A stupid bunny had her clutch of babies in the middle of our lawn this month which I discovered while doing a household chore I picked up because my wife hates it, which is watering the summer plants on our deck and the new perennials we’ve planted in the yard (dogwoods to give us some privacy from our neighbors who are jerks! a cherry tree! to partially replace the dead tree we had to pay SIX GRAND to remove! lungwort! some other stuff I don’t know anything about!) and while I was doing this I was like, oh I’ll water the lawn a bit in this area where it is drying out for some reason. Like, it’s been hot! Our lawn service keeps not coming on time and so the meager rain we get doesn’t reach the roots because the grass is too long! I hate having a lawn! But this big dead patch is bumming me out because it’s where Bruno likes to run around. So I’m watering it, fence to fence, walkway to fence, not heavy but enough. And there’s a big clump of loose grass in the middle and I think it’s because we had some other people come handweed all our flower beds because neither of us can physically handle that kind of work and they did a nice job, but I had seen some detritus chucked about which is fine! It’ll just become compost basically! It wasn’t seedy stuff! I probably wouldn’t care if it was!
So I start spraying the clump to roll it back toward the hole it must have come from and then it like… wriggles. And I’m like… snake! Monster! Evil! Creature! And then I’m like… … Wait… … No no, no no no no NO, and I scurry over because it’s fucking BABY BUNNIES!!!!!! That I have now accidentally tried to DROWN!!!!! So I do at least a dozen aborted turns with the turned-off hose in my hand and I grab a small box that was on the deck and with my bare hand I sort of… guide the bunnies as a writhing mass to move out of the hole a little bit while the water (thankfully) absorbs into the (thankfully) very dry earth and they can go back in. And they’re wet! And rat sized! And gross! And abandoned in the middle of my stupid lawn because that’s what stupid rabbits do! And I do more aborted motions trying to decide what to do — still with the box in my hand for no reason — because our lawn service comes so randomly and all I can picture is a bunny massacre if they manage to survive my attempted drowning so then I’m grabbing some big rocks that used to circle the base of the previously mentioned tree and I make a little circle around this stupid bunny hole in the middle of my lawn and I get the hose put away and I go inside and I fucking LOSE IT on the phone to my wife about how I almost killed some bunnies.
And like, you’re lucky to spend most of your life reliably turning to the adult in the room, but at some point you become the adult and it sucks. I wanted a grownup! I did not want to deal with the bunnies! I am too sensitive for fucking bunnies!!!!
Anyway, despite a Herculean attempt at idiocy on my part and lawn people who ignored our sign to not mow near the bunnies (thank god for the rocks!) they all seem to have survived their brief, helpless bunnyhood interlude in the middle of our yard and are now thriving about the neighborhood with all the other bunnies and ducks and squirrels and chipmunks and geese and turkeys.
Anyway!
I haven’t done or seen or liked anything this month. We’ve had a lot of really stupid boring adult issues — Our new car’s internet isn’t working which shouldn’t matter at all except that’s how the GPS works! We wasted like three hours of a day being sold windows by a 22 year old moron! Medical stuff! Money stuff! House stuff! Being alive requires too much administrative time! — and it’s really nerfed my ability to pay attention or enjoy anything and that’s the most annoying thing in the world to me. I played a lot of hours of Pokopia again even though at least once per session I stop and think, “Why the fuck am I doing this? Am I even having fun?” and the answer is, “I don’t know!” to both of them, which doesn’t feel like a great use of my time, but literally what can you do!
Okay, let’s try a little harder…
I did recently enjoy the first book of Lightfall by Tim Probert and Little Witch Hazel by Phoebe Wahl and At Risk by Alice Hoffman. And I’ve been listening to Heart to Gold — mostly their 2018 release Comp which is great, very Sunny Day Real Estate/Jawbreaker/Stars but with a pop punkier side — and I am rediscovering a bunch of jams from 2013 that I completely forgot about because I was going through my iCal cleaning up some stuff and saw/remembered that I posted a song a day on Tumblr in 2013 — because I meticulously documented it of course — and started picking random ones I didn’t remember to listen to. Here’s the playlist in progress! It’s funny how many of the songs I still do listen to regularly and also how many I had completely lost until I heard them again, probably mostly because I transitioned from listening to my own mp3s in iTunes to streaming everything on Spotify between then and now. So much lost for convenience!
I’ve also been on Pinterest a lot, which is mildly embarrassing, but there is something very soothing about looking at my meticulously curated feed and pinning nonsense to boards. It’s mostly holiday art and vintage advertisements and recipes for food I’ll never make — aspirational masochism! — and because I have done my best to weed out/pick all the settings that minimize AI (and use a browser with an adblocker ALWAYS) I mostly only see the kind of garbage I’m interested in.
Okay, well! I tried my best!
We donated to Indidgenous Climate Action, Save the Boundary Waters, and NDN Collective this month.
As always let me know if you have somewhere you think I should donate or if you want to recommend me some pop culture or if you just have something you really need to say! ashrocketship [at] gmail. Love you!
