Month: March 2025

For all those times when someone has looked at you and thought, “What a frickin’ idiot!”

Well, well, well, now the shoe’s on the other foot…

“Young neighbor, young neighbor!” Pops, my elderly neighbor, shouted bewilderedly across our yards, “Your shoe! Your shoe!”

Despite having cut off his leaf blower, and I, my lawnmower, the distance was just too great for effective communication. So instead of gaining any clarification into the odd situation that unfolded before his eyes, he instead got a reply that looked an overly-confident ape trying to convey with sign language how proud he was of his bare heel.

Having made a good-faith effort to look out for the well-being of his fellow citizen, what else could Pops do but smile and nod, lightly shrug his shoulders, and fire back up ye ol’ leaf blower. All the while being not one ounce clearer on which of the two involved parties was the crazy one here.

Oh, poor Pops…poor, poor Pops.

Really, you have to consider what this looked like from his point of view. Imagine this:

Your peacefully blowing the leaves out of your backyard one crisp early December afternoon, when all of sudden, your neighbor shows up in his backyard in his pajamas, power-walking his lawnmower in intense laps. Now this in of itself may have been enough for you–aka Pops–to start questioning your mental faculties. After all, fall has done well fallen many moons ago, and it’s been quite since any grass doth grow…ya’ know?

So there you are, tediously blowing your leaves around your yard when the young stud next door shows up half-sprinting as he pushes his mower through a basically-barren yard covered in a light layer of leaves. Ok. That warrants a few questions, but you don’t want to be nosy, so whatever.

But then, about 3 minutes in–and he, about halfway done ‘mowing’ his yard at a record pace–you look back up and this ----- guy is all of sudden lurching about looking like he got polio on account of now having a completely bare left foot to complement a normally-clad right foot in a shoe. And where is his shoe to be found? Just hanging out in the middle of his yard, chillin’ like nothing is amiss.

Like…does he even know he’s missing a shoe??

“What am I even looking at here, Doc?” you/Pops indubitably asked your/himself before the afore-described attempt to help out Young Grasshopper protect his precious feet.

But apparently ol’ Hot Rod Harry seems pretty fine with the situation, and you observe him proceed to rip right through the rest of the leaves in his yard in approximately 1/10th of the time your Boomer ass has been out there working on your own leaves and heating up the planet with your ----- gas-powered leaf blower.

Maybe–just maybe–though, you/Pops are senile enough to realize at least in part what just transpired before your very own elderly eyes.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” you say, letting out a low whistle, “what kind of mad genius have I just witnessed? The dude just mowed into oblivion every single leaf in his yard in about 6 minutes flat. I didn’t even know that was an option!”

One mystery down, one to go.

“That still leaves the question of why in the name of Hod was he mowing with one bare foot…”

“I think I owe you an explanation…” I told Pops, as I appeared out of thin air in his garage as he was winding up and putting away the extension cable he had needed to run his plug-in leaf blower.

Okay–so, side note: I just realized that it wasn’t gas-powered after all–my bad! But seriously, Pops (and any Dear Reader that might be within earshot): get one with a rechargeable battery–such as Kobalt–and I swear it will be life-changing. I got one for Christmas a few years ago, and I dare say it is hands-down perhaps one of the best (if not at least most-used) presents I have ever received.

But I digress.

Pops chuckled at the sight of me–now wearing exactly zero shoes.

“Oh…yeah…I can’t help but wonder what you were up to out there,” he admitted freely.

“Well you see, the wife and the girls are out on the town for a production of the Nutcracker, cuz, ya’ know…’tis the season and what-not, and so naturally I had to take advantage the 4-hour window in which I could be hyper-productive.”

“Yeah, I know how that goes,” Pops nodded knowingly. “But still…the shoe?”

“Anyways, after knocking out 10-12 items on my list in the first 3 hours, I had originally just planned on popping outside for few minutes to blow the leaves out of my driveway and into my front yard like I normally do. But when I got out there, I discovered that you and every other neighbor within a 2-house radius of me had just painstakingly gone through the trouble of blowing all the leaves out of your yards.”

“Yup, that’s true…” Pops concurred.

“And the piles of leaves in my yard had become quite sizable, and…and…and I just couldn’t be the neighborhood prick who was responsible for everyone’s yard being re-leafified the instant the first pre-winter wind picked up, ya know.”

“Ahh, so a bit of peer pressure, eh?”

“Um…kinda. So, that’s when I decided to put away the leaf-blower, and bust out the trusty leaf-eater instead–“

“You mean your lawnmower, right? I saw your clever little trick there–I might just start calling you LawnMower Man,” Pops attempted to quip.

“Uh…thanks? I guess?” I supposed that was an attempt at a compliment, lol. “So, yeah, but if I’m going to do that, then I better put shoes on–but know time for socks! My only hope at success would be if I didn’t let this new side quest get incrementally bloated, amiright?”

“Ok, yeah, sure. But I suppose you’re halfway to explaining this afternoon’s spectacle so far…” Pops noted.

“Right. Well, I got to mowing the leaves in the front yard, and I realized that it might be a good long while before I get the chance to do this again, so I decided to go ahead and knock out the backyard real quick too.”

“Great, so now at least the story has moved to the backyard now. That’s progress,” Pops chimed in.

“Well, there I was, just zipping right along, when all of a sudden, I realized I was starting to get a blister on my left heel. But no time for distractions! So I just kicked off my shoe without even pausing, and continued straight on in my manic pursuit to get the leaves fully mown before the ladies came home. I could always deal with my shoe later. Sorry about all that, though…I didn’t realize how gravely concerned it would cause you to be!”

Pops just let out a big ol’ old-man laugh, and slapped me on the back.

“Well, I tell you what, I got a big old chuckle out of the whole scene, so thanks for really making my afternoon! I guess it really is like the point of the story of the classic Point of the Story story, LawnMower Man, after all! Just because someone looks like a complete ----- idiot, and what-not…”

“That’s true. Well, I’m glad it brightened your day. And you have ADHD to thank for all of this. My hypothetically forthcoming t-shirts pretty much sums it–and so much of the rest of my life–pretty well.”

“And that, my friend, is the true point of the story…”

Content created on: 1/2 March 2025 (Sat/Sun)