Where the hell did I leave my Machete!?

Good evening Bros and Ladybros, I kept telling myself I was going to write this tomorrow, but let's face it tomorrow is just a version of today where I'm a bigger loser for putting this off.

So yesterday I mowed the lawn. As boring as this may sound to you, you all have this impression of mowing the lawn being like, some weekly thing were you begrudgingly get out of your chair and move outside to stifle the half inch of grass that has struggled it's away above your parent's pristine soft as down feathers type lawn. This as you might guess was not the case for me as rather than being the weekly tradition of "go mow the lawn," at my mothers house it is a time honored annual endeavor we like to call "The Mowing of the Lawn." This tradition marks the beginning of the spring/summer season where people's lawns suddenly matter in suburban neighborhoods, and judgement will inevitably be cast upon you when your neighbors look over to your house and see that during the winter you have let what appears to be Fangorn Forest hang out in front of your porch.

Now the "Mowing of the Lawn" doesn't have a set date every year, but just like Thanksgiving and Easter this can be placed in a relative fashion. What happens is that the rest of the year you'll hear a lawn mower maybe once every week or two, but everyone is inside watching TiVo and hibernating, thus disregarding the noise. However, once the sun comes up in April and the 9:00 AM noise restrictions are lifted, the sound of a thousand push mowers comes bugling over the horizon, essentially guilting my mother and I into action. Plus everybody knows that Pokemon hang out (loiter) in the tall grass, and I happen to be fresh out of Ultra Balls.

"The Mowing of the Lawn" is called an annual tradition because it actually involves cutting 9-11 months worth of grass growth, however the wild card thrown into the task of this chore is the 11 months worth of dog turds sitting just below the surface. You can be walking along with your mower purring and suddenly slip and dissapear under the grass forever like those poacher jerks from Jurassic Park 2. And on the note of dinosaurs, I found a cat statue in the front lawn that I had no idea existed. I then came to the horrified realization that this may very well not be a statue, but a real cat which was suddenly trapped and fast fossilized by my front lawn. I unearthed several other small boulders while traversing the lawn, and also discovered that we actually have a concrete path in our yard which leads to the back fence. I can say in all honesty that I was legitimately surprised. I did battle with the lawn in a manly fashion for a half an hour of my life that will forever be my own person Vietnam war. Wandering through a jungle, land-mines everywhere, finishing and not knowing whether I truly won, thinking it was probably just gonna go back to the way it was in about a week as soon as I looked away.

Dramatizations aside, I did put on my workin' shoes, fired up the mower and cut that lawn down to size eventually. There was a humorous point when I was like 90% done but took a short break to move the fossilized cat and ask my mom it where it belonged (my suspicions were furthered when she said it wasn't her cat statue) and as I went back to the mower and tried to fire it up. When I pulled the cord with all my might the machine made no sounds that could even be calculated as effort to start up it's engine. It simply went "fpuh" and shot a pathetic little puff of smoke out of it's front side. This of course is lawn mower for "Lol wut". 

Thankfully the mower wasn't broken, I just had to put more gas in it, flip it over and dig bits of one of Tolkien's Ents out of the underside. After finishing the last patch, Bogart our 13 year old dog ran outside and gleefully pinched a loaf next to the white picket fence. I would guess that some of his excitement was from being able to poop without fearing that a predator may be waiting in the grass a few feet away. He can also poop in clear view of the neighbors and any passerby dogs, and everyone knows that a 13 year old dog (91 in dog years) shooting a duke on the lawn while you pass by is the equivalent of a grizzled Clint Eastwood scowling and saying "Get offa my lawn..."

Later in the day I went to the gym and was reminded that I have grass allergies when I started weezing violently about two minutes into a cardio workout. But then again if I were meant to breath grass the atmosphere would be made of grass and we would mow our delightful little sky lawns. And my dog could shit on a cloud. But I digress.

You're all a bunch of bastards!

~Taylor Bonzer

Work Doodles

I have been practicing the art of stick figure emotions in my down time at work. I'm fairly proud of them.

Cadbury, you delicious bastard!

Hi everyone, believe it or not I'm still here, just been the right combination of lazy/busy/mentally blocked the last few weeks. I've had my fair share of distractions and conundrums, and perhaps more than a few ker-fuffles these last few weeks, but I'm feeling like myself again. I think instead of linking pre existing images I'm gonna start drawing my own stick comics at work when I can, then I'll scan them and pop 'em on here to properly express what's going on in my brain.  Also I should note that if you didn't find the title of this blog funny try re-reading it in a British accent and pretend you're wearing a top hat and monocle.

I started my new job recently, and made a transfer out of the lucrative market of hauling junk through mud and snow with felons, and into the world of customer sales. There was an interesting moment in the first weeks of my new job where my hands realized they weren't going to be punching lockers into dumpsters and promptly shed all of the callouses that had developed, it was then I knew I had arrived. I'm not going to name my employers specifically because unlike my last job I actually value this one and don't want to risk losing it in any way. My mom constantly reminded me that all of my slanderous speech towards Labor Ready may jeopardize my high ranking position of "guy who jumps up and down in dumpsters when they get too full." I however informed her that there was a high probability that nobody who works for labor ready has the internet, or has even heard of it due to living in the woods and eating porcupines for much of their lives. My suspicions were confirmed when I was cleaning out a barracks and two of them began to fight over a torn out magazine page with a woman in a one-piece swimsuit.

I have even been promoted at my new job to the position of "Overseer". Don't worry it is a position of legitimate authority, however it isn't quite as prestigious as it sounds. Anyways it has been a blast working there so far, within the first hour of my newfound authority I grabbed a clicker-counter out of my desk, found my lowest ranking minion and informed him that I would be clicking it once for every time he disappointed me. The rest of the day was spent looking menacingly out my window and glaring anytime he made eye contact, followed by me holding up the clicker, hitting it, and then gliding stealthily away from the window.

I still roll back into my cashier position occasionally and have discovered a  phenomena that I like to call the "Tag-along-senior." The price for admission with one senior is $15.50, which is in fact the only admission price that involves me giving out any change that isn't purely bills. Don't get me wrong folks I am a lazy person, but it isn't the having to give out coins that bothers me. It's the fact that at the end of the day I need to take a pristine pile of bills that would easily fit under a paper clip and throw in a few unwieldy chunks of metal with my deposit. It isn't like we just have one senior that shows up a day, loads of them show up in pairs, some singular senior pay with credit cards, but EVERY DAY there is just one senior that shows up with their children, and without another senior to balance out his/her change, and it always ends in me furiously stuffing coins into envelopes at the end of the day. You would think if there was one group you could count on to show up and pay in exact change it would be the elderly.

So that synopsis on jobs was more lengthy than expected, but now I'm getting to my desired topic. It's that Easter time of the year again, I say that loosely since Easter seems to be an event now which starts on February 15th and ends sometime in May when that last chump picks up a fragmented chocolate rabbit from the Easter clearance shelf for 90% off. It is usually missing an eye and seems to be crying "Why didn't anyone pick me? Was I not delicious enough?" Anyways I can always find a reason to be excited about Easter, because this is the only time of the year I can find Cadbury Cream Eggs. After all, only the death and subsequent rebirth of our Lord and Savior is proper cause to devour delicious chocolate encased sugar highs in rich cream form. Seriously would it kill anyone to just sell these things year around? And if it did kill someone wouldn't their deaths be totally worth it? If you really feel bad about selling chocolate eggs out of season why don't you just encase them in a sphere.

Also, how did all of our Holidays get tangled up in candy. I feel like back in the day somebody was like, "Hey little Billy, it's time to celebrate the coming Spring, festivity, fertility etc!" and his son said "Dad we don't live on a farm, we don't have crops or livestock, who cares." So he decided to tell the little turd there would be candy to get him away from the Super Nintendo. The catch is that this candy is the same stuff we eat the rest of the year, just put into the shapes of eggs and rabbits. Seriously, I want to go up to the kid who heckles his mom to buy him those Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs, swat him in the head and say "Hey buddy this is exactly what you've been scarfing down at the movie theaters the other 11 months of the year." And really if you told a kid there was candy any other time of the year but he would have to track it down and pull it out of a plastic egg before he could eat it he'd probably just give you the finger.

So my round about point in all this is that besides the religious celebration, the only marked difference is the pastel color theme and the appearance of my delectable Cadbury Eggs. But today when I went to Safeway to finally pick them up, they were nowhere to be found. Instead there were just shelves and shelves of every day candy smashed up and melted down into eggs, and marked up at a higher price. I'm pissed, and would have done something about it but was too caught between openly weeping right then and there, or immediately reporting them to the Better Business Bureau for being a bunch of frauds.

And ummm... that's all I have to say about that. But check out my awesome new hat!

Plus you're all a bunch of bastards.

~Taylor Bonzer