I'm not a big fan of televised sports. I don't watch baseball and I the only time I watch football is bits of the Superbowl. One of the few exceptions to this unwritten rule is Timbersports. For those who don't know, Timbersports are a series of competitions based on lumberjacking skills. Axes, saws, cutting down trees, real manly stuff. It gets straight to the heart of testosterone, taking a once useful activity and turning it into a sport to show off our skill. Some may question if swinging an axe actually constitutes a sport. These are the same people who question whether golf and fishing are sports. Come to think of it, they may have a point.
The question is not whether this is a sport; the question is whether we want impressionable males watching this. Those in their early late twenties to their early forties are probably the most likely to be influenced. When many males watch sports, they get a desire to go out and play the sport themselves. With football or basketball this isn't much of a problem; they can easily go out with their friends and get a simple game going. However, trying to emulate Timbersports can lead to a big problem. You see, it's hard to find a tree that needs to be cut down. Oh sure, you could cut down a tree just because you can. Only there's a big chance that it will hit something when it falls and then you won't be allowed to watch anything else on ESPN2. Better to stick with pruning (otherwise known as cutting down only part of the tree). If you don't know what you're doing, you can kill the tree by pruning it too much or in the wrong way. While this means that you will finally have a reason to cut down the tree, replacing the tree can be costly. So if you want to prune, practice on your neighbor's trees first. Tell them that you've been doing it for years and a professional would charge them hundreds of dollars to kill their tree for them. If this doesn't work, you can always try to prune in the middle of the night while they aren't watching. However, this is very dangerous and it's a lot easier to just wait for them to go on vacation. When they get back and notice that their trees are dead; say that a nasty looking bunch of squirrels did it.
Sooner or later, you're going to run out of trees to cut down or prune. If you're still on the Timbersports kick, you could buy lumber and start making furniture. But this doesn't have the same outdoorsy feel to it. Another option is "landscaping". You see, you can't call it gardening when you're on a Timbersports kick. It just doesn't sound as impressive. Gardening brings to mind plants like begonias (which everyone knows is a sissy plant). Landscaping brings to mind moving large amounts of dirt using equipment that has its horsepower displayed prominently on the side. Image is the important thing because sooner or later someone is going to call it gardening and you're going to have to defend your ego. Make sure you have power tools on hand, as many as possible. I don't mean an electric weed-trimmer or a leaf blower that couldn't scatter dandelion seeds. I'm talking larger stuff, like riding lawnmowers, industrial roto-tillers, and chainsaws--stuff that is ready to tackle more than just the task at hand. You never know when a large section of the Amazon will show up in your backyard.
Just how likely is it that a large piece of tropical rainforest will make an appearance in a suburban neighborhood? I could have asked a so called "expert" but that would have been cheating. I decided to make up an answer myself. I decided that it must be very likely, for the simple reason that it might serve as a good reason to buy an electric hedge trimmer in the future. Besides that, I read an article online that mentioned the possibility of genetically engineering denser tomatoes in the future. As illustrated in the movie "The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" this is a bad idea. I don't know if the tomatoes in the movie were genetically engineered but something caused them to become "killer". Between violent games like "Doom" and the teasing at the hands of fancier vegetables like arugula, who knows what will set a tomato off. We must arm ourselves against the possibility of an attack by vegetables. Concealed weapon laws need to allow citizens to carry implements suitable to fending off fresh produce. If nothing is done it may not even be safe to enter a supermarket after dark.
I can't figure out exactly how I got from ESPN2 all the way to killer tomatoes, but I'd better stop before I go any further. Till next time.
-Mixed Metaphor
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