So here I am, relaxing in my backyard on a warm summer day when from out of nowhere I hear a tiny buzzing sound approaching from behind at a leisurely 100 miles per hour. It sounds like I’m about to be strafed by a Word War II fighter plane flown by a Smurf, and I turn around just in time to see a TWELVE LEGGED, WINGED ALIEN FROM THE 8TH DIMENSION RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY FACE!

Well, sort of.

Before me hovers a terribly vicious looking insect that does indeed have twelve legs and giant wings and enough eyes to keep my optimologist in business for years. And I’m not sure about this, but it looks like he probably has a gun.

You’ve all seen this sort of insect. It’s big, it’s scary and it’s about an inch from my face. Sure, I’ve been told “they don’t bite” or “don’t worry they’re harmless.” I’m not worried about it biting, I’m worried about it flying into my mouth or getting stuck in my hair or doing unspeakable things with my wife or stealing my car.

And even though there’s real no danger of this insect that is only inches from my nose, I instinctively commence jumping around and swatting at the thing as though someone filled my pants with Jell-O and sent 40,000 volts of electricity through my testicles. Combined with my screams of surprise and disgust any neighbors that are watching (in suburbia the neighbors are always watching) must surely think I’m possessed by demons or being riddled with maching gun fire. This is, after all, Northern New Jersey.

It is reasonable to say that I’m not much of a fan of insects.

Sure, I could use some sort of bug spray to keep the bugs away. The only bug spray that really works does so by smelling so horrific that you never want to use it and you just decide to stay inside watching TV and eating cheese doodles all day where very few bugs will get to you.

I’m not sure why human scientists can put a man on the moon, store a bazillion hours of music onto a device no bigger than a pack of cigarrettes and give us unlimited access to photos of naked people from all over the world (and, in some countries, their farm animals) but they can’t make a bug spray that doesn’t smell like a mix of cheap perfume and diesel gasoline with just a hint of Agent Orange.

It is for this reason that I’m leery of standing near people who wear a lot of bug spray on a hot summer days. I just don’t want to hear someone say, “Uh oh, little Johnny just burst into flames. Must be kinda warm in that sun.”

Bug sprays only temporarily repel insects, but I think it’s about time I consider a more long-term solution to my bountiful build-up of backyard bugs.

I think I need a “bug zapper.”

The bug zapper is proof, without a doubt, that humankind kicks ass. What other race of being in all the universe would create a mesmerizing blue light that bugs find irrestiable and then surround it with a deadly electrified mesh for the sole purpose of annihilating everything that approaches it. Sure, I know bug zappers are “serious” insect control devices, but dammit, I think these things are the best darn outdoor entertainment device to come along since the portable TV and beer can cozie.

I have such fine childhood memories of warm summer evenings when my whole family would sit on the porch drinking lemonade talking about our day while we watched millions of insects seek peace in that soothing blue light, only to be instantly fried and sent to Hell moments before reaching their heavenly goal. The air was filled with sizzles, pops, and hundreds of tiny screams I can still hear in my dreams. The white sparks and mini explosions of insect parts gave my family, and indeed the whole neighborhood, it’s own small fireworks show. There was nothing quite as pleasureable as putting 110,000,000 volts through so many of God’s smaller creatures in such a short amount of time.

And I’ll never forget those rare nights when the lights inside our house would go dim for for several long seconds and Grandpa would smile and nod his head and lick his lips, exclaiming excitedly: “Good eatin’ tonight! Another bird’s hit the zapper!”

Ah, memories…

To sum up, I would like to say tha-

Ouch! I was just bitten by something.

Damn. That really bugs me…

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So, maybe you’ve been living under a rock. Maybe you haven’t had an internet connection, working email address, television or hand held radio. Maybe you have no friends and no one has spoken to you in months.

Then you certainly need to be cheered up with this video that’s been sweeping the nation (world?) as the next cool thing until next week comes along: a video of two guys creating a mini version of the Las Vegas Bellagio Fountains created with 2 liter bottles of Diet Coke and lots of Mentos. They put the video with a catchy little soundtrack on their EepyBird website.

The website has a few other videos and brief explanation of how this was done. These guys were even featured on All Things Considered this afternoon.

I really, really wish I had that much free time…

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The phrase “unmitigated disaster” comes to mind when people talk about my lawn.

You see, I have many moral and legal obligations to uphold as the male homeowner of a house in the Great American Suburbs:

1. I am required to have at least one SUV in my driveway at all times.

2. I am required to talk about the weather when I meet my neighbors.

3. I must always, always, always maintain and obsess over having a suburban lawn so perfect it belongs in a Sears catalog.

But I’m not really much of a “plant” kind of guy. I have what the ancient Greeks called the “Round-Up” touch where just about any plant I come in contact with shrivels and dies in a matter of days. The only time I’ve ever been accused of having a “green thumb” is when I accidentally stuck my hand in a can of green paint….

I have two big problems with my lawn: the front yard and the back yard. The only reason I don’t have three big problems is because my side yard is a slab of cement and I’ve been able to maintain that quite well, thank you.

My front yard falls into the “good from afar but far from good” category. If you are driving past my front yard at 100mph you might at first think, “Oh, what a nice, green patch of land.”

But when you actually stop and walk across my front lawn you begin to realize that a green lawn doesn’t necessarily mean there’s any grass there. In my case there isn’t. I have plenty of green stuff like small weeds, moss and some sort of strange groundcover plant which can clearly lay claim to being a direct descendant of Audrey from The Little Shop of Horrors. This groundcover spreads through my yard faster than “Support Our Troops” bumper ribbon magnets spread across the pickup trucks of Alabama.

I’ve tried just about everything I can to grow grass including seeding, fertilizing, tilling, thatching, aerating, spraying, raking, reseeding, liming, screaming, cursing, drinking, dancing and sacrificing chickens.

It was during one of these lawn work sessions that my elderly neighbor Bob walks over to the end of his property and watches me. Bob has lived in the neighborhood since it was built forty years ago and regular tells bawdy stories about the people who have moved away. Bob needs a hobby.

“Nice weather we’re having….” he begins.

“Yeah, nice and warm. How you doing, Bob?”

“Good. Good. Working on your lawn?” he asks.

No, I just regularly drag a rake around my front lawn when I’m taking a shower. “Yeah, Bob, I guess you caught me.”

“Your pH is all out of wack. And your soil density isn’t ideal. Might try putting down some lime.”

“I did that last year, Bob.”

“Yeah… August 21st is too late to do that. And you can’t do it after a rain. Has to be dry.”

“Umm…okay…”

“Hey, that’s a nice SUV you have there…”

“Thanks, Bob…” I say as I hurry inside and make a mental note to keep the blinds closed in the windows that face Bob’s house.

And though you wouldn’t think it possible, my back yard is actually much worse than my front yard. Why? Because you can see the tragedy of my back yard from outer space.

At the right you see a photo taken by satellite of my neighborhood. It’s a typical suburban setting with trees and houses and roads and all sorts of hanky-panky going on with the milkman during the day.

But, wait! What’s that strange round thing in the photo? Is it a crop circle? Could it be a helicopter landing pad? Is it a piece of dust on the satellite lense? Is it a secret underground missile silo? Nope. Nope. Nope. And probably not.

If you look closely at that round thing you’ll see why my back yard is one of the most craptacular back yards in existence: it has a crater. Like on the moon. Only this crater is filled with sand and stones and various pieces of cement lodged in the ground. I can assure you that it looks about 100 times worse from our back windows than it does from the sky. Dogs yelp and childen weep when they see my back yard.

We’re not sure where the crater even came from. Did a meteor the size of a marble smash into my backyard 50 years ago? Did a mini tornado touch down here at one point? Is it a giant burial site for a prehistoric Pac-Man? My wife thinks it was once the place for an above ground pool. That’s just crazy, of course. She’s also tried to “help” by making suggestions about what I should do about the crater:

“Why don’t you dig out all the sand and stone and fill it in with dirt and grass?”

“Yes, of course,” I respond. “I’ll put that on my list of the 185,000 other things I have to do. Besides, this crater is twenty-five feet round and about 6 inches deep.”

“It doesn’t look that big…”

“That’s because you’re not holding a shovel and standing in the middle of it. And where should I put all that sand and stone once I dig it out?”

“You can’t spread it around the yard?”

I am thankful that my wife does not have have a job involving landscaping.

So I live in a house with a front yard that resembles a science experiment gone bad and a back yard with a crater that can be seen from the space shuttle. I could always napalm the front yard and start from scratch in a year and I could always throw 100 pounds of grass seed on the crater and see what happens.

Then again….there is that can of green paint.

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