The monster is loose

I’m going outside in a few minutes. My mission – assigned and to be closely monitored by mine own dear wife – is to clean up the grass and other weeds that have begun to sprout in odd areas around the yard. You know the drill. It’s Spring and the ‘wrong stuff’ is sprouting up and if we catch it now, it’s easier to eradicate than it will be if we let it get knee high.

I accept my assignment and I’ll get ‘er done. But still, I admit to a bit of a moral dilemma.

It’s easy, looking over the sea of sprouting green to see it as something evil, worthy of my destructive attentions. Left to their own collective aims, these weeds would inexorably infiltrate and overwhelm more worthy green things. That is, stuff that’s growing at our behest. Weeds are the anarchists of the plant world – ‘anarchists’ being a less than friendly descriptor in the Seattle area where I live – and they must be dealt with.

I get all that.

But that condemnation only works if you look at the weeds collectively. From the standpoint of an individual errant blade, of the tiny dandelion seeking only to raise its delicate, golden face to the sun, the world is a scary place. And today my massive presence will sow terror in gazillions of little weed hearts.

I am Godzilla and they are the Japanese. If I go through with this, untold numbers of budding weed lives will be snuffed out by the cruel blade of my Hula Hoe. They will be tossed onto piles and then hauled away like so much trash to lie rotting in a common and unmarked grave at the community composting facility.

I now know how it feels to be the monster that’s rightfully, abjectly feared by a whole society. An entire civilization will die today at my hand.

I’ll do it. I haven’t the courage to stand up against Mary’s demands. So I will become that monster set loose on the unsuspecting.

I’ll do it. But I won’t like it.