Gunkin' Man Vs. Nature, Plus Photo Dump, April 1, 2023

Last Sunday eve, as I was stretching out an Achilles that threatened to go berserk after a spate of rain-sodden, increased-distance runs, I remembered that I'd completely blanked on the abdominal portion of my last gym visit. Always mindful of impressing Coop, and believing that in certain narrow angles of light I was seeing a bit of progress, I laid on my back to perform the Maniac Ladybugs and God-Facing Swans of penitence.

Only, the energy wasn't there. I'd had a brief sore throat in the morning, and the back of the house immediately mapped these aberrant blips to one another. I typically feel a bias toward attacking the physical tasks ahead — there are so very many of them piling up and intertwining at all times that immediate action, rather than deferral, is actually the laziest, most calorie-saving strategy — so this icky twist of the helix gave me leave to consider a day or two of convalescence.

What an awful idea, I thought. How would I get the old house on the market, the new house ready for the wedding (we're hosting the wedding at our fixer-upper in September), and rejoice in frolicking through the unfurling bolts of high-octane, early Spring sunlight that were now toppling and bounding down from the blue? Beetles, ravens, and osteopaths were outside my window, rutting and plunging and spurting with resplendent fecundity, yet there I would lay, head-to-toe in gray sweats, propped against a pillow and snoozing the latest round of intellectually disappointing Facebook friends. What a worm.

After five days of cautious engagement with the universe, during which I finished two comics, re-floored the landing at the old house, and moved a few carloads of forgotten junk to the darkest corners of the new basement, I'd had enough with this namby-pamby collapse into self-pity. It was time to remove the stand of pampas grass in the front yard, literally speaking.

Pampas grass — one of which sprouted in each glowing footstep of the Tyrannosaurus Rex — looks like a Hungarian Sheepdog crossbred with a hydrothermal vent. Our two specimens were six feet tall, with roots reaching nearly eleven feet into the earth, and tens of thousands of blades of fire emanating from every angle. These are the sort of plant Southern men chain to their trailer hitches, moments before angrily filing a claim with their automotive insurance provider.

With mattock, spade, and pail, I would sweat the virus out of me.

The poor soil around the first stand crumbled easily beneath the tools, and, after much welcome toil, a trench four feet deep surrounded my quarry. I sat on the rim, gave it a hearty shove with my legs, and...nothing. If you have ever, at the end of a long evening, laid on your back and tried to snap a telephone pole off with your heels, you will be familiar with the sensation.

Fortified by peanuts and fruit-punch-flavored sparkling water, I inhumed myself anew in the cavern that grew beneath the root ball. I beat it with a ten-pound sledge. I worried it with a serrated trowel. Inch by inch I severed the roots, which ranged from gnocchi to capellini in thickness.

Butting it squarely with my chest and anchoring my feet against the trench wall, I pushed again, with all the forehead-popping fury of a football man going at the tire sled. I visualized steel and jockstraps. I monitored the air for the scent of burnt toast.

To my considerable surprise, it gave. An inch at first, but that was all that I, the man-water between its nature-bricks, needed. A few more shoving matches yielded the snapping of its own thousands of Achilles tendons, and soon it lay on its side. Three cinematic sessions with the axe then had its three-hundred pound mass in manageable, wheelbarrow-size loins and barons.

The job done, I went to the basement, stripped to my skivvy, and threw my mud-crusted duds into the wash for a lengthy soak. After an unusually productive shower, during which rusted bottlecaps and small branches ran in dark runnels across the tile, I dressed, stood before the couch, and realized, not a moment too soon, that I was about to topple over from exhaustion.

As I lay there on the couch, the beneficent afterglow of exertion washed over me. I could not be bothered to participate in my usual pastime of snoozing morally offensive Facebook friends. When Lauren announced she was going to buy cat food, I could think of no finer excursion, and begged to join her. I coughed and spat the entire way, but was happy as a Lab out a window — a particularly apt metaphor, considering I'd been asked to hold my head out the window.

Today I'm not much worse for it, but have decided to spend the day writing and choosing the evening soup. The closest I got to a workout was when an electrician came by to estimate the cost of undoing the things the previous electrician had done, but with some careful breathing, and visualization exercises involving the previous electrician weeping before God in a crown of sparking copper, my heart rate maintained a healthy level.