#and he has been cooking his front lawn for years *bu-dum-tish*

[eveningalchemist]

I didn't think it was possible, but I have been witness to a type of lawn cover that baffles and disturbs me more than mono-culture grass, in both the lifeless uniformity of it and the amount of labour to maintain it.

So my family has this neighbour who is determined to get rid of weeds from his front yard forever. A common goal if Sisyphean goal. The extreme part is that he has vowed to not plant anything he actually wants until he achieves his goal of pure and absolute weedlessness. I thought it was an impossible ultimatum to put upon the soil and himself. And/or something something edging via horticulture.

This went on for years and each time I would chuckle a little when wild green things popped up anyways. I did love walking by a reminder of the ecological purpose of "weeds" - tough, fast growing, and easy spreading plants that keep the earth in place until taller and longer-living plants establish themselves. I would just smile and shake my head when he tilled, sprayed herbicides, or just added a new pile of experimental dirt to replace the old, apparently disappointingly fecund, batch.

Except. One year. He did it. This crazy fucker actually did it. Just nothing. There were more green things in the cracks of his sidewalk than his yard. Not even Sauron completely ridded his domain of plant life like this. I would make a demon pact joke but this has been going on so long I genuinely think his tenacious brute force has no need for black magic.

So what this multi-year labour has managed to produce is a fine, powdery, grey substance. It covers his entire front lawn in ever-eroding dunes. Thankfully it does not blow around a lot in the wind but only because it is so inexplicably dense I suspect uranium is involved. I would make a "my empire of dirt" joke but I don't think that's dirt anymore. Like call NASA because they could use this man's creation as simulation lunar regolith. It smells vaguely sour sometimes. If I hear an explosion, its ignition will be my first suspect. I would make a joke about a micro-volcano going off around him as he rages about a single dandelion, producing a Mincraftian ash dispersal range, but ash actually supports plant life.

Predictably, anything he has attempted to plant in it dies. He now has a collection of tiny ornamentals that are too sickly orange and crispy to even call autumn foliage. All squarely arranged around two stumps of trees that died at some point along his war path. He carved one stump into a heron. It's actually kind of impressive. Both the heron and the sheer lifeless void he has made just outside of his front door.

TLDR Local suburban man destroys his soil in pursuit of absolute control and gets nothing but wasteland. Lesson? If weeds cannot grow in your soil. Nothing can.