After having more stops and starts and just as much uncertainty and disappointment as Lindsay Lohan’s career, it appears that summer may finally be here to stay. Looking back, it seems like a really long, hard road to get to the decent weather, but hopefully that will only make me enjoy it all the more. It’s at least nice to have a wind in my face that doesn’t freeze my nostril hairs and chap my face. It’s not all fun and games for the next five months, though. With summer comes countless outside activities of varying enjoyment. The lawn now must be cut once a week. Maybe it’s not that bad. Cutting the grass is strangely fun and games for me, no matter how much I try to make it seem like work.

I spent several years renting, so this is only the second year I’ve had to mow the yard. I look back longingly now on those years of apartment dwelling. Never underestimate the joy and disgust of having someone else do the yard work. The joy was that I could have my hand wrapped around a nice glass of Scotch on a Saturday afternoon in the comforts of an air conditioned apartment while I looked out the window and saw some poor bastard with his hand around a lawn mower sweating his ass off. The disgust came only because the damned mower was so loud I couldn’t hear the ball game.

These days, I’m the sweaty bastard with his hands around the lawn mower. The only comfort in that is knowing there isn’t some smart-assed guy like me watching me from inside the house. There’s no Scotch like before either, but it could be worse. Lawn work requires beer instead of hard liquor, and actually, that’s just fine by me. There’s no joy in putting a warm rocks glass to your cheek to cool down. A cold beer can to the forehead, on the other hand, feels like a little slice of heaven. It also makes me feel tough like I’m in one of the Busch commercials where they head for the mountains ... except I don’t have five buddies with me ... and I’m not hiking ... and my yard is really flat. Fine, it’s nice, but it really doesn’t make me feel all that tough if I really think about it.

It is nice, though. I bitch about it every week, but that’s just my nature. If I won the lottery, I’d be one of those people who bitches about how much tax I have to pay on my millions. I’m still not sure why I like mowing the yard so much, but I have to assume it goes back to childhood. My dad always seemed to be happy on the lawn mower. It never occurred to me that it was probably nothing more than a nice respite from Mom’s list of chores and my constant offers to play catch with him. It was his way to get away from everything. It was nothing but beer, noise and vibration, and he couldn’t have been happier.

From the age of four or five, I must have realized his happiness and wanted to deprive him of it as soon as possible. I begged until I was about seven, when I was finally given the lawn-mowing duties. It was a big yard, but it was quite fulfilling to just stand and look at it once the job was completed. It wasn’t napalm in the morning, but it did smell like victory. The dogs would scratch their backs on the freshly shorn blades of grass, Dad would give me 20 dollars and I would drink a big soda pop and pretend I was tortured beyond belief. I couldn’t let on that I liked mowing because the 20 dollars would have gone away very quickly.

Last year, I started up the mowing hobby again. I had a crap-ass lawn mower with crooked wheels and a dull blade. It was like wrestling a freaking alligator to turn a corner with the damned thing, and I often felt my arms were going to be snapped from my torso with all the shaking and vibrating. If the grass was extra high, I had to nurse it along so it wouldn’t shut down. It was an enormous pain in the ass, and yet when I was finished, I couldn’t wait to get out there again. Four hours later when my body stopped vibrating, it actually seemed like fun looking back on it, but I would never let on. In this case, it’s just more fun to keep the joy to myself.

This year, I’m rocking a self-propelled version. It’s much easier, but the self-propulsion is limited only to the lawn mower and is not for the guy walking behind it. I learned this the hard way when I tried to tie two skateboards with a barstool on top of them behind the mower so it could haul may lazy ass around too. It didn’t work and really left a nasty bruise. It’s probably for the best. Everyone says the walking is good for me. I’ve personally never really seen it, but it’s still not that bad. There’s still a cold beer waiting for each frequent break I take, and at the end, it looks and smells like I’ve actually done something with my day. Besides, I can always have that glass of whiskey in the air conditioning after I’ve washed the grass off my feet.