Dear Sweden, thanks for all the glug. We really love glug. Or maybe that's Norway. As if there was a difference.

I mowed my lawn for the last time of the season.  I guess you could say I mowed my lawn for the first time of the season and that would also be true.

I could really use the exercise, I'm afraid I've let myself go.

I used to be sleek and fast like an otter, now mostly I sit and think important things.  And eat.

I've come to look a bit like this fellow but with bigger teefs.

http://www.powerofthepens.com/myimages/se7en_gluttony.jpg

It's a fine time when your neighbors are calling the police on you after you've spent the long, hot months protecting them from evil on the innernets and mediocre online prons all the while at a cool temperature of 68 degrees, never able to suck in the strong humid air or feel the blessed sun on your pale, fleckless sin.  Skin.

A fine thing indeed, an ounce of respect never asked for, nor never given but in come the police with orders to mow my grass and look presentable and I guess I can see their point of view, I guess if I squint hard I can see it but I'm not in a squinting mood.

I used to have a lawn boy.

He used to come once a week, rain or shine.

In Nebraska we mow even when it rains but this was not true in Salt Lake.  In Salt Lake when it rains, it is a rare occasion and we pray.  We also prayed when it didn't rain.  And when the sun was up.  And down.  All we did was pray and I guess you could say that's why I don't live there no more.

I was constantly praying for a legal delivery service of young girls with big boobs carrying pizza and beer and then the bjs.

You can be sure that wish was never granted which is one reason I moved.

I used to have a lawn boy and he came by every now and again to mow my lawn and of course he insisted on my lawn mower.

He used to always bust my chops, though.  Always in my face with lawn complaints the kinds of which I did not want to be bothered.

He was the lawn boy, after all.  Not me.  If I was a lawn boy I would mow my own lawn and complain to myself but I am the man on the innernets restraining most evils and eviscerating various comments on chat rooms what needs eviscerating.

"I'm out of gas," he would constantly tell me.  "Mr. Ho, you need more gas or I can't mow you're lawn."

Even in conversation he was confusing the contraction you are and a possessive your. 

It was maddening.

"Mr. Ho, you're check bounced."

I was empathetic.  "I can certainly understand how a check bounce could be upsetting."

Wait, I was not empathetic.  I was sympathetic.

Wait, I was not sympathetic, either.

What is it when you're neither empathetic nor sympathetic?

I suppose I didn't give much of a fuck about it at all.

Anyway, I used to have a lawn boy.

Now I mow my own lawns.

Dear the ignorant bastards of America : Yes, you. Dumbass.

Hello.

One thing I read on the innernets came as such:  STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.

That was on the CNN.

Here, here, I say.  Hear me now, here, here!  Here we have someone who knows the truth and the facts about the so-called American intelligentsia and writers.  Nothing but liberals and queers writing about feigned trips in the woods hunted by homosexuals and Blair Witches.

Nothing but skinny asthmatics scrabbling their rickety arms at the necks of the chancellors (men of business and import) for ... what is it when you can't get fired from a university?  Is it called affirmative action?  I think so.

It's about time someone from the nobels shot it straight to the world about every American in the world being a hack writer and not translating enough.

That was one of the things he said, that we don't translate enough. 

I know that this does not apply to you, you who are always translating things, but people like me, we don't translate, shit.  We're too busy fighting terror and wanting to glimpse a glance of Sarah Palin's underpants and fighting the liberal armies of that Maher guy on HBO and also that fat pig who hates America vis a vis showing anti medical films about how expensive medicine is.

Michael Moore, that's the fat pig.

Shame on you, MM.  Medicine in the US?  Expensive?  Why don't you do us a small favor and to eat someone elses pork while we dine on cheap US of A medicine and you wait in line in Canada or some other liberal country, maybe in STOCKHOLM, Sweden and sit there and wait for your tubal ligation or your gastric bypass.

Good luck to you, my porcine pal.

Back to the nobels, I'm really glad that guy had the nerve to say what has been on my mind for about a thousand years about the state of American writing.  It's all bad.

All of it.

Fucking shit.

If American writing were a shit in the sewers of literature, other shits would not deign to even float near the shit of the American writers because that's how bad the American writing shit stinks.  Not even a flotilla of Spanish Armada turds would even float by for a broadside into the meaty hunk of the entire body of American shitty writings.

When I think of all of the really great literature coming out of Sweden, too, my blood just boils that Americans can even think about wanting to soil the perfectly good pages of a book, or the innernet while all the Swedish stuff is sailing miles ahead in the river of good writing and literacy and also translation (they have to translate, nobody speaks Swedish but other Swedes (not that nobody wants to speak to Swedes, not at all, it's just how often do you get the chance to polish off your Swedish?))....fuck.  Lost again.

Oh, right.

All of the fine, fine things coming out of Sweden that I have been reading.

Let's see.

There's Beowulf.

A damn fine movie.  Cartoon, really.  And you could kinda see Angelina Jolie's naked titties but in cartoon form.  Not that you can't go on the innernets and see them up in real person but the cartoon version has no pesky tats that say I love Billy and such.  That's a bit of a buzzkill, isn't it Brad Pitt.

Is this the vagina that Billy Bob Thornton filled with his seed and he laid on you and his old man belly rubbed all hair and old man oils onto your fair skin and now soiled and then you two traded blood and wore it around one anothers necks?

Yep.

Well let me in for seconds!

I'm not saying I'm a jealous man, I just have a rule to stay out of vaginas once plugged by Thornton.  I mean he seems a nice enough guy but he looks like he has the hiv dripping off his beard when he talks.  Like he just left the methadone clinic and he turned up dirty and he's wondering how he's going to feed his aids until he can get another dose of methadone.

Maybe it's just me.

So there's Beowulf and who was that guy who got his head cut off by a Muslim about a year ago for making that movie that I never saw but I plan on translating some day soon.  Was that Sweden?

Where is Sweden?  Is that one of those countries in WWII?

Oh, and those pictures that drove the Muslims crazy because it had that bearded guy strapped to some bombs, was that Sweden?

Those were some funny pictures, that's all I know.

Anyway, I hope my nobel is in Math or Medicine or something harder than writing which is so gay especially in America.