack Kerouac

The grass may be greener on the other side, but you still have to mow the lawn.

The sky is fucking with me. It's one of those militantly perfect spring days, the kind that seems to be trying just a little too hard, the kind you want to smack in the face, and the sky is bluer than it has any right to be, really, an obnoxious, overbearing blue that implies that staying home is a crime against humanity. Like I've got anywhere to go. The neighborhood is alive with gardeners mowing lawns and trimming hedges, the mechanized hiss of twirling sprinklers and for those just joining us, it's a beautiful day and Hailey is dead and I have nothing to do, nowhere to be.

Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape. Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, it the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? The case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with lime, fertilizer, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much.

A knock sounds on the door. “Who is it?” Matt yells, exasperated. “Your father.” “What do you want?” “Can you mow the lawn tomorrow after church?” “Daaaaaaaad.” Matt’s shaking his head and laughing. My mouth has dropped open. “Couldn’t you have waited until after Kate goes home to ask me?” “I didn’t want to forget,” Mr. Brown says from behind the door. Matt whispers to me, “This is his way of saying we shouldn’t be in here alone together.” I nod. Matt yells to his dad, “Fine, I’ll mow the lawn. Now go away.” I smack his chest. “What?” Matt asks, clutching my hands so I can’t hit him again. “You shouldn’t treat your dad that way.” “I like her,” Mr. Brown says from out in the hallway. “Daaaaadd, stop eavesdropping!” Matt jumps to his feet and grabs his keys from the nightstand. “That’s it, I’m taking you home. We’ll never find any peace around here.” I can’t stop laughing.

Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.

Charlie lying in a heap of hair and body parts at the bottom of a very solid set of stairs “The yard work? “I know, Grandma, but—” The fucking yard work? I’d mow her lawn, for fuck’s sake. This was honestly about yard work?

When I was this kid's age, you'd be burned alive for such talk. Being a homosexual was unthinkable, and so you denied it, and found a girlfriend who was willing to settle for the sensitive type. On dates, you'd remind her that sex before marriage was just that, sex: what dogs did in the front yard. This as opposed to making love, which was more what you were about. A true union of souls could take anywhere from eight to ten years to properly establish, but you were willing to wait, and for this the mothers loved you. You sometimes discussed it with them over an iced tea, preferably on the back porch when you girlfriend's brother was mowing the lawn with his shirt off.

There's relief in not having to be outside. No gardening, no mowing the lawn, no tyranny of long daylight hours to fill with productive activity. We rip through summer, burning the hours and tearing up the land. Then snow comes like a bandage, and winter heals the wounds.

The average lawn is an interesting beast: people plant it, then douse it with artificial fertilizers and dangerous pesticides to make it grow and to keep it uniform-all so that they can hack and mow what they encouraged to grow. And woe to the small yellow flower that rears its head!

In the summer I mowed their lawns for five dollars a week; in the winter I shovelled their walks for cups of hot chocolate; and in the fall I raked their leaves for the pure thrill of watching them burn.

When Isaiah predicted that spears would become pruning hooks, that's a reference to cultivating. Pruning and trimming and growing and paying close attention to the plants and whether they're getting enough water and if their roots are deep enough. Soil under the fingernails, grapes being trampled under bare feet, fingers sticky from handling fresh fruit. It's that green stripe you get around the sole of your shoes when you mow the lawn. Life in the age to come. Earthy.

Sylvie aced the classes she was interested in but got C's or D's in everything else. Julia had operated her determination like a lawn mower and mowed through high school with the next step in her sights.

Thoreau wrote, "the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation." This is as true today as it was back then. How many men stand on a balcony and wonder what happened?... He wanted adventure and he got two weeks' vacation. He wanted a mission and he got a lawn that needs mowing. He wanted purpose and he got a cubicle. He wanted a mighty steed and he got a minivan. He wanted a castle and he got a mortgage. He wanted a battle to fight and he got televised sports. He wanted wisdom and he got talking heads on TV. He wanted treasure and he got endless debt. He wanted every part of his life to be wonderful, and here he is... standing on a balcony, in bleak, ruminating hesitation.

With all the lit­tle facts we learned, we nev­er had the time to think. None of us ev­er con­sid­ered what life would be like clean­ing up af­ter a stranger ev­ery day. Wash­ing dish­es all day. Feed­ing a stranger’s chil­dren. Mow­ing a lawn. All day. Paint­ing hous­es. Year af­ter year.

I write in my head on the way home from work, or when mowing the lawn, or on a night out with friends. Sometimes I find the time to capture those words that are rolling through my mind, quivering and drumming and swimming, banging into each other until I can finally trick them and leak them out onto the page. And sometimes I don't. Writers are like that

Comfort has its place, but it seems rude to visit another country dressed as if you've come to mow its lawns.

When I sit down to write I never brood. I have so many other things to do, with my children and teaching, that I can’t afford it. I brood, thinking of ideas, in the automobile when I’m driving to work or in the subway or when I’m mowing the lawn. By the time I get to the paper something’s there—I can produce.

And as for girls, his mother needn’t have worried. By then, Linus had already noticed how his skin had tingled when his seventeen-year-old neighbor, Timmy Wellington, mowed the lawn without his shirt on. No, girls weren’t going to bring about Linus Baker’s downfall.

You don't really mean that about having everyone leave you alone," she said sweetly. "You seem like such a friendly and outgoing guy. I'll make sure to mention how great you are to everyone over the next couple of days. Before you know it, the whole street will be knocking on your door and introducing themselves. It won't be a month before you're hosting the neighborhood barbecue. You'll also be picking up prescriptions, mowing lawns and eating macaroni salad with every meal so you won't hurt their feelings." She batted her eyelashes at him as he seemed to pale before her eyes. "Welcome to the neighborhood.

When your child is a little older, you can teach him about our tax system in a way that is easy to grasp. Offer him, say, $10 to mow the lawn. When he has mowed it and asks to be paid, withhold $5 and explain that this is income tax. Give $1 to his younger brother, and tell him that this is "fair". Also, explain that you need the other $4 yourself to cover the administrative costs of dividing the money. When he cries, tell him he is being "selfish" and "greedy". Later in life he will thank you.

...Barack had told me, he'd contended most often with a deep weariness in people--especially black people---a cynicism bred from a thousand small disappointments over time. I understood it. I'd seen it in my own neighborhood, in my own family. A bitterness, a lapse in faith. It lived in both of my grandfathers, spawned by every goal they'd abandoned and every compromise they'd had to make. It was inside the harried second-grade teacher who'd basically given up trying to teach us at Bryn Mawr. It was inside the neighbor who'd stopped mowing her lawn or keeping track of where her kids went after school. It lived in every piece of trash tossed carelessly in the grass at our local park and every ounce of malt liquor drained before dark. It lived in every last thing we deemed unfixable, including ourselves.

Tomorrow I'm going to mow the lawn and prune the trees, and after that I'll cook some stew and casseroles to put in the freezer. We'll be glad of them when we're busy gaining dominion over the world, and can't find time to cook.

There’s a huge difference between the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen and the rest of society in that no one understands us. It’s a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we’re wasting our time when the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating. It’s acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it’s a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been floating around your brain forever. No one understands us

Jake ignored him and went on. “If I ever do hook up with anybody again - and I sincerely doubt that I will, so wipe that hopeful look off your face - it will be with someone who thinks that being with somebody who mows lawns is her idea of heaven on earth and who will do exactly what I tell her to do and love it." "I think Donna Reed is dead," Will said.

The road to medical school started with a job mowing lawns I was far from sure I could handle.

People were polite here, on the whole. They were rule followers, and do-gooders. They voted in midterm elections. They mowed their lawns.

Bombing operations in Gaza and raids into the West Bank are often referred to by Israeli officials as mowing the lawn.

Besides. Eternity was going to seem like forever. With the crowds of smiling people smiling at me in the dark, me who spent my life cleaning bathrooms and mowing the lawn, I told myself, why rush anything? I'd backslid before, I'd backslide again. Practice makes perfect. If you could call it that. I figured, a few more sins would help round out my resume. This is the upside of already being eternally damned. I figured, Hell could wait.

My father continued to tinker on the lawnmower, repairing or destroying it, it was hard to tell. If curses were magic words, the machine would’ve run like a charm in no time. It probably could’ve mowed the lawn by itself.

Life was good. The sun setting on a sweet summer's day, the smell of freshly mowed lawns, the sounds of children playing-- A house across the river, on the Jersey-side. A beautiful wife and a baby girl. The American Dream come true. [Honey, I'm home!] But dreams have a nasty habit of going bad when you're not looking. --- Max Payne 1

Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation.

Our sages say burying someone is considered the truest form of kindness and respect, as the deceased will not be able to thank you for it." That’s kind of funny, actually, since Dad was not exactly prone to expressing gratitude to his children when he was still alive. You were either screwing up, or you were invisible. He was quiet and stern in a way that led you to expect an Eastern European accent. He had soft blue eyes and unusually thick forearms, and when he made a fist it looked like he could punch through anything. He mowed his own lawn, washed his own car, and painted his own house. He did all these things capably, painstakingly, and in a way that silently passed judgment on anyone who paid for someone else to do it. He rarely laughed at jokes, just nodded his understanding, as if it was all pretty much what he’d expected. Of course, there was a lot more to him that that, it’s just that none of it is coming to me right now. At some point you lose sight of your actual parents; you just see a basketful of history and unresolved issues.

Young men ... learn practical skills that set is in good stead for lives as the husbands of wealthy and educated women: Strong Handshakes, Silence, Rudimentary Car Mechanics, How to Mow the Lawn, Explosive Displays of Authority, Sport and Nutrition Against Impotance.

For weeks, really, I could conjure him into being. I'd imagine him walking in, soaked in sweat, having finished mowing the lawn, and he'd try to hug me but i'd squirm out from his arms because even then sweat freaked me out. Or I'd be in my room, lying on my stomach, reading a book, and I'd look over at the closed door and imagine him opening it, and then he would be in the room with me, and I'd be looking up at him as he knelt down to kiss the top of my head. And then it became harder to summon him, to smell his smell, to feel him lifting me up. My father died suddenly, but also across the years. He was still dying, really—which meant I guess that he was still living, too.

Any do-gooder can save one life or a dozen by spending x dollars, but that doesn't demonstrate anything unless you've got x dollars multiplied by the total number of lives that need saving. Stopping poverty one victim at a time is like mowing a lawn one blade at a time. The problem grows faster than the cure can be applied, the only people who profit are the agencies who claim to be cutting grass while they're actually applying fertilizer.

they learned that an unmowed lawn would result in a polite but stern letter from the city, noting that their grass was over six inches tall and that if the situation was not rectified, the city would mow the grass—and charge them a hundred dollars—in three days. There were many rules to be learned.

Hey, Alek, you want us to, you know, weed-whack at all?" Dante tugged at his pubic hair. "Clip the curlies." "Uh, no. Our members prefer natural hair. Are both of you...?" "Manscaped?" Dante smiled. "I'm fucking Italian; I been mowing my lawn since I was thirteen. My brother taught me." Jesus. "I'm not." Griff's eyes bulged. He'd never thought about trimming down there. Dante gave his crotch a once over. "Griff's pretty neat on his own. Scottish hedge!

...TV was entertainment of the last resort. There was nothing on during the day in the summer other than game shows and soap operas. Besides, a TV-watching child was considered available for chores: take out the trash, clean your room, pick up that mess, fold those towels, mow the lawn... the list was endless. We all became adept at chore-avoidance. Staying out of sight was a reliable strategy. Drawing or painting was another: to my mother, making art trumped making beds. A third choir-avoidance technique was to read. A kid with his or her nose in a book is a kid who is not fighting, yelling, throwing, breaking things, bleeding, whining, or otherwise creating a Mom-size headache. Reading a book was almost like being invisible - a good thing for all concerned.

three kinds of people in the world. First there are “well-poisoners,” who discourage you and stomp on your creativity and tell you what you can’t do. Then there are “lawn-mowers,” people who are well intentioned but self-absorbed. They tend to their own needs, mow their own lawns, and never leave their yards to help another person. Finally there are “life-enhancers,” people who reach out to enrich the lives of others, to lift them up and inspire them. We need to be life-enhancers, and we need to

The fruit was so plentiful that young hobbits very nearly bathed in strawberries and cream; and later they sat on the lawns under the plum-trees and ate, until they had made piles of stones like small pyramids or the heaped skulls of a conqueror, and then they moved on. And no one was ill, and everyone was pleased, except those who had to mow the grass.

If you asked me to mow your lawn, I’d say sure—just as soon as you move your lawn directly above mine.

-Hey, neighbor, is your wife free for a date today?
 -No, I’m taking her out this afternoon?
 -Great! Then you won’t mind if I come over and mow your lawn. Sucker!

Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain

It's time to mow this lawn.

These Burbclaves! These citystates! So small, so insecure, that just about everything, like not mowing your lawn, or playing your stereo too loud, becomes a national security issue.

Flying in his dreams was an exhilarating, breathtaking experience, sometimes literally, that tended to leave reality wanting, like riding a roller coaster compared to mowing the lawn.

My father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my playmate I thought this was what fathers did. Then I began to catalog and notice. They mowed lawns. They drank beer. They played in the yard with their kids, walked around the block with their wives, piled into campers, and, when they went out, wore joke ties or polo shirts, not Phi Beta Kappa keys and tailored vests.

I'm a Cancer, you know," I tell her. "So it's hard for me to talk. And I have all these weird dreams, not the ones with the Sony Girls - ha-ha - but mostly where I mow the lawn. Sometimes I just wash the car, like Gupta! But there's this voice in my head, and Lt. Kim thinks that once we get it to go away, I'll stop worrying that the good things in life are destined to fail, like you and me. But I'm up in this satellite dish, and I'm thinking: what if this is the voice that still believes things can be okay, that believes in good and warns me from bad? It wants to protect me, just like the United Nations.

A few minutes later, the doorbell rang again. This time, I answered it. It was my neighbor, an elderly woman I had exchanged no more than a dozen words with in the ten years I’d lived in Thomaston. She had pot holders on her hands, which held a pan of brownies still hot from the oven, and tears were rolling down her cheeks. “I just heard,” she said. That pan of brownies was, it later turned out, the leading edge of a tsunami of food that came to my children and me, a wave that did not recede for many months after Drew’s death. I didn’t know that my family and I would be fed three meals a day for weeks and weeks. I did not anticipate that neighborhood men would come to drywall the playroom, build bookshelves, mow the lawn, get the oil changed in my car. I did not know that my house would be cleaned and the laundry done, that I would have embraces and listening ears, that I would not be abandoned to do the labor of mourning alone. All I knew was that my neighbor was standing on the front stoop with her brownies and her tears: she was the Good News.

How would parents respond to children who gladly cleaned the house and mowed the lawn but refused to spend time talking with and enjoying them, the very ones who have loved and cared for them their whole lives? We know this isn’t the way things should operate in a healthy family, and yet we often and subconsciously relate to God in this way. We give Him what we perceive to be our obedience yet internally resist a deeper surrender.

These things matter to me, Daniel, says the man with six days to live. They are sitting on the porch in the last light. These things matter to me, son. The way the hawks huddle their shoulders angrily against hissing snow. Wrens whirring in the bare bones of bushes in winter. The way swallows and swifts veer and whirl and swim and slice and carve and curve and swerve. The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass. Salmonberries thimbleberries cloudberries snowberries elderberries salalberries gooseberries. My children learning to read. My wife's voice velvet in my ear at night in the dark under the covers. Her hair in my nose as we slept curled like spoons. The sinuous pace of rivers and minks and cats. Fresh bread with too much butter. My children's hands when they cup my face in their hands. Toys. Exuberance. Mowing the lawn. Tiny wrenches and screwdrivers. Tears of sorrow, which are the salt sea of the heart. Sleep in every form from doze to bone-weary. Pay stubs. Trains. The shivering ache of a saxophone and the yearning of a soprano. Folding laundry hot from the dryer. A spotless kitchen floor. The sound of bagpipes. The way horses smell in spring. Red wines. Furnaces. Stone walls. Sweat. Postcards on which the sender has written so much that he or she can barely squeeze in the signature. Opera on the radio. Bathrobes, back rubs. Potatoes. Mink oil on boots. The bands at wedding receptions. Box-elder bugs. The postman's grin. Linen table napkins. Tent flaps. The green sifting powdery snow of cedar pollen on my porch every year. Raccoons. The way a heron labors through the sky with such a vast elderly dignity. The cheerful ears of dogs. Smoked fish and the smokehouses where fish are smoked. The way barbers sweep up circles of hair after a haircut. Handkerchiefs. Poems read aloud by poets. Cigar-scissors. Book marginalia written with the lightest possible pencil as if the reader is whispering to the writer. People who keep dead languages alive. Fresh-mown lawns. First-basemen's mitts. Dish-racks. My wife's breasts. Lumber. Newspapers folded under arms. Hats. The way my children smelled after their baths when they were little. Sneakers. The way my father's face shone right after he shaved. Pants that fit. Soap half gone. Weeds forcing their way through sidewalks. Worms. The sound of ice shaken in drinks. Nutcrackers. Boxing matches. Diapers. Rain in every form from mist to sluice. The sound of my daughters typing their papers for school. My wife's eyes, as blue and green and gray as the sea. The sea, as blue and green and gray as her eyes. Her eyes. Her.

The winning electoral strategy with phishable voters is threefold: 1. Publicly, proclaim policies that will appeal to the typical voter on issues that are salient to her, and where she will be well informed. 2. But on other issues, where the typical voter is ill informed, but where potential campaign donors are well informed, take the stance that appeals to donors. Publicize this stance to would-be contributors, without broadcasting it widely to the general public. 3. Use the contributions from these “special-interest groups” for campaigning that increases popularity among the regular run of voters, who are more likely to vote for someone who “mows their lawn on TV.

But men and women are different in the way that they feel loved. Men like to be admired for what they do, for their integrity and their accomplishments, whether it’s at work or at the gym or mowing the lawn, because it makes them feel manly. When a woman tells a man that she is proud of him, or she tells him that he did a good job, he’ll about bend over backwards to take care of her and love her.” “But women like attention from men, because it makes them feel feminine and adored. That’s why they’re always fixin’ themselves up, doing their hair, wearing pretty clothes and makeup and jewelry and perfume. It’s all to attract your attention, you know.” (Thelma Jenkins)

Cox!” Kami screamed, stalking into the room. “Shut your stupid Mexican mouth!” Cox glared at her. “Bitch, I’m Puerto Rican!” She waved her hand dismissively. “Whatever. Don’t you have some lawns to mow?” “I’m Puerto fuckin’ Rican!” “What! Ever!” “Bitch! Don’t you got some rich boy cock you need to suck off for a new pair a fuckin’ shoes?” “Fuck you!” “No, bitch, fuck you! I’m fuckin’ Puerto Rican! Say it, Kami, say Puerto Rican!” “No!” “Say it!” “American Indian!

How I picture it: A scar is a story about pain, injury, healing. Years, too, are scars we wear. I remember their stories. The year everything changed. Kindergarten, fourth grade. The year of the pinecone, the postcard, the notebook. The year of waking in the night, sweating, heart racing. The year of being the only adult in the house, one baseball bat by the front door and another one under the bed. Or the year the divorce was finalized. First grade, fifth grade. Two houses, two beds, two Christmases, two birthdays. The year of where are your rain boots, they must be at Dad’s house. The year of who signed the permission slip? The year of learning to mow the lawn. The year of fixing the lawn mower, unclogging the toilets. The year I was tattooed with lemons. The year of sleeping with the dog instead of a husband. (The dog snores more quietly. The dog takes up less space.) The year of tweeting a note-to-self every day to keep myself moving. The year I kept moving. The year of sitting up at night, forgetting whether the kids were asleep in their beds or not. The year of waking in the morning and having to remember whether they were with me. The year I feared I would lose the house, and the year I did not lose the house. The year I wanted to cut a hole in the air and climb inside, and the year I didn’t want that at all. The year I decided not to disappear. The year I decided not to be small. The year I lived.

Do heroes know when they are heroic? Rarely. Are historic moments acknowledged when they happen? You know the answer to that one. (If not, a visit to the manger will remind you.) We seldom see history in the making, and we seldom recognize heroes. Which is just as well, for if we knew either, we might mess up both. But we’d do well to keep our eyes open. Tomorrow’s Spurgeon might be mowing your lawn. And the hero who inspires him might be nearer than you think. He might be in your mirror.

In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being — a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say ‘Tomorrow I will mow the lawn,’ the ‘I’ which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the ‘I’ which does the pronouncing. The former ‘I’ is known to linguistic theory as the ‘subject of the enunciation’, the topic designated by my sentence; the latter ‘I’, the one who speaks the sentence, is the ‘subject of the enunciating’, the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two ‘I’s’ seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The ‘subject of the enunciating’, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun ‘I’ stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot ‘mean’ and ‘be’ simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ as: ‘I am not where I think, and I think where I am not.

Whatever. Don’t you have some lawns to mow?” “I’m Puerto fuckin’ Rican!” “What! Ever! “Bitch! Don’t you got some rich boy cock you need to suck off for a new pair a fuckin’ shoes?” “Fuck you!” “No, bitch, fuck you! I’m fuckin’ Puerto Rican! Say it, Kami, say Puerto Rican!

The grass is always greener…wherever you water and mow. No matter how big or how small, take care of the things you currently have. See to it that your marriage, your children, your job and the blessings you have been entrusted with get plenty of water and sunshine. Pull the inevitable weeds that pop up, keep that lawn of life manicured and trimmed; don’t forget the edging. Add seeds of growth where you find deficiencies, nurture the flowers that bloom and rejoice in the sight of the healthy beauty that lies within your very own fence line.

He hired me on the spot for forty dollars a week, in cash. I was thrilled. It was my first real job. Babysitting and tutoring and doing other kids' homework and mowing lawns and redeeming bottles and selling scrap metal didn't count. Forty dollars a week was serious money.

No man in the house described our situation. Of course, everyone has a father—or, as they would say nowadays, a sperm provider, fatherhood in the old sense of paternity having fallen into disrepute—and I had one, too, though at that date I wasn’t sure this father was still what you’d call “alive.” When I was four or five, my mother told me she’d changed him into the garden gnome that sat beside our front steps; he was happier that way, she said. As a garden gnome he didn’t need to do anything, such as mow the lawn—he was bad at it anyway—or make any decisions, a thing he hated. He could just enjoy the weather.

I immersed myself in my relationship with my husband, in little ways at first. Dutch would come home from his morning workout and I’d bring him coffee as he stepped out of the shower. He’d slip into a crisp white shirt and dark slacks and run a little goop through his hair, and I’d eye him in the mirror with desire and a sultry smile that he couldn’t miss. He’d head to work and I’d put a love note in his bag—just a line about how proud I was of him. How beautiful he was. How happy I was as his wife. He’d come home and cook dinner and instead of camping out in front of the TV while he fussed in the kitchen, I’d keep him company at the kitchen table and we’d talk about our days, about our future, about whatever came to mind. After dinner, he’d clear the table and I’d do the dishes, making sure to compliment him on the meal. On those weekends when he’d head outside to mow the lawn, I’d bring him an ice-cold beer. And, in those times when Dutch was in the mood and maybe I wasn’t, well, I got in the mood and we had fun. As the weeks passed and I kept discovering little ways to open myself up to him, the most amazing thing happened. I found myself falling madly, deeply, passionately, head-over-heels in love with my husband. I’d loved him as much as I thought I could love anybody before I’d married him, but in treating him like my own personal Superman, I discovered how much of a superhero he actually was. How giving he was. How generous. How kind, caring, and considerate. How passionate. How loving. How genuinely good. And whatever wounds had never fully healed from my childhood finally, at long last, formed scar tissue. It was like being able to take a full breath of air for the first time in my life. It was transformative. And it likely would save our marriage, because, at some point, all that withholding would’ve turned a loving man bitter. On some level I think I’d known that and yet I’d needed my sister to point it out to me and help me change. Sometimes it’s good to have people in your life that know you better than you know yourself.

And yet, we have not changed so much, have we? We still coach Little League and care for our parents, we cry at romantic comedies and mow our lawns, we laugh at our eccentricities and apologize for harsh words, we want to be loved and wish for a better world. That is not to absolve us of responsibility for our politics, but to trace a lament oft heard when we step away from politics: Aren’t we better than this? I think we are, or we can be. But toxic systems compromise good individuals with ease. They do so not by demanding we betray our values but by enlisting our values such that we betray each other. What is rational and even moral for us to do individually becomes destructive when done collectively.

The reason I didn’t have a normal, dad-built tree house is that, as I’ve indicated, I didn’t have anything even approaching that kind of dad. He was, and remains, one of the world’s great indoorsmen, a delegator of all conceivable outdoor tasks—lawn mowing, car washing, gutter cleaning, and tree-house building. By the time I was ten, which was when I’d kicked off my campaign for a tree house in the woods behind our ranch, he didn’t even own the tools needed to build one, having “accidentally” nailed his tool chest behind the walls of a cedar closet he’d tried to build for my mother in the basement. Whether consciously or not, my father had clearly wanted to make sure the cedar closet would be his last do-it-yourself project, and it was.

Experts say that the nervous system needs to be reprogrammed to allow for greater happiness, fulfillment, and relational connectedness. The good news is that the nervous system is highly receptive to new programming. In fact, it is somewhat capable of reprogramming itself if we provide support. To create the space and allow the nervous system to develop this new capacity, we encourage leaders to integrate just after they experience a new high. For example, you close the deal you never thought you’d be able to close; you get the promotion you’ve always wanted; you have a great weekend away with your partner and experience a new level of closeness. At these moments, we suggest leaders integrate by doing things that are grounding, ordinary, mindless, soothing, mundane, and/or repetitive. This could be going for a walk, mowing the lawn, sweeping the floor, washing the car, making a meal, flipping through a favorite hobby magazine, or taking a little longer shower. This allows for the gentle raising of old Upper Limits (the reprogramming of the nervous system), without forcefully blowing past them in a way that actually causes a big crash.

Jeez, how stupid was I? What kind of job can a reservation Indian boy get? I was too young to deal blackjack at the casino, there were only about fifteen green grass lawns on the reservation (and none of their owners outsourced the mowing jobs), and the only paper route was owned by a tribal elder named Wally. And he had to deliver only fifty papers, so his job was more like a hobby.

What first comes across our minds About the stocky Mexican Pushing a mower across the lawn At 7 a.m. on a Saturday As the roar of the cutter wakes us? Let me take a guess. Why do they have to come so damn early? What do we make of his flannel Shirt missing buttons at the cuffs, Threadbare at the shoulders, The grass stains around his knees, The dirt like roadmaps to nowhere, Between the wrinkles of his neck? Let me take a shot. Dirty Mexican. Would his appearance lead us to believe He is a border jumper or wetback Who hits the bar top with an empty shot glass For the twelfth time then goes home To kick his wife around like fallen grapefruit Lying on the ground? First, the stocky Mexican isn’t mowing the lawn At 7 a.m. on a Saturday. He doesn’t work weekends anymore ever since He lost one-third of his route To laborers willing to work for next to nothing. Second, he knows better than to kneel On the wet grass because, well, the knees Of his pants will become grass-stained And pants don’t grow on trees, even here, Close to Palm Springs. Instead, after 25 years of the same blue collar work, Two sons out and one going to college, Rather than jail, and a small but modest savings In case he loses the remaining two-thirds Of his work—no matter how small and reluctantly The checks come in the mail— My father the stocky gardener believes He firmly holds his life In both his hands like pruning shears, Chopping branches and blossoms, Never looking downward as they fall to his feet In pieces like the American dream.

The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn’s relationship to nature. For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one’s neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor waxing, or road paving. Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture’s boot. Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape. Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? A case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with fertilizer, lime, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.

It's a difficult path that we tread, us Indie self-publishers, but we're not alone. How many bands practicing in their dad’s garage have heard of a group from the neighbourhood who got signed by a recording company? Or how many artists who love to paint, but are not really getting anywhere with it hear of someone they went to art school with being offered an exhibition in a gallery? How many chefs who love to get creative around food hear of someone else who’s just landed a job with Marco Pierre White? There’s no difference between us and them. There is, however, a huge difference in how everyone else perceives the writer. And there’s a huge difference between all of us – the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen - and the rest of society in that no one understands us. It’s a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we’re wasting our time when the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating. It’s acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it’s a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been floating around your brain forever.

One late afternoon, we crossed a creek and came upon a thicket of trees in the middle of a pasture quite a ways from Marlboro Man’s homestead. As I looked more closely, I saw that the trees were shrouding a small white house. A white picket fence surrounded the lot, and as we drove closer to the property, I noticed movement in the yard. It was a large, middle-aged woman, with long, gray hair cascading down her shoulders. She was pushing a lawn mower around her yard, and two wagtail dogs yipped and followed her every step. Most notably, she was wearing only underwear and what appeared to be a late model Playtex bra. And as we passed by her house, she glanced up at us for a moment…then kept on mowing. Trying to appear nonchalant, I asked Marlboro Man, “So…who was that?” Maybe this could be the start of another story. He looked at me and replied, “I have absolutely no idea.” We never spoke of her again.

You know, I’m just a regular guy. I mow my lawn, shovel snow from the driveway, and change the oil in our vehicles. I do the grocery shopping and cook most of our dinners. I’m like any other man in America. Only I got lucky—I have a beautiful son and an activity we can do together, despite his disability. It’s been an incredible journey. I’m not a hero. I’m just a father. And all I did was tie on a pair of running shoes and push my son in his wheelchair.

We fear what is uncontrollable. This 'control' attitude results in an 'order fetish.' People become obsessed with mowing and grooming their lawns and obsessed with neatness. People living in contemporary society are split beings divided against themselves. Our Eurocentric society is wounded. Society does not want to feel pain. Therefore, society denies history, and hides its collective head in the sand. We must reintegrate what we have taken apart and love the thing we fear.

I think about what the man at the Coney joint said. He was right. We are the people who stay. We stay in our homes and pay them off. We stay at our jobs. We do our thirty and come home to stay even more. We stay until we are no longer able to mow our lawns and our gutters sag with saplings, until our houses look haunted to the neighborhood children. We like it where we are. I guess then the other question is: Why do we even travel? There can only be one answer to that: we travel to appreciate home. (p.97)

She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of won, the beginning of the name of what she was—a woman. A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan. Lawn had some of the letters of man, though the reverse of man would be Nam, a bad war. A raw war. Lawn also contained the letters of law. In fact, lawn was a contraction of laman. Certainly a lawman could and did mow a lawn. Law and order could be seen as starting from lawn order, valued by so many Americans. More lawn could be made using a lawn mower. A lawn mower did make more lawn. More lawn was a contraction of more lawmen. Did more lawn in America make more lawmen in America? Did more lawn make more Nam? More mown lawn made more long moan, from her. Or a lawn mourn. So often, she said, Americans wanted more mown lawn. All of America might be one long mown lawn. A lawn not mown grows long, she said: better a long lawn. Better a long lawn and a mole. Let the lawman have the mown lawn, she said. Or the moron, the lawn moron.

To keep lace crisp, iron it between sheets of waxed paper. We were kept busy learning. We had a million facts to remember. We memorized half the Old Testament. We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think. None of us ever considered what life would be like cleaning up after a stranger every day. Washing dishes all day. Feeding a stranger’s children. Mowing a lawn. All day. Painting houses. Year after year. Ironing bedsheets. Forever and ever. Work without end.

The best thing is when a customer comes back and praises the book you recommended. I can’t get enough of that. Boy: I saved my lawn-mowing money to buy this book. Me: I had no idea that kids still did this. Boy: Kids still pull up the couch cushions too. For change. See? He held up a baggie of coins and small bills. Me: I’ll be hornswoggled. Teen Girl: Are you still open? Oh, thank god. I ran here. I promised myself. Me: Promised yourself what? Teen Girl: This book. It is my birthday and this is my present to myself. She holds up Joan Didion’s biography. For the rest of the week I enjoy this moment.

There were movies to go see at the Gem, which has long since been torn down; science fiction movies like Gog with Richard Egan and westerns with Audie Murphy (Teddy saw every movie Audie Murphy made at least three times; he believed Murphy was almost a god) and war movies with John Wayne. There were games and endless bolted meals, lawns to mow, places to run to, walls to pitch pennies against, people to clap you on the back. And now I sit here trying to look through an IBM keyboard and see that time, trying to recall the best and the worst of that green and brown summer, and I can almost feel the skinny, scabbed boy still buried in this advancing body and hear those sounds. But

Is she really old enough to have crushes on boys? I feel like she’s too young for all that.” “I had crushes on boys when I was nine,” I tell him. I’m still thinking about Kitty. I wonder how I can make it so she isn’t mad at me anymore. Somehow I don’t think snickerdoodles will cut it this time. “Who?” Josh asks me. “Who what?” Maybe if I can somehow convince Daddy to buy her a puppy… “Who was your first crush?” “Hmm. My first real crush?” I had kindergarten and first- and second-grade crushes aplenty, but they don’t really count. “Like the first one that really mattered?” “Sure.” “Well…I guess Peter Kavinsky.” Josh practically gags. “Kavinsky? Are you kidding me? He’s so obvious. I thought you’d be into someone more…I don’t know, subtle. Peter Kavinsky’s such a cliché. He’s like a cardboard cutout of a ‘cool guy’ in a movie about high school.” I shrug. “You asked.” “Wow,” he says, shaking his head. “Just…wow.” “He used to be different. I mean, he was still very Peter, but less so.” When Josh looks unconvinced, I say, “You’re a boy, so you can’t understand what I’m talking about.” “You’re right. I don’t understand!” “Hey, you’re the one who had a crush on Ms. Rothschild!” Josh turns red. “She was really pretty back then!” “Uh-huh.” I give him a knowing look. “She was really ‘pretty.’” Our across-the-street neighbor Ms. Rothschild used to mow her lawn in terry-cloth short shorts and a string bikini top. The neighborhood boys would conveniently come and play in Josh’s yard on those days. “Anyway, Ms. Rothschild wasn’t my first crush.” “She wasn’t?” “No. You were.

How much do you know about each other?” was Father Johnson’s final question of the day. Marlboro Man and I looked at each other. We didn’t know everything yet; we couldn’t possibly. We just knew we wanted to be together. Was that not enough? “Well, I’ll speak for myself,” Marlboro Man said. “I feel like I know all I need to know in order to be sure I want to marry Ree.” He rested his hand on my knee, and my heart leapt. “And the rest…I figure we’ll just handle it as we go along.” His quiet confidence calmed me, and all I could think about anyway was how long it would take me to learn how to drive my new lawn mower. I’d never mowed a lawn before in my life. Did Marlboro Man know this? Maybe he should have started me out with a cheaper model. Just then Father Johnson stood up to bid us farewell until our session the following week. I picked up my purse form its spot next to my chair. “Thank you, Father Johnson,” I said, standing up. “Wait just a second,” he said, holding up his hands. “I need to give you a little assignment.” I’d almost made a clean getaway. “I want you both to show me how much you know about each other,” he began. “I want you both to make me a collage.” I looked at him for a moment. “A collage?” I asked. “Like, with magazine pictures and glue?” “That’s exactly right,” Father Johnson replied. “And it doesn’t have to be large or elaborate; just use a piece of legal-size paper as the backdrop. I want you to fill it with pictures that represent all the things you know about the other person. Bring it to your session next week, and we’ll look at them together.” This was an unexpected development.

There’s one in every neighborhood. The family that never mows their lawn. Has toys scattered everywhere. The ones who never plant flowers, or do and let them die. The messy family who lowers real estate values. Here they are. Right next door. You’ve got that bulb wrong side up, Samantha.” I switched the bulb around, scooting my knees in the dirt to get closer to the fence, my eyes never leaving the father as he swung a baby from a car seat while a curly-haired toddler climbed his back. “They look nice,” I said. I remember there was a silence then, and I looked up at my mother. She was shaking her head at me, a strange expression on her face. “Nice isn’t the point here, Samantha. You’re seven years old. You need to understand what’s important. Five children. Good God. Just like your father’s family. Insanity.

What I didn’t want: a low-octane life of draining jobs, counting the days till I’d have time to mow the lawn again, counting the weeks till I could afford some plastic, beach-chair vacation, counting the years till retirement when I’d be too old to enjoy it. I was from a place built off those blueprints, where sprinklers went off in the morning and whole neighborhoods became ghost towns during work hours. I’d look out at all those empty houses, the exhausted adults returning home, the whole sorry bunch living at low throttle, and it seemed like death. I wanted to see the stars over Kilimanjaro, the sunrise after sleeping at the base of a killer range, to breathe powder. You can stand on the peak of the world, knowing you’re about to drop into the mouth of a canyon sculpted by wind, and if you die, at least you die by your own rules. That’s why I gave my life to extreme sports.

Our Ideal Citizen—I picture him first and foremost as being busier than a bird-dog, not wasting a lot of good time in day-dreaming or going to sassiety teas or kicking about things that are none of his business, but putting the zip into some store or profession or art. At night he lights up a good cigar, and climbs into the little old 'bus, and maybe cusses the carburetor, and shoots out home. He mows the lawn, or sneaks in some practice putting, and then he's ready for dinner. After dinner he tells the kiddies a story, or takes the family to the movies, or plays a few fists of bridge, or reads the evening paper, and a chapter or two of some good lively Western novel if he has a taste for literature, and maybe the folks next-door drop in and they sit and visit about their friends and the topics of the day. Then he goes happily to bed, his conscience clear, having contributed his mite to the prosperity of the city and to his own bank-account.

First, the enormous potential energies of the two elephants are consumed balancing the seesaw, instead of being able to do something more useful, like mowing the lawn or paying the bills. This is equivalent to diverting energy from various long-term building projects in order to solve short-term stressful emergencies. By using two elephants to do the job, damage will occur just because of how large, lumbering, and unsubtle elephants are. They squash the flowers in the process of entering the playground, they strew leftovers and garbage all over the place from the frequent snacks they must eat while balancing the seesaw, they wear out the seesaw faster, and so on. This is equivalent to a pattern of stress-related disease that will run through many of the subsequent chapters: it is hard to fix one major problem in the body without knocking something else out of balance (the very essence of allostasis spreading across systems throughout the body).

Mow a neighbor's lawn. • Give your spouse a back rub. • Write a check for a local charity. • Compliment a coworker. • Bake a pie for someone. • Slip a $20 bill into the pocket of a needy friend. • Laugh out loud often and share your smile generously. • Buy gift certificates and give them away anonymously. hildren and gardens go naturally together. Children are observers, and they learn so much more when they can see what they're learning. And when Mom or Grandma and kids work together, gardening is a great way to build relationships. There's something about digging and weeding that makes sharing confidences so much easier. And it's a great lesson for kids that work can be meaningful. That it brings tangible rewards-fresh vegetables and beautiful flowers. Best of all, the children help you learn too. They freshen your wonder. And when they pass on the learning and wonder to their own children, you've helped start a lasting and living legacy. Sur simple ingredients can make a meal memorable. First, the care you take in setting the table establishes the tone or atmosphere. Second is the food. That always

The Ten Ways to Evaluate a Market provide a back-of-the-napkin method you can use to identify the attractiveness of any potential market. Rate each of the ten factors below on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is terrible and 10 fantastic. When in doubt, be conservative in your estimate: Urgency. How badly do people want or need this right now? (Renting an old movie is low urgency; seeing the first showing of a new movie on opening night is high urgency, since it only happens once.) Market Size. How many people are purchasing things like this? (The market for underwater basket-weaving courses is very small; the market for cancer cures is massive.) Pricing Potential. What is the highest price a typical purchaser would be willing to spend for a solution? (Lollipops sell for $0.05; aircraft carriers sell for billions.) Cost of Customer Acquisition. How easy is it to acquire a new customer? On average, how much will it cost to generate a sale, in both money and effort? (Restaurants built on high-traffic interstate highways spend little to bring in new customers. Government contractors can spend millions landing major procurement deals.) Cost of Value Delivery. How much will it cost to create and deliver the value offered, in both money and effort? (Delivering files via the internet is almost free; inventing a product and building a factory costs millions.) Uniqueness of Offer. How unique is your offer versus competing offerings in the market, and how easy is it for potential competitors to copy you? (There are many hair salons but very few companies that offer private space travel.) Speed to Market. How soon can you create something to sell? (You can offer to mow a neighbor’s lawn in minutes; opening a bank can take years.) Up-front Investment. How much will you have to invest before you’re ready to sell? (To be a housekeeper, all you need is a set of inexpensive cleaning products. To mine for gold, you need millions to purchase land and excavating equipment.) Upsell Potential. Are there related secondary offers that you could also present to purchasing customers? (Customers who purchase razors need shaving cream and extra blades as well; buy a Frisbee and you won’t need another unless you lose it.) Evergreen Potential. Once the initial offer has been created, how much additional work will you have to put in in order to continue selling? (Business consulting requires ongoing work to get paid; a book can be produced once and then sold over and over as is.) When you’re done with your assessment, add up the score. If the score is 50 or below, move on to another idea—there are better places to invest your energy and resources. If the score is 75 or above, you have a very promising idea—full speed ahead. Anything between 50 and 75 has the potential to pay the bills but won’t be a home run without a huge investment of energy and resources.