people are dumb and bad (a rant)

i'm so annoyed right now. i just ran into two groups of neighbours at the supermarket. one of them was a nice little old lady, and the other was this young-ish (late 50's, early 60's) retired couple that have stopped smiling at us in the evening when we can see into each other's houses. i've never been sure what offence we've committed, but always assumed it had something to do with the stepbug being noisy in the yard or throwing pinecones (which, for some reason, really seems to bug them).

i hate discord and people not liking each other if there's nothing really between them, so i struck up a conversation. i know when our house came up for sale there was a lot of interest and that our present landlords got it for a song -- maybe 350K? -- it has more than doubled that value in five years. so i was asking them about this and property values on our street and trying to sympathise, but they were very flat and unforthcoming. then the lady said, "well, i noticed they [my landlords] finally mowed the lawn!"

i blinked and said, "no, we do. we mow it. regularly. we just don't have a weedwhacker, so they had someone come over to trim the few inches around the periphery that the mower can't get."

i didn't add that it had pissed me off to come home one afternoon to the grasses, flowering "weeds" and flowers i had bought and planted on purpose cut down. i had liked the foxgloves, snapdragons and buttercups -- even if they do grow unbidden. i had liked the miniature field of dwarf wild barley that had sprung up under the cedar tree. j and i would watch it undulate in the wind and admire it.

so many things are irritating me right now about this whole thing that i don't know where to start.

i'm irritated by people with golf course aesthetics. who can't appreciate a tiny (and i mean, tiny) bit of wild beauty amongst cultivation.

i'm irritated by people with no scope or imagination. why a person would be so dense as to think a lawn unmowed because of a three-inch fringe of (attractive) grass is beyond me. these are the people who see a cup, plate, three crumbs and a twist tie on the counter and think a kitchen "dirty," who equate the actively lived-in with the messy. is it something in their nervous systems? some neurotic defect that requires them to view only vacant and orderly worlds to maintain serenity? i wish they would admit it because then i could have compassion and be more helpful.

even the serene and minimalist zen tradition admires a bit of well-placed nature.

i used to generously attribute this difference of opinion to matters of taste, but i'm going to jump out of my cluttered closet right now as a despiser of relentless and bland order. i think it's actually wrong headed. i think it's the wrong taste. i think it's boring, dead, annoying, ugly, inhuman, messed up and part of what's wrong with the world, inside and out.

i'm also irritated by our landlords. (again.) i've never had a real problem with one before and it bothers me that we can't find a way to live harmoniously together. i feel that they must be new to this landlording business, otherwise i can't explain their behaviour. they told us to manage the landscaping and then, years later, show up and cut things down without warning or asking or telling or anything. i can't tell you how unsettling it is to come home and find your surroundings altered. whether a person rents or owns, he or she comes to take the appearance of their living quarters for granted. and well she should. it's her nest. every reasonably well-behaved person has a right to live unmolested. we are good tenants. they could do much, much worse. if i hadn't run into the male half of the deranged duo that owns our house and brought up the weedwhacking (asking, out of curiosity, if it was him, and saying no more) i would never have known that he also plans on cutting down the blackberry bush. i just would have come home and found it gone. our yard isn't a park. it's our yard. we nap and read and play and eat there. it's almost as much a part of what i consider my home as the inside of my house is. having someone else meddle with it makes me feel like a guest. this isn't fair.

if any of you are landlords, please be sure to fill your tenants in on any changes you plan to make.

in the meantime, they, and our neighbours, can stuff their weedwhackers, lame tickety-boo shrubs and withered plants, walmarts and other category killing mega stores, their malls, fast-food chains, and all other high and low-brow mindless mass-produced homogeneity masquerading as orderliness up the huge hole in their tiny, jazzless souls for all i care. i'm sorry to share a dying planet with these greedy, selfish, rotting boors.