That One Time I...

... Realized I'm Not A "Liberal"

Hello. My name is Robzilla, and I'm not a Liberal. There. Now that I got that introduction out of my system, I'll tell you how I came to this conclusion.

Thursdays are a day off from exercise, but in name only. I'll use a blower to remove any leaves and all sorts of debris from the property and sidewalks, and sometimes I'll remove weeds with a combination of weed killer and elbow grease. The yard work often qualifies as a good workout, and my lighter frame often looks forward to it.

This morning, I discovered several weeds that popped up in the retaining wall and in the gaps of the public sidewalk that it borders. The annoying kind that cannot be removed by hand, an action hoe or the edge of a blade for that matter. They only respond to a weed killer, and all you can do is spray them and hope it does more than give them blonde highlights.

I was in the middle of spot spraying those little fuckers when someone yelled out to me. I turned around and noticed an unfamiliar, bespectacled woman around my age had stopped her minivan in the middle of the street and blocked traffic behind her. I found that peculiar since I wore yesterday's clothes, concealed Woodstock's nest on my head with a trucker style golf cap, and had yet to take a shower. I was most definitely not dressed for date night.

"Is that Roundup?" she asked.

"It's Groundclear," I replied with a proud grin. "It's a better weed killer." I instantly wondered if she was yet another person that wanted to congratulate me for how my family and I turned this humble home from an eyesore to one of the neighborhood's more appealing properties within twelve months, and then...

"You shouldn't spray that stuff," the woman said. "It's bad for the environment, and that stuff gets in our ground water and..." 

I don't know what else this woman said, for I had immediately blocked her shrill voice from my mind with a dismissive wave of my gloved hand. I couldn't take her seriously, not when she drove a two decade old vehicle whose combination of tail pipe emissions, punched in rear bumper and weathered paint job could be classified as a "gross polluter" by other card carrying liberals and the EV crowd.

Then it got me wondering... am I really a liberal? If being a liberal means a modern day Pharisee, that's a hard no. I'd rather be known as a highly intelligent human that wants nothing to do with the "either or" dynamic that passes for political discourse in this country.

We can always be friends, though.