Cut some grass today, for the first time in over a month. I know that’s so because the last time I cut it was the first time this year, and it was the end of May, because I was mad at global warming and the world in general that I had to cut grass before June got here. But the combination of it being an extreme drought and my own general laziness allowed me to not having cut it since, until earlier today. Even then, I only cut the back and one side because I didn’t feel like moving my railroad spike spray painting station (which is the leftover hulking frame of a patio table that a tree limb fell on and busted the top and all the glass) and the spray paint milk crate, nor did I feel like wrestling with the heavy ass entertainment stand that I put in the front yard, meaning to use as a shelf on the back porch (which is actually the front porch), but then I just left it out in the weather and it’s all fucked up now and probably even heavier, just standing on its side in abandonment. The cats use it as an outdoors scratching post though, and it helped me not feel obligated to cut the front yard today, too, which again, could be called laziness, although I also posit the theory that nature and Earth itself is kinda lazy, and if humans were lazier, the Earth would be in way better condition. Being productive is not natural, and in fact, we attempt to make the Earth be productive at a rate that far exceeds its natural cycles. We don’t even do this out of some moral imperative to feed everybody either; we do it for profit, and whatever can’t be sold is tossed into the trash, because it’s not profitable to risk any liability by giving it away for free to those in need. There’s an old book I love called The Right to Be Lazy, by a French socialist Paul Lafargue, who says in his opening salvo, “A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work.” I’ve got this book somewhere upstairs, and I hope my eyeballs magically find it, going up there to fuck around on the turntables at some point the next few days. I’d like to put this in the bathroom, where all my best reading is still done (like any truly philosophically lazy person). Anyways, there’s more grass to be cut, always, just like there’s more dishes to be washed, and clothes to be folded, and bills to be paid, and lackadaisical hopes to be put on the backburner of life until you have run out of time and find out you have squandered all your idle moments chasing the carrot on a stick called productivity, hustle and ground to death, into the black flecks of pepper that flavor the inheritances of leisure lifestyles of the wealthy. Our wasted lives of labor allow them their leisure, and all we get is promises of an eternity we can’t touch while here on Earth to enjoy it. In other words, I’m not cutting the front yard today.
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