I mowed the weeds today.

When we had our backyard planted a few years ago, the landscaper noticed that throughout our backyard dirt, thousands of tiny oxalis pods lurked. Each of these insidious pods packed enough evil weed mojo to give nightmares to any conscientious home-owner. For a lazy bastard such as myself, it's the kiss of death to the hapless plants whose only crime was being placed into my backyard.

The landscaper tried to warn me. He pulled me aside on his way out, and spoke in hushed and reverent tones about the potential destruction that lay mere inches under our newly-planted lawn. I didn't pay much attention but certain phrases did stick in my mind:

"Don't let it get out of control!"
"...end of humanity as we know it..."
"Take the ring to Mordor!"

Naturally, I ignored this advice. A few months went by and nothing bad happened. I realized that he had been exaggerating the danger of this clover-like weed, and I re-settled back into complacency, comfortable complacency.

Oxalis, as it turns out, blooms in the wet months. So, around late fall, it arrived. It quickly spread throughout our backyard, soon becoming the dominant plant. Ignoring this threat became much more difficult, but I did not get where I am today by being easily deterred. I stuck to my plan of measured laziness and complete apathy with a dogged determination. My perseverance was rewarded in late spring when the rains ceased and the oxalis died off. Of course large chunks of the lawn were now also dead, having been choked out by the ominpresent weeds for several months.

The next few winters I fought the oxalis. There's no weed killer you can spray on it that won't kill the other plants, so I was forced to get down on the ground for hours at a time, and carefully pull each evil sprout. It was time-consuming and futile work, since generally when I pulled the sprout, the pod would remain underground, ready to do battle another day.

This year I gave up again. So, I mowed the weeds. I look foward to new and exciting dead patches in my lawn this spring.

This reminds me of the battle my high school english teacher once fought with a persnickety zit on his face. One day, he just shaved the bastard off. Mr. Friss, I'm with you in spirit.