Team Marvelous 1, Hippies 0

Mentioned in passing, Toombsday and I had more than a challenge to locate a roomy apartment for cheap in Indianapolis. After months of scouring classifieds and beating the pavement, we finally found a place in between downtown and Broad Ripple with a monthly rent that is scandalous, especially since this particular lease doesn’t include gang beat-ins or prostitute baby mamas.

A new place was necessary because Toombsday’s computer is a living, wheezing organism that fills a room easily. The new place wasn’t charming when we first saw it -- climbing ivy overtook the siding, blue tarps covered missing awnings, eerie spiders cackled at us from the corners of the walls. But it had a basement and a second room to house our demon a.k.a. the computer.

We met our neighbors the second evening -- when they decided to have every single punk rock kid in the neighborhood come over, drink P.B.R., listen to Dead Kennedys, vomit on the front lawn and climb on cars. One day Toombsday came home from work when they were trying to kill insects with a lighter and an aerosol. Eventually they left their burnt couches on the curb and abandoned the place. For some reason their shenanigans didn’t bother me.

But then the hippies moved in. With their patchouli and midwifery. And their dreadlocks. And the basic lazy I-don’t-need-to-work-screw-the-man type behavior. It's not that I scorn hippies. I concur with Sherman Alexie’s quote: “all hippies [are] trying to be Indians.” I, too, eat barley, salute the sun and buy locally. This is all fine and good. They can fight the corporate system all they want until the bastards mow a line down my lawn.

I have this thing, you see, with spinning metal objects. This quirk comes from my fifth grade nemesis Kelly who accidentally cut off his toes with a lawnmower. It didn’t help when Megatron recounted an incident involving a nest of baby bunnies and a lawnmower either. I don’t mow and I have literally lost friendships over the subject. It doesn’t have anything to do with outdoors stuff -- I have hauled wood, built fences and routed irrigation systems for hippies. But I don’t mow. That’s the point of renting -- to have someone mow for you. Because home ownership is complicated and there are more things to deal with on a daily basis.

Then I came home the other night. The hippies decided that the lawn needed a cut. But only particular parts of the lawn. And those parts were disproportionate to who actually occupied the lawn. I felt like the disadvantaged Brady kid, sulking because my sibling divided our room with an indivisible line -- except my part of the line only had a closet and my self-centered sibiling had the side with the front door and the bathroom.

Do you see the irony? The hippies “fuck the corporate” using boundaries to claim ownership on my front lawn? This is a socialist system we have running on this corner lot, which translates into: we pay the landlord to do this for us; let him mow the lawn. I don’t care if your baby gets lost in the dandelions while we wait for him. You will not cut the grass (but pick up your dog’s poop…that’s gross).

So I got angry. I knocked on the door with full intentions of confronting them, or at least handcuffing them to the stair railing and shearing off their dreads like a good Indian. They weren’t there. I was still angry when I woke up yesterday and composed a Lincoln-Douglas value analysis to present to our landlord. And before I could hit the send button, Toombsday called to say, "Don’t worry about it. Dave (the landlord) came by and finished the job."

And to that I say, justice is served. So put that in your ear candle and smoke it. Hippie bitches.