Mercurial superstar and occasional dick Antonio Brown was granted his trade request by the Pittsburgh Steelers and shipped to the Oakland Raiders back in early March. NFL football being the year-round occupation that it is, Brown is long gone and already participating in optional offseason workouts with his new Raiders teammates. While this has been an exciting development for Raiders fans, it has brought torment to certain of Brown’s former Pittsburgh neighbors, at least one of whom is pestering Brown on Twitter to mow his dang grass:
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review visited Brown’s property on Friday and confirmed that the grass is in certain places as high as two feet. Brown eventually got around to responding to the neighbor’s snotty tweet, noting that the property is currently for sale and asking that someone do him the solid of mowing the grass in exchange for cash:
Holding aside that this Twitter plea is a goofily inefficient and drearily of-our-times way of hiring landscapers to mow your grass, it’s not clear that mowing the lawn is even the right move! Science tells us that a well-maintained lawn is an ecological disaster, undermining the broader environment in a number of startling ways, including choking off native plants of value to pollinators, reducing potential wildlife habitats to a concrete-like “full monoculture,” contributing to global warming, and soaking up 30 to 60 percent of all drinkable municipal water. Maybe, in his negligence, Antonio Brown is making an accidental contribution to our great planet! Now who’s the bad guy in this story, you selfish jerks?
On the other hand, your own freshly mowed lawn is a delightful thing to see out your window or from your porch, and the very things that makes an unkempt lawn ecologically preferable also make it sort of gross to live next to—bugs and mice and groundhogs and snakes, plus the Jordy Verrill-esque horror of runaway greenery consuming the things of man. Mostly I am jealous of Antonio Brown for having lived in a picturesque suburban neighborhood with a toothless HOA, where neighbors are forced to take their petty concerns over the condition of your property to social media for a long-shot hope at relief. What kind of madman would ever leave such a place?