Forty inches of rain last week availed me of the opportunity to binge some Netflix. Try out “Painkiller” when you get that binge hankering, cause its solid work. Basically, the story of how the development and promotion of oxycontin destroyed entire segments of our society in the name of corporate greed and government ineptitude.
It stars Matthew Broderick but also Taylor Kitsch, who most of us know as Tim Riggins from Friday Night Lights, probably the greatest high school fullback in the history of the high school game (I’d listen to an argument for Zach Sherman, but Riggins is at least 1 or 2). Anyway, my recommendation is watch, but don’t indulge in painkillers.
Rain or no rain, I gave up on yard work in the last year. I spent approximately 20 years trying to be a lawn God and it just didn’t take. I mowed every day, every other day, once a week, sprayed chemicals, pulled weeds and spent a ton of money over the years and the yard still looked similar to most of my neighbors. Now, I hire a guy. He comes by once a week and it still looks like most of my neighbor’s yards, and I don’t get tired one bit watching him mow.
Gonna mark this one down as life failure. Wish I had all that mower time back.
My grandfather ran a motor grader for the county and mowed his own yard. I still remember it because of the simplicity of those days. He mowed around his little cottage home that sat on a gravel road in Audrain County in the old fashioned, most efficient way possible, down to a nub. Did they even sell lawn fertilizer 50 years ago? Probably not. He would never waste money on such nonsense. He liked to fish, smoke and raise a couple tomatoes.
Hell, he didn’t want the grass to grow. He went to work, mowed the lawn and then sat in one of those webbed lawn chairs with a cold beer and lorded over his garden. The less that grass grew, the more he could sit in that chair and have my grandma lug him some Hamm’s beer.
He might have had life figured out. I should have listened closer to him.
How many Hamm’s beers could I have hammered down over those 20 years if not for wasting time and money on my yard? Do they still sell Hamm’s?
I decided to research this, and as I thought, this whole lawn thing was another corporate idea, just like all the Hallmark Holidays. As suburbs grew in population in the 1950’s and 1960’s, lawns became more of a homeowner focus, but most grasses were best suited for golf courses or pastures. Brooks Pennington, founder of Pennington Seed started focusing on grass seed for lawns, instead of agricultural and then his company, Pennington Penkote Seed Technology, made a ton of money. The government and USDA even got in on the game and helped with some technological advances.
In the 1960’s they rolled out new grass seed technology and forever ruined the beer drinking, garden overlord days of men forever.
Brooks Pennington ended up rich by stealing this time away from generations of men. He served in the Georgia State Senate for a bit, turned his company into a 200-million-dollar enterprise and was a campaign chair for President Jimmy Carter’s first campaign for governor of Georgia and was an agricultural advisor to Carter during the 1976 presidential campaign.
I’d say Brooks had a checkered past based on all this data and I’m not sure he progressed society with all this nonsense.
(Guy Speckman can be reached watching someone else mow his lawn)