Breakdown (It's Alright)

It seems I can't do anything right. The last few times I've mowed the grass, I spent a couple hours painstakingly grooming every inch of the front and back yard with the gangly, shuddering hunk of metal and plastic that is our mower. My parents don't seem to think I've done well enough; their complaints mainly pertain to the few blades of grass on the immediate perimeter of the house and on the precipice of the rock-lined flowerbed in the back yard, areas which range from exceedingly difficult to evidently impossible to reach with our current machine. My mother purchased a trimmer for this very purpose, although when I went out today to mow my father instructed me to ignore this device and just get all up in the flowers, "really put some muscle into it."

I finished the front without incident (though I avoided the patchy area encircled by the ankle-high upraised tree root, the terrors of which I detailed in this post) and did the bottom half of the back with somewhat less enthusiasm than usual. (When your progress is impeded by your inability to determine which sections of grass you have and haven't mowed, the result is a small but not insubstantial existential dilemma.) When I got to the top I attempted to put into action this half-baked muscle-based method of which my father spoke. After murdering some innocent flowers and dislodging several rocks from their decorative positions, the mower let out a violent snap, ejected one side of the filter casing, and--either from the damage done or from my terrified release of the safety bar--died with a whir, slumped halfway over the mulch. Somewhere in the near distance an alarmed dog barked in agitation. I left the mower strewn in the plants and went inside, utterly trounced.