Monday, April 25, 2011

Klan in the Front

Easter weekend. Did some yardwork which included adding some flower beds near the sidewalk. Mulch is my friend. My house is pretty much the neighborhood eyesore. Anytime I get it looking nice, something happens to make it a complete embarrassment. Last summer all the grass died. Rather than replant that crap, I decided on low maintenance flowers. So the next day I'm walking my dog in the old neighborhood where I grew up. It's a flat, bland, post war, cookie cutter suburb with no tree lined streets, interesting architecture or even a hill to climb up. My eye was drawn to all of the randomly landscaped yards. Most just had ugly bushes hugging the house with the odd stone circle around a tree every third house. These people have never watched HGTV. This got me thinking about the truly classic and tasteless front yard decorations we white people have grown up with in our soul sucking suburban youths.

Of course, everyone knows the lawn jockey. They come in caucasian and African equestrian American. But the black ones have always been deemed racist(they do tend to have sambo-ish faces). I feel like they aren't even tasteless anymore. They have transcended it and become kind of retro kitschy cool. Any hipster would put one in his apartment if it wasn't crowded with Michael Jackson lunchboxes.






Next you have the bent over gardening lady cutout. This is some form of weak striptease that gave birth to the "upskirt" genre of porn. I've never actually seen anyone completely bent over in this fashion in the yard. Seems like it would be bad for you. There's also the silhouette of the guy smoking a pipe that is often combined with the equally ugly "dude ranch western style split rail wooden fence". Ick. Oh, and let's not forget the wagon wheel! I don't get that one at all.





Other ugly yard fixtures are the ubiquitous gnome, the white trash modern art known as gazing balls, the old school pink flamingo(that's more of a trailer park thing, see next post), and the truly despicable fake wishing well. Look, we have working sewers, I know that well isn't real. To bring it all back around to racism, I spotted one last ornament as I left my old hood that night. Someone had erected a full sized light up cross for Easter. If you squinted just right, it kinda looked like a burning cross. Stick to plastic eggs next time, neighbor.

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