Clearing brush

I cleared brush the other day. It might seem like a strange thing to do for somebody who owns two patches of land that measure a mere five feet by two, but clear brush is indeed what I did. It was a necessity. Mother Nature had taken over my property and was bent upon pushing me and my house out of her life. I have never ever seen twenty square feet of such tightly packed vegetation. It was fucking ridiculous. You know how it is in spring, when you see tiny little green shoots making their way up through the soil and you're so happy to see life returning to the cold parched earth. And then those shoots begin to grow and turn into stems and leaves. And then they grow some more and they keep growing and they just don't stop growing and then you realize you are the modern day version of Jack with the bean stalk. Except Jack climbed the beanstalk in search of better career opportunities and you continue to be grounded because you value job stability.

Apparently in my case, the previous owner had decided to throw all condo-living etiquette to the wind and recreate a miniature tropical rain forest in her front yard, which is an area, the size you wouldn't even be able to park a hatchback in. This place was a botanical Dharavi. Plants were living on top of other plants, other plants were trying to crawl underneath still other plants, all engaged in the business of trying to squeeze every drop of sustenance out of the land. In between were the illegal squatters : weeds that had somehow escaped everyone's notice, grown to a monstrous height and were now pretending to be rose bushes. When I purchased this house, I remember the previous owner telling me how she had been desirous of importing and planting the 59,500 sq. feet spanning giant banyan tree of Chennai in her flower bed. Luckily for me, while she was there, she incurred the wrath of Rajnikanth fans by being openly skeptical about his bullet-catching abilities and had to fly back in a hurry.

Also, my wife brought up the snake issue. I am only slightly terrified by snakes. If I see a snake, I feel only a mild urge to curl up into a ball and roll downhill. My wife has considerably less reptile tolerance. According to her, every inch of soil on our property not visible for inspection due to its foliage cover could potentially turn into a snake sanctuary. So she assigned me the task of getting rid of the jungle and using my famed people skills, gently coax any angry snake that I happened upon to depart from my property.

So I began to clear brush.

The one thing that aided me in drumming up the required enthusiasm for this brush-clearing project was the knowledge that our last president spent so much time doing it. It's a well-known fact that President Bush liked to have his fun. If this guy spent six months of every year clearing brush, surely there had to be something enjoyable about it. But then as I plunged deeper into the project and realized how thoroughly unpleasant and soul-crushing this activity really was, I realized something. If President Bush chose brush-clearing over his job as leader of the free world, boy, he must have really really hated his job. Well, good for him for surviving his eight years in office. I developed a gnawing sympathy for the poor guy. That's when I realized I was either getting dehydrated or the sun was doing something terrible to my brain. So I went and put on my cap and drank some water.

My first order of business was to trim the peonies. Peonies are to flowerbeds what the African elephant is to a bathtub. They are huge monstrous organisms that start out in life as cute little baby plants, which then sprout out roots that run all the way to your neighbor's medicine closet where they find and suck down all the human growth hormones they can find, marry Maria Shriver Kennedy, get elected Governor of California and then grow up all the way to your chimney. Just like you wouldn't raise an African elephant in a bathtub (if you are, more power to you, sir), you should not plant peonies in a flower bed.

Two days out of three hundred and sixty five, the peony "plant" bears flowers. These flowers are ginormous. Sure, they are reasonably good looking. Not pretty like the rose, but they do have petals that are not transparent. These flowers are heavy and the plant is unable to bear their weight. So it bends under the load and onto your driveway. There they remain in a drooping position for two days. On the third day, it rains, causing each and every petal of those flowers to fall to the earth where they turn into a rotting brown mush, are discovered by your local ant colony which, in light of this wonderful find, relocates in its entirety to your driveway. Trust me, you do not want to plant peonies in your garden.

I did not want those peonies in my garden next year. In fact, next year, I did not want to see in my garden a single thing that was growing there right now. I wished to start afresh with a clean slate. So I began the scorch and burn process. After I trimmed the peonies, I tried to pull them out by the root. I had very little success, although at one point, it did feel like I had pulled my shoulder out by the root. So I retrieved the pickaxe from my garage that I appear to have purchased at some unidentifiable time for some unidentifiable reason and haven't yet put to any use. After punching the peony plant in its nutsack a few hundred times, I realized that I was going nowhere. As, apparently, did my neighbor, who walked out of her garage to check where all that cursing was coming from.

"Here, you probably need this", she said, throwing some kind of large dark metallic object at my face. It turned out to be a shovel. I put aside my pickaxe and started pounding on the peonies with the shovel.

"Is this the first time you've used a shovel?", she asked me. "But I remember your dad telling me you have a large garden back in India."

"Yes, we do", I replied with some shame. "But I came here when I was a little boy so I didn't have much gardening experience from back then."

"Really?" she said. "How old were you when you came here?"

"Let me see", I said, doing some quick math. "I was....uh.....23".

She looked at me without comment.

"Okay, here's how you do this. The key is to push, not pull. Insert the shovel into the soil. Push down on it hard with your feet, then press the handle sideways, using it as a lever."

Lever, yes, that sounded familiar. I had studied levers in college. I wished I hadn't bunked all those "Theory of Machines" classes. Anyways, too late to do anything about it now. So I followed her instructions and after a bit of strenuous pushing, out came the peonies, roots and all.

"Alright", she said, "I think you've got it. Throw the shovel back into my garage when you're done."

There was a lot of crap to get rid of. Another bunch of peonies, two hydrangeas, some vague creeper with red flowers that appeared to be called a "chlamydia" although that doesn't sound right, a bunch of gigantic lilies, two enormous weeds that had turned into trees through the passage of time and a large bush that appears to have acted as a meeting-place for a number of shady members of the local wildlife club who scurried out when I pulled it up by the roots. It took me two hours to strip my garden of all that chlorophyll, but I was finally done.

I spent the next few days repopulating that space with small proportionate things. I purchased some day-lilies, a blue shrubby thing that they claim will last through winter and a number of petunias. My neighbor visited me again in order to monitor my progress. She remarked that the blue shrubby thing will be growing up and in due time, will be taking over my entire garden. She held her arms in front of her, trying to give me an idea of the future hugeness of the blue shrubby thing by air-sculpting its size and I tried to help her by eyebrowing her ample waistline to use as a measuring benchmark but she didn't get the message. I said fuck no, really, oh man. So I guess I'll be clearing brush next year too.

But at least it will keep me off the streets.

Deer and rabbit

Here are deer and rabbit. Deer and rabbit are seen sweetly entwined in the symbiotic harmony of harvesting my neighbor's crops. As seen in this exclusive surveillance camera footage, rabbit cautiously makes his way to the day lilies as deer watches out for the long arm of the law. Later, rabbit will stand guard as deer forages on the tulips. In my role as an embedded journalist who refuses on principle to interfere with their garden consumption activity, I receive unfettered access to all the inside scoop. Here is their story.

Deer and rabbit have come a long way from their troubled past. There was a point when each time deer applied snout to vegetation for grazing purposes, deer would come up with a mouthful of bunnies and had to spit them out like you would spit out goat bones from the mutton masala at Sunny-da-Dhaba on the Mumbai Pune highway. It resulted in a poor dining experience for the deer and led to a frustrated deer introducing the phrase "breeding like a rabbit" into the English vernacular. This, in turn, pissed off rabbit who, under the glare of the public eye, was forced into using protection during sexy-time. It was tiresome for someone unendowed with opposable thumbs to have to spend time fiddling around with condom wrappers at such a delicate, fleeting moment.

But then, just when it seemed that a deer-rabbit final confrontation would be inevitable, Man stepped in. Man cleared away all the brush and planted short grass everywhere, so deer could spot bunnies more easily and rabbit could continue with his baby-making efforts without fear of criticism. In fact, Man made it safe and even desirable for deer and rabbit to co-exist peacefully. Man planted pretty, tasty stuff in his backyard with easy access to deer and rabbit. Stuff bearing colors of such vividity that they might as well have been neon signs proclaiming, "I am delicious...Eat me". Now, deer and rabbit live together in a mutually beneficial partnership, the serenity of which is only occasionally interrupted by the sight of my wildly gesticulating neighbor running out of her basement with chainsaw in hand and murder in her heart. It is not without irony that Man, who was responsible for the deer-rabbit collaboration, turned out to be the worst affected by it.

But regardless, deer and rabbit are now happy. Deer and rabbit, friends forever.

Raccoon

So somebody's been stealing the fruit from the strawberry plants on my deck. It looks like a clean professional job. No crumbs lying around. My wife says it could be the squirrels who've have been loitering around in a suspicious manner lately but my money is on the asshole grackle. He's a shady character.

The grackle has devised a great workaround for getting to the contents of the bird-feeder for those times when I'm on the deck. This is what he does. When I'm not around, he violently waggles the feeder back and forth, causing all the birdseed to fall on the ground where he can later browse it at his own leisure. What the grackle doesn't realize or is callously insensitive to is the fact that through his actions, he is spoiling the dining experience for the rest of my patron base. If you're a bird and planning to go out for a nice romantic dinner with your lady friend where you'll be popping her the ultimate question, whose establishment are you gonna visit, the guy who keeps a full feeder or the one who forces you to eat off the ground? The answer is obvious. Each day the grackle finds new ways of getting under my skin. Wars have been waged due to far less provocation. The sad part is, I am sure the grackle would be a much more productive member of society, were he to apply his powers of deductive reasoning to its betterment rather than its downfall. But he chooses to follow the dark side and that is a pity.

A raccoon now trespasses on to my deck every night. He climbs up using a ladder that one of his raccoon buddies or perhaps a mercenary deer has got to be holding down for him because unless he was bitten by a radioactive spider during his stint at the Daily Bugle, there's no way a raccoon would be able to climb up the ten foot post, crawl upside down on the underside of the deck, then make his way up the railing and onto my flowerpots. I have asked around for advice on how to keep him away. An American colleague suggested that I use a BB gun on him. I asked him, what's a BB gun, is it the one that shoots water and is popular among Holi revelers who lack access to a faucet for balloon-filling purposes? He asked me, what is Holi? I replied, it is a Hindu festival celebrating the fortuitous escape of young Prahlad from an assassination attempt by the demoness Holika who carried him into a raging fire on behalf of her brother, the demon Hiranyakashipu. I see, said the colleague, who's this Prahlad, is he an ex-President of India or something? Well no, I replied, India being a parliamentary democracy, the president of India is a mere figurehead. For his escape from a demon attack to be met with such rambunctious delight, it would have to be at least the prime-minister, who happens to be the working head of the executive branch. All in all, it was a highly productive discussion.

Since my colleague turned out to be useless, I turned to my next-door neighbor for help. She informed me that another home-owner up the street also currently had a raccoon visiting him. I said, "Really, does he have any idea why it's doing that"? She replied that apparently it was after the bird seed in his feeder.

"Goddamn you GRACKLEEEEEE", I yelled, raising my face up to the heavens. "The grackle keeps spilling my birdseed onto the lawn", I translated for her, "which must be what attracted the raccoon to my deck in the first place". "Here's what you do", she replied, "Add hot pepper flakes to your birdseed, that should keep the raccoon away".

So that's what I'm gonna do now. Hopefully the raccoon doesn't have any Indian ancestry in his blood. If he does, I'm gonna have to use plan B which involves playing heavy metal music loudly at all times. It might cost me friends and family but every war has its sacrifices.

Deck Garden

Deck garden is ready. Here is deck garden. This year I win the deck garden competition against my neighbor. Clearly visible in the background are neighbour's two flowers. Last year, I got my ass kicked in the deck garden competition but this year I win. Champagne in everybody's hair.

Send me money. I am broke due to the deck garden competition.

Being on the go

Goddamn my back hurts. I've had lower back problems ever since I began working out but something happened yesterday to make it hurt really bad. It all began when I was watching that AAMCO commercial on TV with this cool rockstar dude wearing a cowboy hat who was singing, "My life is crazy, I'm on the go, I can't stop and take it slow". And I said to myself, boy, I wish my life would be as fulfilling and jam-packed with crazy as this guy's, but I'm never on the go and I'm taking it awfully slow with my evening naps, baseball games, music and beer. I realized that if I wanted to be an asshole wearing a cowboy hat who sings to people how busy he is with all the important stuff he's currently involved in, my first order of business should be to stop taking it so fucking slow.

So yesterday evening, after coming home from work, I shifted into high gear. First, I cleared my driveway of all grass clippings that were a result of my weekend lawn mowing activities. Then, I watered my deck plants. Yeah man, I was on the freakin' go. After that, I vacuumed the first floor of my house and cleaned out my bird feeder. And finally, just as I was thinking my life couldn't get any crazier, I went out into my backyard and added fertilizer to my lawn. With weed killer!! I was certainly not taking it slow.

That's when my back gave out. It was puzzling because the cowboy's song hadn't mentioned anything about back ailments. And then I started thinking, you know, when he was talking about his life being crazy, he might not have been referring to vacuuming, watering or fertilizing. Perhaps it was something more interesting. Like going camping with his girlfriend in Alaska and killing a grizzly bear with his guitar. But I'm not sure I would be up to such craziness in my life. Also, I own an acoustic guitar that wouldn't kill a fly. I would probably cut myself with a guitar string and be the laughing stock of the entire animal kingdom.

So I went back to my comfortable sofa, baseball game and beer. I'm done with being on the go. Next time the commercial plays, I'll just change the channel. Or watch the Kingsford charcoal commercial with those lazy fuckers hanging out on the highway who advise you, screw that AAMCO guy, just "slow down and grill".

The deck

Your lawn sucks. But there is hope.

In the single year that I have been a home-owner, I have come to realize that an American home-owner's life is basically one characterized by constant suckerhood. After purchasing a home, at some point, you correctly determine that the human race at a molecular level can be classified into two fundamental categories : a> Home-owners and b> People who make money off home-owners. In fact, if you take a close look at all the major US stock indices, you will notice that for the most part, they are comprised of companies engaged solely in the business of trying to separate a home-owner from his cash. Initially, when the recession made its presence felt in this country, I was surprised to know that it was caused by home-owners. Now that I am aware of the huge role my fellow home-owners and I play in propping up the American economy, it all finally makes sense.

A prime player in the home-owner-milking industry is Scotts. Scotts, of course, is the company most renowned for its lawn maintenance products. Now if you are of Indian origin and used to a life bereft of anything green within a 20 km radius around your house, you'll probably say to me, but gawker, I am Indian and therefore, quite used to a life bereft of anything green within a 20 km radius around my house. Why would I even consider buying a Scotts lawncare product? I am quite satisfied with the Saharan ecosystem currently flourishing in my backyard. My wife and kids have already managed to evolve camel-like humps, padded feet and flapped nostrils in order to cope with the parched sandy environment. I don't need Scotts, gawker, please go away.

I will go away, but let me say this, don't underestimate Scotts, my friend. Scotts has a widespread network of undercover lawn spies. The moment they track down a Desi brown-thumbed lawn anarchist such as you, Scotts will quickly purchase the home next to yours and landscape the holy heck out of it. Soon, you will be spending long mournful hours comparing your terrible weed infested yard to the dazzling state-of-the-art lushness that is your neighbor's property. Don't forget, a large part of being Indian involves coveting your neighbor's lungi, his wife and yes, also his yard. It won't be long before you find yourself loitering around in Home Depot or Lowes and buying up everything that has the word "lawn" or "garden" on it.

And Scotts will be more than happy to help. Scotts has a hundred different types of lawn-care products and you are mandated by law to purchase each and every one of them. In early Spring, you will need to use Scott's fertilizer with Halts. It gets rid of something called crabgrass. Crabgrass is not as delicious as it sounds so you need to remove it as soon as possible. This will give you adequate time to prepare yourself for the next tragedy that is about to befall your lawn, which is weeds. Late spring is weed season. This is when you need to use Scotts fertilizer with Plus-2 weed control. That will get rid of dandelions and thistles. Sometimes it also gets rid of the lawn. But hey, don't worry, Scotts is already on it. Here my friend, meet Scotts grass seed. It will grow you a new lawn. But don't forget, grass seed is quite useless by itself. To grow a new lawn in an ISO 9001 certified manner, you also need Scotts starter fertilizer. You see, grass seeds are like babies. They need water, love and their own expensive baby food. They don't cry and keep you awake all night, but not to worry, Scotts is already working on it.

Alright, so your lawn is back up and running but what d'ya know, it is now summer. Summertime has its own problems. Summer is apparently when grubs take over our planet. As always, Scotts is by your side, eager to provide moral and chemical support. Which is in the form of Scotts fertilizer with Summerguard. You don't know what a grub is or what it looks like or why it shouldn't be on your lawn, but isn't it reassuring to know that Scotts is protecting you from that sucker? It sure is!

Finally, when September comes around, you allow yourself to breathe a sigh of relief. You're probably thinking okay, it will soon be winter, my lawn will stop growing and get covered with snow and I can finally quit the second job I had to take in order to pay for all that fertilizer. But you sigh too soon. For fall is the perfect time to make plans for a lush spring lawn. Hey, you can't be too careful, right? It just makes no sense at all, not to use Scotts Winterguard with Plus-2 weed control. It protects your lawn from spring weeds. Yes indeed, Scotts has invented a fertilizer that is so powerful, it will even kill weeds that don't yet exist. If that doesn't qualify for Alfred Nobel's inheritance, I don't know what does. Also, please don't confuse it with regular Scotts fertilizer with Plus-2 weed control. They are totally different. One has the word Winterguard in it, and the other doesn't.

Sometimes, when I have some time to myself between two fertilizer applications, I sit down and ponder. Ask myself questions. Like, why doesn't Scotts add weed killer, crabgrass killer and grub killer to the same fertilizer? Is it because Scotts weed killer is actually an army of grubs that march forth and devour the weeds? Also questions like, how did grass manage to grow before there was Scotts? Why crabgrass? And why do they call pubic lice "crabs"?

But before I can answer any of these questions, it's already time for the next fertilization.

Why are birds such assholes?

You may not have realized this, probably due to the sheltered nature of your lifestyle, but not every asshole who's ever descended to earth from Planet Asshole was human. In fact, there are quite a few birds whose assholistic tendencies can rival even the finest mankind has to offer.

Take for instance, the Canadian goose. What an asshole. It's not just that this dipshit is an illegal immigrant from Canada, but also that it regularly fails to realize that it is a bird and would get its ass handed back to it, were it to ever engage in hand-to-hand combat with a human foe. Regardless of that fact, when this asshole is not shitting gigantic human-sized turds all over the path leading from your office building to your car, it is standing over them with the menacing demeanor of a mother guarding her newborn babies, prepared to fight to the death anybody who would dare crush them en route to home and hearth. Get over it, asshole. To you, they might be priceless nuggets of your body and soul, but the rest of us don't give a birdshit. And if I'm walking towards my car, better get the fuck out of my face because you're a goddamn bird and I don't know if you watch Animal Planet but you're supposed to be instinctively apprehensive (read scared shitless) of my species.

And what's with all the road-crossings? Watching these fuckers jay-walk all over our major arteries during rush hour would make one wonder, where are all these wankers off to? Meetings? Presentations? You're probably saying to yourself, "Dear God, am I doing as much with my life as these geese are with theirs"? To which the answer is, yes, because they are just being assholes. Only an asshole would deliberately cross a road on foot during rush hour despite being endowed with actual working wings.

Now you probably wouldn't believe a sparrow to be a bird subscribing to the asshole mindset. After all, it's just a tiny soul, keeps to itself and gets bullied by the larger birds. But then, you don't know assholes. Assholes come in all sizes and innocence. And the sparrow is a tiny asshole, but an asshole nevertheless. Look, you purchased a bird feeder for thirty bucks. You've been keeping it well-stocked with bird feed, spending about fifteen bucks twice every month. It is food fit for a king, delicious and you know that for a fact because you've taste-tested it yourself. So when it is time to patch the bare spots in your lawn with grass seed, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to assume that the sweet innocent sparrow that regularly dines in your feeder would leave your grass seed alone and in peace. But you would be wrong because the sweet innocent sparrow is an asshole. A human would say, I have eaten this man's salt, perhaps I should keep my grubby paws off his lawn. But not the sparrow. The sparrow will eat your salt, have your grass seed for dessert and then return it back to your deck in dropping form. That's how big an asshole the sparrow is.

But there is a feathered asshole that puts all other assholes to shame. Even human asshole heavyweights such as Axl Rose, Bill O'Reilly and Terrell Owens' agent. This is an asshole extraordinaire, one who reigns uncontested at the top of the asshole pyramid. Meet the common grackle. It is not a crow and it is not a blackbird. It is a grackle. Let's call it for what it is, a grackhole.

The grackhole loves to dine at your feeder. That's not necessarily a bad thing since that was the precise intent behind your purchase of the feeder, namely, to allow destitute birds access to adequate nutrition, while maintaining their dignity. But the grackhole is an asshole. The grackhole will keep other birds out of the feeder. And you know why other birds hate it and keep out of its way? Because apparently, the grackhole is in the habit of devouring the other birds that eat at your feeder. Are you fucking kidding me? What kind of an asshole does that? Let's say, you're at a restaurant and you decide there's nothing you like on the menu. Do you then say to the waiter, "Hey, I'll have the guy sitting at that table over there, grilled medium rare with mashed potatoes on the side. By the way, what's the soup of the day?" Not even Dick Cheney would commit such an act of blatant assholery. At least not until you're done with dinner and you go back home and wake up in the middle of the night to find Dick Cheney squatting on his haunches at your bedside, gnawing on your exposed fibula. But at least Dick Cheney will let you eat in peace. Not the grackhole, however. Because the grackhole is an asshole.

A few facts appear to support the hypothesis that the grackle is a world-class asshole. For example, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology says that the grackle has actually benefited from deforestation. Yes, you heard me right. How fucked up does a bird have to be in the head to actually hate trees and rejoice in their destruction? Another fun fact about the grackle is that it allows ants to crawl onto its body in order to destroy the rest of the parasites that live there. I do not even wish to know what it is that the ants are supposedly destroying. Hopefully it is not cancer. I would like cancer to remain on the grackle's body.

But the grackle is not just an asshole to its own kind. It's also an asshole to you. You, who installed the bird feeder on your deck in the first place. You, who are responsible for the healthy radiant rainbow-colored penumbra around the grackle's neck. Yes, you. The grackle doesn't care about you. For the grackle, you are nothing but a pair of hands hovering in mid-air that refill the feeder every couple of weeks. As far as the grackle is concerned, when you're not replenishing its food supply, you are just a fat lazy slob who lolls around on the deck wasting his life, gaping at the scenery and more importantly, keeping the mighty grackle away from its food and preventing it from achieving its daily masticatory goals.

And so, realizing that you are not going to budge from your seat without some external encouragement, the grackle alights on a nearby tree branch along with a couple of its thuggish buddies and kicks things up a notch by firing up the karaoke machine. The grackle's grating "chack chack" is the avian equivalent of fingernails dragging across a chalkboard. In the beginning, you are loathe to admit defeat because by God, you purchased this townhouse in large part due to its wonderful deck and the nice view it has of the woods and the stream and there is no way you're gonna let this filthy cockatoo keep you from getting your money's worth. But after ten minutes of nonstop chacking, you finally admit defeat and make a dignified retreat into the keep, whenceforth you watch as the gleeful little fuck leaps onto your feeder and celebrates its victory by defecating into the flower basket you've just populated today with fresh pansies.

What. An. Asshole.

Shirtless Stupid

I am considerably gladdened by the realization that criminals in my neighborhood appear to be mental midgets. Apparently there was this guy who robbed and assaulted a cab driver and then, in order to elude the cops, fled into an apartment building where he was arrested in about an hour. Evidence of his sub-par mental faculties:

1.> The building he ran into was unoccupied. Thus making him the sole occupant of that building.

2.> The building he ran into was less than 100 yards from the scene of the crime. Really, criminal? You couldn't be bothered to run, say, 200 yards? You did have an hour to kill before the police showed up. So in the meantime, couldn't you have run to the train station? Where you could have caught the Septa R5 to 30th street? Where you could have boarded the Amtrak to Whitefish, Montana? Instead, you chose to run 100 yards. Good call, man.

3.> Finally, in a brilliant move whereby he clinched the 2009 "Evasive maneuver least likely to succeed but mad props for trying" award, the guy removed his shirt in an attempt to fool the cops. I suppose he was thinking, "Hey, if no one could tell Clark Kent was actually Superman merely because of his glasses, I'm sure I'll be made virtually unrecognizable by the sheer lack of garment on my upper torso". I'm sure he even called up his own mother in order to test his disguise and said, "Hey mom, I'm not wearing any clothes, can you tell it's me on the phone?"

So to recap, in order to escape the long arm of the law, this guy ran into an unoccupied empty apartment building within a stone's throw of where he knew cops would be arriving, stayed there for an hour and removed his shirt in 30 degree weather, hoping to meld into the crowd, of which there was none.

The cops explained how they caught the guy. "He was not dressed for the weather".

With geniuses of such outstanding cerebral caliber trying to rob me, I can now sleep soundly at night. All I have to do is post a sign on my door that reads, "After picking lock, please pull to open" when it actually needs to be pushed.

Dreams

My latest thing is to wake up in a panic about five times a night, believing that my house is on fire. My previous thing was to wake up in a panic about five times a night, believing that my roof is leaking. I wish I could somehow find a way to combine these two dreams and finally get some sleep.

Wikimulch

Sometimes I wish the wikipedia didn't exist. Blogs would be so much more interactive than what they are now if wikipedia did not exist. Let me give you an example. Mulch. I see mulch everywhere. Wherever I see flowers, I see mulch. Wherever I see ardently landscaped trees, I see mulch. Where grass is lacking, I see mulch. But what is mulch? From personal experience, I have this much to relate. Mulch is a soup of rotten tree parts, cut into bite sized pieces for convenient consumption. That is mulch. So now I know what mulch is. But what is mulch for? Where is the place of mulch in the soup of life? Is mulch the carrots? Is mulch the peas? The broth? Or is mulch those chunks of nicely tenderized human flesh floating ever so squeamishly?

It is not just because I see mulch every which way, wherever I ride, but also because mulch has a personal history with me. I found mulch here, underneath my deck. It was a stray orphanized bag of mulch, deliberately left by the previous owners of my house in order to torture me. They knew that I did not know what the heck mulch was. I was a real estate n00b. Mulch who? I do not know why they seeked to torture me though, since I paid them above-market price and did not haggle (sorry mother, it is true, fish is not real estate).

Now. About mulch. What is mulch is what I have to find out, let's say. Also, why mulch? Now here I have two options, okay. One is to log on to the wikipedia and ask the wikipedia, hello sir, good morning what is mulch, thank you please. The other option is to log on to my blog and after entering my shitty login and shitty password, ask the air, hello air, what is mulch, thank you please, and thank you for being so invigorating today after two days of 90s and 100s.

Wikipedia would have given me my answer in about 5 seconds, 2 of which would have been consumed in trying to find if my blog was referenced in that wikipedia article. And then what? I would know what mulch is, but where is the social interaction? Where is the personal bonding? Not here. Not here, it ain't.

But where is the bonding? It is here, in the blogs. For if wikipedia had not been born, if wikipedia had been aborted as a fetus, or if papa wikipedia had remembered to wear a condom while fucking mama wikipedia, the world would have been a different place. A better place. Oh, so different. For, if I had woken up this morning, wrought over the question of the mulch, I would have gone straight to my blog and asked of you, my twenty or so intentional readers, hello readers, pray, what is mulch? Are you in the USA? Are you of sane mind? Are you of ample vision? Are you ambulatory? Then, what is mulch? What, for God's sake, is mulch? And, what the heck is it for?

And you would have answered, mulch is ...... this, and mulch is....that, and mulch is.... you know, whatever. And I would have contemplated your answers, formulated my own follow-up question, maybe something like, hey, but why is it called mulch and so forth, and you would have replied, hi gawker, sorry, but this is all the time I have, it is summer and it is now time for me to go swimming with my girlfriend, and I would have said, sure, go, who the heck is stopping you, I have nineteen other intentional readers, who the fuck cares, and then I would have asked you, you there, in the corner, you, pretending to read CNN on the other Firefox tab. Yes, I would have asked you. Why mulch?

And you would have told me. You would have guessed, or you would have lied. Either way, there would have been an interaction, a bonding. There would have been a conversation, an exchange of ideas, a give and take of viewpoints. The foundation of society as we know it.

But now there is wikipedia. So I won't ask you. I already know what mulch is. It's a stupid answer in bulleted form and quite predictable. And I had kinda guessed it anyways. So no blogposts about mulch. No personal interaction. No enlightening conversations.

Which is why, fuck wikipedia. The next time I have a question, I will ask you. And you better be ready with an answer. It's okay if you make stuff up. After all, it's all about the interaction. And the comments. And the follow up replies. Mulch? Mulch could be a Seattle-based grunge band. It could be an ice-cream flavor. Or it could be a pornographic position.

Mulch is whatever you tell me it is.

Another Garden update

Lately, I have been taking an active interest in my garden. With the appearance of daylight and decent atmospheric conditions here in the mid-Atlantic, various things have begun to sprout and grow. The funny thing is that all throughout winter, not a single thing that is currently growing was visible. It's as if plants hibernate underground during winter just like fish and women.

A rose plant has appeared and it already has a yellow rose hanging from it. I never did anything to facilitate its growth. I remember back in India when my dad had to lavish a considerable amount of time, water, fertilizer, affection and rogor on our five hundred and sixty seven rose plants before a single one graced us with a flower. Here the roses do not appear to require any human intervention to prosper and celebrate life. In fact, they appear to be prospering in spite of my presence which, historically, has been to the detriment of plant-life. Neither of my thumbs is green.

And then there is another plant right by our doorstep which has also appeared out of nowhere and is now partying like it is 1999. This organism has assumed the appearance and demeanor of a rain-forest and has annexed most of my driveway to its kingdom. Currently, it is bearing about thirty-forty huge pink bastards and these bastards are so gigantic that due to their weight, the plant is forever lying prostate on the ground. I don't know what breed of flower this plant is. So the other day, I asked my neighbor, who appears to be knowledgeable in this area, if he knew who or what these flowers were and if they came from a decent family.

"Yes, they are called panties", he replied.

"Can you spell that for me please", I requested.

"Could you use it in a sentence", he countered.

"I have panties growing in my garden", I replied.

"P-E-O-N-I-E-S", he said.

"Oh yes", I said. "You mean ponies."

My other neighbor has the lushest, greenest, thickest backyard I have ever seen. It is in stark contrast to mine, which is a weed infested mess with a few blades of grass trying to make a decent living but having very little success. There is a well-defined boundary between my backyard and my neighbor's where the grass ends and the desert begins. It is so bad that the rabbits on her property have erected a fence in order to keep my rabbits from crossing over to the other side. They say the nibblings better over there.

I do not know what she did to deserve that kind of lawn on her property. I wanted to find out. So naturally, my first step was to guess. After spending a lot of time guessing, I made a list of things that I guessed were responsible for the superior health of her lawn. I then went to Lowe's. I purchased a weed killer. I purchased grass seed. And finally, I purchased grass fertilizer. Since I wanted my grass to de-weed, sprout and grow all on the same day because in this part of the world, summer only lasts for a couple of months which go by so fast that they seem like a couple of days and sometimes hours if you are playing the PS3, I mixed together weed killer, grass seed and fertilizer and applied the mixture to my lawn. The next day, my lawn disappeared, weeds, grass, earth and all. In its place was a deep hole, the bottom of which I could not see and through which I could faintly hear a number of voices speaking in a Chinese dialect.

Repeat after me. Patience is a virtue. Grass takes time to grow. Your neighbor's grass will always be greener. Weed killer, grass seed and fertilizer are not friends.

Garden Update

My deck gave birth to a litter of cilantro plants yesterday. I must tell you, cilantro babies don't look like cilantro adults at all. When they come into this world, they are all like two tiny leaves and one tiny stem and they are barely green and so helpless, they don't even wave when you blow wind in their face. But when you pluck off those tiny leaves and taste them, you can feel the cilantro spirit not yet surging, but definitely germinating inside them.

They took a long time waking up. I first planted them in an old pot, a pot full of dirt left over from the previous owner. I called up my mother and told her, "Hello mother, prepare, for once, to be proud of your son for he is now helping the world meet its food-production needs."

My mother said, "what are you food-producing?"

I said, "Cilantro, mother, cilantro." I come from a family of cilantro fanboys. "Are you excited for me?"

My mother replied, "Yes, yes, I am excited. Did you break the seeds before planting them?"

I allowed a stunned silence to elapse for about a minute and a half.

"Break the seeds? Why?"

"Well, you have to kind of break coriander seeds before you plant them in the dirt."

"Okay mother, I will talk to you later." I had not broken the seeds.

I went and prepared an additional pot for cilantro-planting. Again, an old existing pot. This time I broke the seeds. Alright, that should appease the fussy Cilantro Deity.

But it didn't. I waited and waited some more. It didn't help that the weather suddenly turned cold. A week went by. Not a lot happened. I did improve my COD4 rank from 41 to 51 but that's another story which I could narrate again if you were to so desire.

I decided that it was the old dirt that was the root of the infertility. So I went and bought a fresh bag of dirt from the grocery. My suspicions were confirmed. The dirt manual told me that dirt only lasts for three months or so. Dirt comes with a manual. Long live Western Society. So I went and prepared a third pot for cilantro plantation with all the new dirt I had just purchased. I broke the seeds, used new dirt and watered the pot. Conditions couldn't get any more perfect than this. And then I waited.

And waited some more.

And finally, just as I was about to give up my agricultural dreams, two of my pots went into labor. It happened while I was at work so I couldn't share in the joyous moment but when I came home in the evening, I saw the cilantro babies and it was one of my proudest moments since the time I achieved rank 52 in COD4, but that's a different story.

The funny thing is, the two pots that first gave birth were full of old dirt, including the one with the unbroken seeds. I appear to be breaking new ground in cilantro cultivation technology.

Secondly, I have also planted tomatoes. No progress there. Tomatoes fussier than cilantro. Also, experience has now taught me that a farmer needs to be patient with his crop.

The other day, an Indian kid, claiming to be one of my neighbors, came by and offered to mow my lawn. "Really, does it need mowing," I asked him. I could barely see him through the grass so I asked him to shoot a flare so I could find him.

He answered yes, that in his professional opinion, my grass did indeed require mowing. I haven't been able to start my mower yet. I think it needs gas and I am waiting for the war to end for gas to become affordable again. So I said wokay, son, please do the needful. As I was watching him work on my lawn, he noticed that I was looking at my plants with pride and said to me," You know those are all weeds, don't you?", and he pointed towards basically everything in my garden.

The news stunned me. For a number of days, I had been watering those plants with love and water. I felt betrayed, like a prison guard who's discovered that the convict he took under his wing was actually stealing money from him. I was unconvinced.

"Are you sure? Is this a weed?", I asked, pointing to a small pretty yellow flower, a lot of which were scattered throughout my lawn.

"Yes", said the kid.

"What about this one", I said, indicating the tall thing with the crown of white things that disintegrate and blow away when you blow on it.

"Yes, that one is the worst", replied Dr. Greenthumb.

"Okay", I said with resignation. I had weeds.

The kid offered to rip them up for me but I declined the offer. They were my weeds. I had raised them and I would put them to sleep. So I bent down, began to uproot those ungrateful suckers and arranged them in a big pile.

"That is not a weed. It's actually a tulip", said the kid who was still hanging around like some kind of tomato fungus. I handed him the tulip root I had just pulled out of the ground and told him, "Okay, YOU do the weeds. I will be inside playing COD4."

I am ranked 53 now, but that is another story.

Farming

Winter is gone and it is time for farmers like me to start planning for the growing season. As you might remember I have a brand new deck to do my farming on and the previous owners of my townhouse kindly left their flower pots scattered all over the place in various states of neglect. I'm not a farmer, I lied. This will be my first foray into agriculture.

This year I am planning to grow my own food. Towards that end, I took the first steps yesterday. It was a warm day and when I had to turn on the AC in my car for the first time in seven months, I realized that it was spring and time to begin planting. So I went home, took a fork from the drawer, moved the dirt around in one of the flowerpots and filled it up with coriander seeds. I also watered it. Soon, I hope the seeds will wake up with a boner, have sex with their neighboring seed and give birth to seedlings which, in turn, will grow up to be at least 99 cents worth of cilantro.

I am starting out with cilantro because I have a lot of cilantro experience. Back in India, I used to grow cilantro in our garden and I had a lot of success. Lesser success was achieved with plants like lady finger (okra) and beans. I remember harvesting one okra pod and one green bean at a time and giving it to my mother to cook for dinner, basking in the warm glow that comes to men who've managed to put food on the table for their family.

So I am starting out with cilantro and I hope to move up to mint, maybe a green chilli here and there. In a mad fit of optimism, I purchased a packet of tomato seeds two years ago and it still lies unopened. Perhaps this will be its year of emancipation. And with a little bit of help from the grocery in the form of onions, hopefully this year my family will be well supplied with salsa.

Patch

So I finally determined the origin of the David Letterman-shaped patch on my living room ceiling. Turns out that the pipe connecting my drier to the vent that transports steam from the drier to the outside world had come off. This led to my laundry room filling up with steam whenever the drier was operated. This steam then condensed on the pipes inside the dry-wall that bring cold water into my washer. The condensate then dripped off the pipes and onto my ceiling. How did I discover this? Through the creation of another patch. So basically I am now on step two of the homeowner experience, namely, I'm finding out all the things I shouldn't do by doing them.

Alone

Yesterday I spent my first night alone in this house. It feels strange and I don't know how people in the US can be single and live alone in a house. The woods were calling from outside but they couldn't get in because my windows were closed and drapes drawn. As my friend zambezi explained when he purchased his condo, it is a novel experience to familiarize yourself and get used to the night sounds of your new home.

The fact of the matter is, American houses tend to be somewhat noisier than Indian ones at night. This is mainly due to their wooden construction but also perhaps because of the greater amount of sexual activity occurring within. All that wood and sex causes these houses to creak a lot during nighttime. Hence the popular proverb that goes, "If the house is a-rocking, don't come a-knocking". As opposed to a similar Indian proverb which goes, "If the house is a-rocking, you're probably in the middle of an earthquake and it would be best if you found a safe place to hide".

In the case of my house, it is not so much a noisy house as it is an abruptly noisy house. It will stay quiet for prolonged periods of time and you will be like, "ah what a wonderful quiet peaceful poltergeist-free place this is" and then one of the water pipes will clang for no apparent reason and after you pick yourself up off the floor where the floor meets the bed, it will quit clanging and go back to its dormant state.

Yesterday I had fallen asleep in the living room and at 4:00 am, I woke up to discover that there was a party going on in my kitchen and somebody had forgotten to invite me. As I became a little more awake and a little more aware, I realized that it was less of a party and more of something falling over something else. As I grew awaker, I concluded that I had purchased a house with a rodent problem because that could be the only possible source of those tap-tapping sounds emanating from the kitchen.

I fleet-footed to the kitchen, assuming that fleet-footed means walking silently like a fleet of cats. There was no one in there. I checked the sink and it was empty. The tapping had ceased. I checked the cabinets which were also empty. Then the tapping started again. It appeared to be coming from the fridge. I opened the fridge compassionately, expecting to find a frozen mouse signaling for help. However, there was nothing inside. The sound appeared to be coming from the freezer. I knelt down to check what the fuck was happening. This is what I found.

My freezer appears to have a rectangular opening in its back. This opening was periodically emitting a tapping sound. At the same time, water was falling from above the rectangular opening into the bottom of the rectangular opening. I confess, I am not as well-versed in refrigeration technology as I am with blogging technology and so I must request you to tell me what the fuck is with this tapping and falling water? Is that water? Is it going somewhere it shouldn't? Is my basement turning into a swimming pool? Where is the water coming from anyways? And why the tapping? Because it's tap-water? How many more years till we run out of Middle-Eastern oil? Answers to these questions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

R

Football is officially over. What to do with sundays now? Sure, there's the pro-bowl this sunday but who the heck watches the pro-bowl except people in Hawaii hoping to see their relatives in the stadium? My sundays are open now. I need to come up with a plan. Plus, the wife has left me for another guy called India.

You know what I realized recently is that having nature and woods behind your home is all well and good in theory but these things get kinda scary at night. The other day I thought I heard a whistling sound coming from outside. I was concerned that it was coming from my gas heater so I walked down to my basement, out onto my patio and inspected my steam vent. In the distance, something howled. It was a very short distance, somewhere near my right elbow. I jumped back into my basement, ran back up and walked out onto my deck which is above ground level and luckily, way way above ground level. I peered into the dark. The howling was strange. It was a combination of a dog with tuberculosis, a baby choking on sand and a cat drowning in a well. This cat-dog-baby thing appeared to be loose in the woods and was probably hunting for mouse-bone-toy things which are its natural prey. Occasional splashing sounds in the creek appeared to confirm my hypothesis. To this day, namely, the day after that day, I do not know what that thing was. Maybe the nature of teeth-marks on that corpse will confirm its identity.

But during the day these woods are great. They are a bird-watcher's wet dream. By the time this article went to press, I had already seen a family of cardinals, a group of blue jays, a happily married purple finch couple, a nuthatch, a red bellied woodpecker, a hairy woodpecker and something that looked like a hawk with a yellow chest. Deer yes, they've been around too and they appear to be well fed and healthy. The only thing I haven't seen yet is a fox and by God, those things are awesome. I still remember the sight of a red fox running around in the snow as I watched it from my bedroom window in New Hampshire. Foxes, whew, they are beautiful creatures.

By the way, for anyone who was feeling sympathetic towards me for living next door to a band, that issue has been solved. I had a talk with the guy the other day and I asked him, hey man, are you in a band, and he said, yeah, sorry about all that noise, and I said, oh come on, it wasn't that bad, in fact I worry more that my television might be disturbing you, and he said, okay then. Uh, I said, okay then, keep playing. Did I just tell him to continue playing? Sure I did. So to recap, I am okay with people who live next door to me and play loud music in their basement as long as they come to me and apologize for it. I would make a bad president.

Hey Iran, I heard you were making nuclear weapons.

Oh yes, Mr President we were meaning to tell you about it, we apologize.

Oh okay then Iran, I guess I will see you around.

So basically don't bother voting for me in the primary.

Garbage

This was the first garbage truck visitation in my new home. I stood there while the guy emptied my trash can. I had a lot of cardboard I wanted to recycle. I would like to save those trees. I asked him hello sir can I recycle all this cardboard? Sure, the garbage guy said. He took the cardboard from my hands and threw it into the back of the truck along with the rest of the trash.

This anecdote has been offered unaccompanied by additional commentary.

Home

Thank you for all the comments asking me to write. And thank you for continuing to check my feed. It made me feel guilty that I haven't reciprocated your feelings by checking my sitemeter in return. But there is a very good reason for that. Now that we have applied for adjustment of status and have a fairly good chance of staying on in this country for a longish period of time, we decided to finally put down some roots in this community. Maybe even extend a branch here and a shoot there. Sprout a couple of leaves. Perhaps develop some kind of pitcher-like contraption designed to attract insects, which would then fall into an enzyme pool at the bottom, get digested and assimilated into our fibrous stems. Those pitcher plants are fucking awesome.

Anyways what I am saying is this. We are buying a home. And we've been looking at homes for the past month or so. It is a hard business, but totally worth it. I've been in this country for over ten years now and I still do not have a place here that I can call home and which will, in turn, call me homeowner. For the past ten years, we've been following education and employment wherever they would take us. One Christmas I remember being asked by a colleague what I would be doing for the holidays and I replied, "I'm going home". He looked confused. And then I had to explain that when I said home, I did not mean the apartment I was living in at the time but back home to India.

But this exchange led me to wonder if there was something wrong with my mentality of apartmented homelessness. I went to another colleague, a British guy who's been here for about ten years now and asked him, "Brian, if you were to use the word "home", would you be referring to Philadelphia or England?" He replied "What?". It turns out he wasn't British after all. But if he had been British, I am sure he would have replied "England".

So we've been looking at a number of potential dwellings. We have not had a lot of luck so far. The problem might be that we are far too specific in our requirements. For example, my primary requirement is that the home be multiple-storied and have a back patio or deck facing woods that are densely populated with a variety of animals such as deer, bears, tigers and dolphins. There do not appear to be many homes in this area that pass this test so I will probably have to be satisfied with a back patio facing a tree clearly visible through binoculars.

My wife, on the other hand, has her own requirements. She wants her home to be spacious and well-lighted. As we go through the process of home-buying, we are adding other requirements as we come across them. For example, there's this radon gas that appears to make its home in American basements and causes lung cancer. We have decided to buy a home that is not full of this radon gas that causes lung cancer. It was a tough call but we made it. Then, the other day, it appeared that we had found our perfect home. It had a huge wooden deck facing a meadow full of trees with a stream flowing through it. The home was newly refurbished with a huge basement without any radon and it had hardwood floors in every room. It was the perfect home. In fact, it was all I could do to keep from writing a check then and there and the only thing stopping me was the fact that I did not have a check book with me, or a pen, or any money in my bank account, also there wasn't really a table in the house that I could use to support the checkbook while I signed my name.

So we decided to return the next day with a checkbook and a pen and a table. And then, on a whim, I decided to go to my trusty friend Google Earth (as well as Microsoft Live Maps who is still just an acquaintance, but is fast climbing the buddyship ladder) and survey the countryside that surrounded the home. Nice, it looked beautiful and green and leafy and beyond the green there were fields and beyond the fields there was a pretty little nine-sided structure that looked like a castle. I made a note to myself to go visit this castle after we moved in.

And then I zoomed into the castle and the castle turned into a number of squat fortified buildings surrounded by barbed wire with guard towers at all its nine corners and I had the curious feeling that I was parachuting into the Graterford Correctional Facility. For that is what it was. A maximum security prison, a place that is apparently home to the cream of Pennsylvania's criminal community, the best of the worst. Bye bye perfect home. I hope you get a good owner and I hope he buys a gun and I hope he keeps it loaded.

So that, I guess, was that. This weekend we will go see some more houses. Hopefully we shall find one and call it home.