Diary: Gas Powered Leaf Blower

A fucking gas powered leaf blower going. Which is illegal,right? Gas powered leaf blowers are banned. But I have never seen a leaf blower operating without the sound of a fucking outboard motor blasting. The ban on gas powered leaf blowers has had absolutely zero effect. What did they do– was there some amnesty where you could turn in your gas powered leaf blower in exchange for a toy or something? For an electric powered leaf blower? I’ve never once seen anybody using an electric powered leaf blower.

Still, the fucking gas powered leaf blower. Accelerating now. Crescendoing. And then diminuendoing, murmuring almost, then roaring again as its operator discovers a new patch of leaves. What the fuck does the gas powered leaf blower do? How is this a more suitable tool for cleaning up the approximately 30 leaves that accumulate in front of an apartment building in Studio City, where the flora consists almost entirely of evergreen or tropical trees? Why, in the area I am from in New England, where there is a legitimate problem with the enormous mountains of leaves dropped annually by oaks, birches, maples, etc.– why in that place where there are genuinely a shitload of autumn leaves to deal with, do you never hear a gas powered leaf blower? People go out with a rake and rake their leaves into piles. Kids jump in them.

I think it’s because a gas powered leaf blower, or really, a leaf blower operating under any sort of power, is an essentially useless piece of make-work that only blows the leaves onto some neighboring property where they will have to be blown off with another gas powered leaf blower, etc., forever. So a gas powered leaf blower only works if you have no real problem with leaves to begin with. If the leaves don’t really need to go anywhere, and it doesn’t really cost you a significant sum, there’s a whole underclass of illegal immigrants willing to strap on this loud fume-blasting arm cannon and walk around blowing leaves three feet off their original location, and that’s just what’s done here. You just hire Mexicans to do things, they bring a bunch of big serious-looking tools, and you feel like they’ve been of some use. Back East where you don’t have a secret caste of slaves and there are actually a fuckton of leaves, you must dispose of them yourself and use the actually appropriate tool, a rake.

In rich neighborhoods in California there is a constant roar of gas powered power tools being operated by Aztec-looking illegals. Every tree on every fucking rich man’s block is constantly being sheared, and chainsawed, and otherwise attended to. The only cars that are parked outside Hollywood Hills homes during the day are ’86 Mazda pickups with big illegal pipe-cages welded on the back, filled with branches or 2 x 4’s. And seriously nowhere– nowhere in this town will you go 15 minutes without hearing a sound like an old outboard motor, or an Ent getting thrown screaming into Saruman’s lumber mill. The amount of landscaping that goes on in Los Angeles is ridiculous– for a desert. We live in a desert. Our native plants are dry queasy herbs and gnarled chaparral bushes that grow point oh one millimeters per year and have roots that stretch five thousand miles below the Earth and are three thousand years old. Aside from just watering the shit, there shouldn’t really be anything to be done, because every other plant should just fucking die basically. But still. Even on my humble street there is never not at least one illegal landscaping business truck parked out in the street and a guy with no health or liability insurance hanging off a high branch with a long claw-shaped saw at the end of a catchpole, hacking off branches so some other, more desirable branch might live. So that the tree might not just be left alone. So that one’s neighbors might not be undisturbed by loud gutteral machines screeching and roaring and whining like a dirt bike making constant laps in your driveway.

Tags: aztecs, diary, leaf blowers, what if shaq actually had a really small wang