There's this one Pearl Jam song lyric that goes: "Everything has chains. Absolutely nothing's changed." But I thought it was: "Everything has changed. Absolutely nothing's changed." I like my interpretation better. And I'd like to tell you why.
It involves a lawnmower.
A lawnmower is something you buy when you buy a home. Usually. Again, I don't think there's an age restriction, but apartment renters get the strangest looks when they drag a mower up four flights of stairs.
I bought my first lawn mower a couple years after I bought my first home. This was around the last time that gas prices were soaring, like they are now, and dear god, someone make it stop already, please.
Everything’s a circle. Like the blade on a mower, this world keeps spinning, around and around.
Everything has changed since that first lawnmower. I own a different house now, for one. I have two kids. My knees make a weird clicking noise when I go upstairs, now.
Absolutely nothing's changed. Still working, eating Doritos and junk, breathing, all that stuff. Still the same knobby knees I had 14 years ago, but they sound different now, more gravely.
Still impulse buying electric lawnmowers because I still don't learn.
In 2009, I bought a "cordless" mower (spoiler: there was a cord; the one that charges the battery) because I thought I'd make up for the cost in how much less I'd spend on gas.
In 2022, I bought a "cordless'' mower (spoiler: there's still a cord, but this time it's attached to a charger that the TWO batteries go onto, so progress, I guess), mostly for the same reasons. This one I bought at Costco, which didn't exist here back then. That one, I bought at Sears, which doesn't exist here right now.
Circles, I'm telling ya.
The mower I got back then operated more like a regular gas mower, except weaker and more pitiful, and it lost the will to continue about halfway through the one job it had.
This new one, so far, operates much better. Much differently, too. Kind of like a robot vacuum cleaner except requiring more supervision and does less of the tormenting the dog. It's quiet. I wore headphones for reasons and kept thinking it died because I didn't hear it doing the thing it was made to do.
The self-propelling function is smooth, and there's even a lever to control how fast or slow it propels.
It does cut grass, and got all the way through mowing lawn on a one charge, so what else can I ask for than that?
Is this what driving a Tesla is like?
This has been my product review of the Greenworks Pro lawnmower, which mows lawn like a pro and, other than reminding me of the creeping approach of my own mortality, I give a rating of: pretty good, pretty good.
