Yardwork Is A Big MisRake

Being your average High School kid, my bitch-ass friends decided that they don’t need me anymore.  This saves them not only minutes on the phone bill, but also the trouble of wasting their time hanging with me.
Now that I am friendless I can spend my time on more important things, such as the study of quantum physics, helping with a cure for cancer, and raking my front lawn.

Whoever said that Fall was a beautiful season was obviously only alive for the one day that it is.  Autumn is based off of the Greek word “Disautoums.”  Disa meaning “to change color” and utoums meaning “for one day until they all fall to the ground and make your lawn look ugly.”  As I looked out the car window yesterday, I saw everyone else’s trees turn into bright shades of orange, red, and yellow.  When we pulled into my driveway and I stared up at our 6 oak trees rudely protruding out of my green lawn, I did not see orange, red, or yellow.  I saw the same brown leaves hanging there just like they do the other 4 seasons of the year.  Only this time there were less of them, because Autumn seems to cause oak leaves to grow suicidal and jump off their branch.  Whether the leaves died or not, they polluted my lawn and forced me to rake it.

There are rumors that during World War II the Nazis planted oak trees in the concentration camps and forced the Jews to rake them.  Seemingly the Jewish people begged Hitler to simply kill them in a giant holocaust rather than make them rake the ugly, brown leaves.  Although there are many historic items that support this idea (It is said that Anne Frank drew pictures of rakes in her diary) I do not believe this strictly because I feel the Germans could never have been that cruel. Sure, killing over 6 million people for no reason may seem a bit harsh, but I sternly believe that even
Hitler has enough heart so that he wouldn’t make the Jewish people rake.

My dad however, would.  He had no problem throwing me a rake and forcing me to move the ugly brown leaves outside his house.  If you have ever climbed a rock wall or hiked Mount Everest, you would get the idea of how steep my father’s lawn is.  So as I stood there at the bottom of this 80 degree “hill,” equipped with only a rake and a leaf bag, I began the rake.

What is it about raking that seems to boost your self-esteem for a good quality 5 minutes, and then makes you feel like absolute crap for the other 115 minutes?  In the beginning you’re always like “Wow, this is pretty easy, these leaves aren’t that wet and heavy after all,” but as your stuff your second back you think “Whoever invented leaves should be shot on site.”  It also didn’t help that I was forced to rake the day that Hurricane Bob ran through Arlington.  The 200 mph winds were constantly ruining my piles and toppling my leaf bags.  I was expecting Mary Poppins to come gliding down with her umbrella and start singing “A spoon full of arsenic makes your father, go down.”

All in all the raking built character, which is always good then you’re yelling at your children for how
spoiled they are:

“Back in my day, I had to rake the leaves on my 80 degree angled lawn with winds of 200 mph and Mary Poppins singing in my ear”

There were many occasions in which I asked my dad why we didn’t make a very smart investment in one of those leaf grinders htat suck up the leaves, chops them up really small, and puts them in a bag for more efficient raking.  To this he simply stared blankly at me for a few seconds before going back to work.  Obviously he couldn’t think of anything to say to prove me wrong.  There is really nothing wrong with getting a machine that does the work for you.  My friends have one and they rake all of their leaves in a total of 73 seconds.  I guess that if my dad wanted something that sucks to pick up our leaves, he would have asked my brother to help (booyah).

All of the raking made my usually athletic legs grow very weary and tired, as well as made my hands get intense blisters.  The leaves all absorbed the water which wouldn’t even let me jump in them (not that it would have mattered, because my lawn is like a steep water ride and I would have slid into the street) and made me very upset.  So when the day was done I was basically a:

Super callused agile pissed kid blessed with leaf osmosis.

HAHA TAKE THAT MARY POPPINS!!!!