Kicked to the Kerb: Lawn Convolute Alpha

The Silence of the Lawns (Is Deafening)

[EDIT ME] BEGINNINGS ARE HARD [EDIT ME] Yeah, Lawns Say That All the Time

Every twinkling blade of grass on a fresh blank lawn can be intimidating even for seasoned gardeners. We know that Woodstock is talking when he emits those little chirps that on the Peanuts page look like small blades of mown grass. But we don’t know what he’s saying.

And we don’t know what lawns are saying.

But they’re saying it everywhere.

And that’s how I went insane and become an ecological philosopher.

Thanks to Jeremy Braddock for helping me realize today that this ought to be my first post.

(Rubyliquid, “Moulder.” Rubyliquid is Timothy Morton and Michael Snyder (brother of Tim). Recorded and produced by Timothy Morton. © Timothy Morton and Michael Snyder, 2002. Rubyliquid was a shoegaze band I created whose every lyric had to contain the word “lawn.”)

In Every Lawn, an Ear

This first post is an ad for a journal run by graduate students, a wonderful thing, my refuge, after decades of trying, a safe place for me to scream.

Since 1995 I’ve been haunted…that’s not enough…horrified. Done in. Obsessed. Reduced to tears. Totally freaked out by…the American lawn.

Everything I’ve ever written has been about it, around it, on it, to the side of it, despite it.

But until the wonderful Kerb journal accepted it, I was beating my head against all kinds of brick wall. Self-imposed and imposed by publishers. “You can send us anything, you’re a genius.” So I send them the lawn idea. “We don’t understand what you mean.” I’m a survivor of very serious childhood abuse (see my new book). After a while this kind of thing drives me totally nuts.

Columbia, I’m not looking at you…at last I got married to a press. I stopped trying to seek approval from strangers all my life. It started to feel creepy.

Now I have to tell you about the community I’m building here

In a weird way, this injunction looks like one of those “KEEP OFF THE GRASS” signs. Given the “Keep off the Grass” quality of lawns, the way they symbolize private property and the way this overlaps with their status AS private property, in public, one person on a lawn is a community, dammit. Let alone two. So I’m hoping we can build a giant army here, including hedgehogs and moles in Che Guevara hats.

Fuck it I’m going to edit this later. I’m so mad. I’m literally insane about these things. NO ONE writes about them. Well just a few. Many people now rewild them, refuse to mow them. But who is talking about this at the magnitude required? The silence of the lawns is deafening.

These spaces of ecocide, these velvet green mantraps for Black people.

(Silence can be deafening. Unfiltered, unedited recording of leaf blowers near my house in 2023. Drive a gasoline car 100 miles or use a leaf blower for 20 minutes, it’s the same to the biosphere. Except with the latter, your lips are attached to the tailpipe of the former. I used to run after them with N95 masks. No masks in Texas. No stopping for pedestrians.)

Now I am being told to be specific (I promise I will be)

I can’t believe they’re making me do this.

I am being asked to follow a template using buttons (lawns are like this, they’re templates that stay as templates, no?)

A picture will look nice if… Or you could just leave your lawn as you found it, constantly mowing it and killing everything in it and aiming guns at people who might step on it.

Lawn as crime scene: a still from David Lynch, director, Blue Velvet (De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986). Collection Christophel / Alamy Stock Photo. Reproduced by permission.

Now for the really scary part (bouncy castle section)

There is no one true way to etc. Don’t forget to ENJOY. Jesus.

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