Reflections on the slaughter of thousands of innocents, many at my own hand, and why I'm OK with it

Like something out of a Stephen King novella, the usually innocuous dandelions that dot the Vista pasture each spring have mutated this year into a multi-headed, rapidly spreading plague of thick stemmed, snarling weed-beasts.

Though I have no hard evidence of this, I strongly suspect they are consuming the neighborhood squirrels and chipmunks, right down to the very bones of the carcasses. These dandelions appear to be that insatiable.

I have tried all manner of standard eradication procedures, to no particular avail. That which should kill them only makes them stronger. Resorting to digging them out, I have been horrified to unearth stems the circumference and length of a human thumb, rivaling those found on a well-rooted sapling.

No matter the defense, I wake each morning to a waving sea of new conscripts in their nuisance army, all standing at attention in what is clearly the floral equivalent of an upraised middle finger.

Yesterday, I boiled over. Fueled by a powerful mix of self-loathing at my inability to tame these creatures and genuine disgust for the aesthetic disaster that my "lawn" has become, I concocted a plan to, at the very least, send a message to these invaders.

A message of pain. And hate.

In a purely cathartic act of "Clockwork Orange"-style ultraviolence, I armed myself and my children with golf clubs, after which we launched a frantic assault on any and all stems in our respective paths. We felled those bastards by the hundreds, shredding their rubbery bodies into grotesque chunks of ravaged yard waste.

Notwithstanding that this activity will surely be revisited in a family therapists office one day, we all took to it with uninhibited zeal. LSW arrived home amidst the carnage and happily waded into the fray with a six iron, expanding the scope of our mission to include the evisceration of an especially egregious patch of clover and creeping chuck.

In essence, what started out as a daddy temper tantrum ended up as a raucous family bonding exercise, albeit the kind that makes our neighbors continue to believe they are living next to decsendants of the Addams family.

On the yard maintenance front, one could say that our spontaneous act of rebellion accomplished very little. As we surveyed the debris field afterward, we all knew in our hearts that the roots of evil still lurked just below the devastated visible surface. Indeed, this morning I can already report that a handful of bold insurgents have shown their faces, rigidly assuming their defiant stance just outside the kitchen window.

But I sense in them now a palpable fear. I can smell it on their oily yellow leaves. They have felt the sting of our wrath, and know that we could strike again, at any time, from any place.

They've got the numbers, but we've got the guns. This battle has just begun.