A Plea for Gas-Powered Leaf-Blowers
By: Benjamin Cain
Tags: Consumerism, The Bad Influence, Fiction, Comedy, Satire

You had second thoughts about removing your leaves in autumn.

That’s why my crew of landscapers with our gas-powered leaf-blowers did you the favor of offering the added service of transferring the leaves from your lawn and backyard to the interior of your home.

After all, you remembered nostalgically that when you were a kid walking home from school, you used to go out of your way to step on the piles of browning orange, red, and yellow leaves on the sidewalk just to hear the exquisite crunching sounds.

Was it an early onset of ASMR, before that became a thing? Either way, my team fulfilled your request, so you’re welcome!

And all while we professional leaf-blowers suffer the slings and arrows hurled by complainers who say we’re too noisy and should instead be using rakes.

But this is the twenty-first century and rakes are too slow for removing leaves. Also, if the rake is lying in the grass, you can step on its pointy end and smack your face with the long incoming handle.

I take it you might approve of that comical outcome. Be honest with yourself; you’d love it if I were to unstrap my gas-powered leaf blower, step accidentally on a rake and smack my face hard with the wooden handle. You would, wouldn’t you!

You must be one of those fancy suburbanites that wants to watch your big-screen TV or read a book or hear yourself think without the cacophony from our bulbous, orange and white, gas-powered leaf-blowers, without being subjected early in the morning to the equivalent of screeching from blind and hideous Azathoth, from that god of chaos that squats at the gates of Hell to assure its inhabitants there’s no escape.

You, too, must be lamenting that you can’t evade the baffling noise pollution from our labour which assaults your ears, not even if you shut all your windows, seal your doors and pray for just a moment of peace in those especially-taxing summer months, when you need to open your windows to let in a little air, but you can’t because doing so would hold you captive to the brunt of that unbelievably-loud droning that sounds like a chainsaw passing through a mile-wide tree.

But no, we can’t help you there, because we don’t mess with rakes like feudal peasants. We prefer to go around with big, honking, gas-powered leaf-blowers strapped to our backs, like evil ghostbusters, except we’re tasked with cleaning unwanted leaves off of grass — as if grass could ever be clean! Would you want to roll around in grass?

But we leaf-blowers oblige and are here to serve, so again you’re welcome!

It’s hard to credit, but the other day my crew and I were standing by our truck, parked on the street after a long day of clearing leaves and filling the very stratosphere with the appalling, deafening blasts from our shiny, gas-powered leaf-blowers, when a home-owner drove slowly by, leaned out his open window and started yelling at us — presumably for being too loud.

As if we could hear a word he said with our noise-canceling ear muffs on.

I suppose that annoys you, too, the fact that we terrorize the neighbourhood, violating all the noise by-laws with no legal repercussions, while we, the very unapologetic offenders have the audacity of tucking ourselves away in nirvana, thanks to the cute little ear muffs astride our tanned heads.

Admit it, you’d just love to tear off those ear muffs and tie the gas-powered leaf-blower hose around our neck like a noose so the roaring machine would do its worst straight into our ears. I know you would.

But have you stopped to consider why we’re in business in the first place? You’re the ones in search of a perfect lawn of green grass unspoiled by fallen leaves, by those symbols of death immortalized in psalm 103: the Lord “is mindful that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass — he blooms like a flower of the field; when the wind passes over, it vanishes, and its place remembers it no more.”

So yes, we leaf-blowers are only unforgivably-noisy caterers to your insistence on having pristine lawns, and here again we’ve obliged with that bonus service of depositing the collected leaves throughout the rooms of your home, just so you can have the First World pleasure of trampling them.

You’re welcome!

Will you complain now as well when you call us to remove the leaves we blew into your kitchen and hallways, when we once again don our rifle-shaped, gas-powered leaf-blowers like Rambo, gain entry and blow the leaves and all your earthly belongings hither and thither, giving you no semblance of peace even in your inner sanctum, deafening you with ungodly noise that seems to last on and on until the Sun engulfs the Earth, all while we, the culprits add insult to injury by wearing those noise-cancelling ear muffs?

Will you try to get a word in edgewise while my crew stomps around your bedroom, blowing the leaves along with your clothes and jewelry and duvet all around the place, drowning out your objections?

Of course you will.