Growing concerns about grass, toenails

My idea of a perfect day is anyone but me mowing my lawn while someone lovely gives me a pedicure.

It’s never happened. I don’t expect it ever will.

In peak growth season, I cut the grass at least once a week and my toenails -- they’re perennials -- about once every ten days.

Both ought to be cut more often, but they are maybe the two most dreary maintenance tasks of my entire existence.

I used to enjoy mowing the lawn at the old house where I had an old push mower. Guys get a pit crew rush out of any manual labor with a racing element.

I could speed mow the old lawn in 37 sweaty minutes. Of course, when it was done that rapidly, there were bound to be casualties. I’d carelessly mow down rose bushes, ornamental hedges and occasionally my sunbathing wife.

But it was always a thrill to dash to the ‘frig for some quencher suds and look up at the clock and see -- shazam! -- I’d shaved another 30 seconds off my best time.

That’s never happened when I mow my toes, the most tedious grooming task in a dapper gent’s life.

I’m forever barraged by advertisements hoping to get me to purchase pharmaceuticals that will get parts of me to grow. I’m thinking, of course, primarily of my hair and my penis.

No thanks.

I have all the hair I need.

For reasons of taste I’ll refrain from detailing the reasons why I don’t wish to see my intimacies extended. It’d be unseemly and I wouldn’t want to start a riot among the groupies.

But how come there’s no pill to halt toenail growth? It’s not like hair styles. You don’t get bored with the length of your toenails and one day think, what the hell, I think I’ll go for a Katy Perry look.

No, they’re just little utilitarian toe helmets. You can paint them, but I can’t imagine even the foot fetish deviants slobber over nail length.

I try and trim mine before they get long and sharp enough to sever Val’s Achille’s tendon when I crawl in for a snuggle.

I’ve only had one pedicure in my life and I recall it with the same emotional gratitude as the night I lost my virginity.

It was a revelation. I did it for a travel story and wrote about it in this very early blog post, one of my first 10 or so. The above picture is the result (you can play guess the feet!).

But I can’t justify paying someone to cut my toenails so at some point today I’ll grab the clippers and start rolling around on the floor like a chubby contortionist.

And I’d be mocked if I paid a kid to climb on the old John Deere and mow the lawn for me.

Most people would be more understanding if I’d get busted paying for sex with a prostitute, something a married man would never dream of doing -- at least admit out loud to dreaming of doing.

It’s probably true that I could find 100 prostitutes who’d take money to have sex with me, but none of them who’d take the same amount to come to my house and mow my lawn.

I guess they have their own set of standards which we’ll without further comment here call cockeyed.

This is just one of those days when I wish all the companies devoted to researching ways to make everything grow bigger and faster would about face and figure out ways to make everything stop growing.

I want things like my grass, my toe nails and my darling little daughters to stop growing and just stay the same as they are. Same goes for my sports leagues, the number of TV channels I receive or my waistline.

Enough with growth. Enough with expansion.

Please don’t grow alarmed at my odd melancholy.

The feeling will pass.

I’ll grow out of it.