Like I said, I now mow graveyards. It’s not a great job, it’s only fourteen hours a week, so I won’t make as much money as I should. Some money is better than no money, however, so there you go.

Certain people seem to think that this is a bad-ass job, but it really isn’t all that exciting. All I do is cut grass. I really don’t like mowing. I hate it, actually. I long ago promised myself that I will never have a lawn.

One of the two graveyards I mow is actually pretty easy, because it has one of those four-wheel mowers. There is something strangely satisfying about rinding around on a machine that can, if I read the warning labels correctly, kill babies if they look at it. Most of the work is done with a normal mower, which would be fine and easy if somebody hadn’t put up tombstones all over.

Speaking of the tombstones, it is a bit interesting to see that even graves are slaves to trends and fashion. The 1890s seems to have favored tall and pointed stones, while just a few years earlier people liked to be buried under small obelisks.

Another trend of the late 19th century was apparently to bury six people on top of each other on the same plot, and then randomly scatter their tombstones above them, making mowing hard. It cannot have been easier with a scythe (as we all know, machines didn’t exist before the eighties), so they either maintained graveyards with scissors or just let them grow wildly.

Working on a graveyard should be depressing, I suppose, but it isn’t really. Both the graveyards are nice sunny, open places, with pretty trees and mostly nice graves, and some lamp posts, in case people come to grieve in the middle of the night I guess. They’re peaceful places, at least until I show up with my noisy and noxious mowers. They aren’t the gothic and spooky cemeteries you see on Buffy. And let’s be honest, if you build gothic and spooky cemeteries like they have on Buffy, you want vampires. Vampires would be very much out of place in the cemeteries I mow.

Building crypts is inviting monsters. There are no crypts.

There are some wicked echoes off the stones though, that could give any man a fright before he got used to them.

Also, I should like to take this opportunity to apologize to several dead people. I didn’t mean to cut the flowers of your graves or crash the mower into your tombstones. That thing can just run a bit out of control sometimes, and the exhaust make me dizzy so I don’t always see what I’m doing.

I’m also sorry for the many, many shivers you no doubt felt in life, what with all the running back and forth I’m doing.

I think that’s all for now.