OK, after yesterday’s sloth-fest, I kicked it into gear, beginning work today at 8:30 and plowing through all of the remaining poetry submissions in the Inch submissions manager.  A small handful that we liked and were considering had been pending for entirely too long, a disservice to the authors that I hope not to repeat now that the graduate work is finished.  (Our new intern Jordan has been diligently learning the ropes, and shows such a keen eye for fiction that I hope he’ll stick around as a reader even after the summer is up: Bill and I have five fiction submissions left to discuss and we’ll be ready to send fiction contracts, as well.)  I also filled this week’s orders, sent a care package to a friend who is home with her family, and got five submissions of my own out into the wild.  So, it was a massively productive morning.  Clearing those tasks off my plate has me feeling much more mentally prepared for the day job tomorrow… a feeling I did not have at any point last week, when I stumbled through the workweek with a groggy sense that I didn’t belong anywhere near that office.

But the real triumph of the day was mowing the lawn.  Longtime– and I do mean longtime– readers may remember that my most transcendent moments all seem to occur when I’m mowing the lawn, be they revelations about where my life is headed or 70’s porn moments.  (Man, I wish I had not lost all the blog comments when I moved from Moveable Type to WordPress… some of the comments accompanying that latter entry were pure gold.)

I hadn’t mowed my own lawn in over a year, since I discovered early last summer that the mower had died.  I honestly don’t recall how I managed to make it through last summer, but this summer I was paying the same guy that mowed for my next door neighbor.  Until, that is, one of the kids from the neighborhood offered to mow for me.  He’s a good guy– I had met him through Lisa– but a total stoner.  I never had any way to contact him, so when the lawn was hilariously overgrown, he’d appear a couple days later.  He would borrow lawnmowers from whoever he could borrow from, and a couple of times he asked me for a raise from $25 to $30, which is what I had been paying him all along (so I always agreed and let him think he was getting a raise).  He would sometimes bring a stoner friend; occasionally I would bring him dinner.  When I found out he was 21, which completely shocked me since I assumed he was 16, I would sometimes hang out and drink a beer with him on the front stoop when he’d finished.

Just before residency, he came by late at night (did I mention he never began mowing before 8:30 PM?) and couldn’t finish the whole yard before it got too dark, so he left the side yard unmowed and said he’d get it in the morning.  I went ahead and paid him since I was leaving in the morning, but when I got back into town, the lawn looked decidedly overgrown in that area.  He came by Wednesday night, late once again, and finished only the front yard (though he did manage to mow an X into the back yard… why that happened, I cannot be entirely sure).  I paid him when he said he’d be back in the morning, but as of this morning, it was still looking pretty rough.

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, I’ve been outwitted twice by the neighborhood stoner.  So, cognizant that spending another $30 would likely get no more than a small swath of my lawn cut– I would suspect that he was conditioning me to expect less and less, until he could one day ring the bell and have me just hand him thirty bucks, saying “See you in a couple weeks,” but seriously, the kid is a mad stoner and I just don’t think there’s enough guile there to undertake a summer-long program of conditioning– I finally got my mower up and running, a process which proved much easier than I had envisioned, and spent an hour puttering around that lawn, choking the mower almost to death in the thick patches that hadn’t been mowed in quite some time.

It’s a little thing, chopping up the grass on a patch of land that you own (or that your wife owns and allows you to manicure).  And it’s a little thing, finishing a job left undone by your neighborhood stoner.  But for about an hour this afternoon, I felt like the returning conqueror, like the hero in a late-night western, like the king of the fucking world.