They say the creative muse can strike at any time, in any place. This blog is a testament to that theory.
I had no plans to write a blog today, or this week, or next week, or God knows when, figuring I could use a breather after pounding out a whole lot of blogs lately, for reasons even I don’t understand, considering that there’s nothing terribly fascinating about my life right now to blog about, other than the fact that our country is having a massive meltdown due to the dumbass in the White House, but anyway…
The blog tank was empty today.
Until.
Until.
The yard crews showed up, wielding leaf blowers.
They arrived en masse this morning in our quaint, leafy little white-collar commuter neighborhood in North Jersey. It’s the waning days of fall, and there are just a whole shit-ton of leaves on the ground. These leaves simply must be captured and hauled away, so that the manicured lawns can spend winter as pristine as fine china in a 5-star restaurant.
Beginning at around 9 o’clock this morning, a battalion of 10,000 yard-crew special forces (I exaggerate) armed with 143,000 high-powered leaf blowers (I exaggerate) went to work annihilating every leaf on every square millimeter of every lawn owned by every homeowner who can’t bear the thought of leaves.
The leaf blowers were all gas-powered. They were top-of-the-line, factory fresh. They were as powerful as the sun. They resembled rocket launchers. They were loud as fuck.
I did some research. Gas-powered leaf blowers can generate between 65 and 85 decibels (dB). If you don’t what that means, it’s loud enough to greatly exceed what are considered safe noise levels. Some models can even reach more than 100 dB, comparable to the noise of a motorcycle or jackhammer.
I’m pretty sure our neighborhood’s lawn crews have the most powerful models. You can hear them from a mile away – I know, because I heard them on my morning bike ride, a mile away.
The noise today lasted hours — hours and hours and GD sumbitchin’ motherf******g f**king f**king hours. I think the crew finally wrapped up their work around 3:30 pm. So, like 6.5 hours of a constant loud/screeching/whining factory-level orgy of dissonant noise.
This is not a problem for the folks who go to the office every day — and you can be pretty damn sure that whoever hires these yard crews do not work from home, because otherwise they would not abide this noise for a millisecond.
But for those of us who do work from home — like me — all this constant noise is a menace. Not a nuisance. Not an inconvenience. But a soul-killing, brain-rattling, on-the-edge-of-insanity menace.
*****
I cannot tell you how hard it is to hear this clatter for hours and hours on end. It makes you question why the first humans even bothered taking their first steps, if this was all they could come up with in the year 2025.
During the first couple of hours you do your best to distract yourself – by taking bike rides, and prepping dinner with the stovetop fan on its highest setting. But even the fan cannot drown it out.
After the third hour, I at least held out hope that it will end soon. That hope grew stronger when the noise stopped for a while. But it was only because they took a 30-minute lunch break.
After the fourth hour I put on some noise-cancelling headphones, Blue-toothed to a white noise app. I figured my noise was better than their noise. But this wasn’t ideal, either, so I took them off.
After the fifth hour I became mentally unwell. I could not focus on a single thing besides that constant whining screech – not work, not chores, not the football game I recorded and hoped to watch in peace.
By the sixth hour I was in a simmering rage.
I walked outside and took a photo of one of the lawn crew trucks so I could get the phone number on the side.
I called the number, but of course it went straight to voice mail. I left a message inquiring as to when the fuck their stupid fucking crew would finally end their fucking loudass fucking job.
I hope they got the message. But I doubt they cared.
*****
We live in a loud world. Noise is everywhere. We have just come to accept it, even though most of us hate it.
Noise is kryptonite to a large percentage of the population. It causes anxiety, disrupts rest, impairs cognitive function, makes us go half out of our minds with frustration and anger, and damages our health. If you don’t believe me, read this.
And yet it is everywhere. And constant. And endless.
*****
You know, I understand the desire to keep lawns neat, even though I also think we go overboard with it.
I mow the grass myself with a lawn mower – and I own a leaf blower. The difference is, my blower and mower are both battery-powered. This means they are a whole lot quieter than gas-powered machines, and create a lot less pollution.
I even recently hired a yard crew to clean up our fall leaves, which we cannot rake our way out of. But this crew also uses the quiet, battery-powered machines, and they are only here twice, and only during the fall. They are not here 10 months out of the year, every week, like so many other crews in our quaint little neighborhood.
*****
The leaf blower attack today not only inspired this blog – it also inspired me to change my plans tonight, and take a Daddy’s Night Out, which I had originally planned for tomorrow night.
But I flipped the script. I got dinner together for the family, cracked a beer, then headed out to a local watering hole to watch Monday Night Football and ease my weary mind.
I thought about writing a blog about the need for us to overcome silly little problems like loud, gas-powered leaf blowers, and find the good in life, the richness in life.
That would have been a blog worth reading. Because life is good, life is rich.
But screw it. I fucking hate loud, gas-powered leaf blowers.
And that crew today can kiss my ass.
Image: The magic of AI.
Vance Cariaga 
My sympathies for your ordeal, Vance. The closest I can relate to is the grass-cutting service around here, once a month. But even that is only about an hour in total, and definitely not as loud as your experience.
Here’s something you may find useful, if you’re inclined to take action about the issue: https://seths.blog/2022/11/the-leaf-blower-parable/
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Hey Yacoob, funny you should share that link…
I originally wrote in the blog that gas-powered leaf blowers are banned in our town during part of the year, like between mid-April and mid-October. The ban went into effect this year after lots of people complained. It makes a huge difference in noise level when they use battery-powered blowers. The problem is, they can still use loud, gas-powered riding mowers on the grass during those months.
Also, they can use the loudest of the loud — gas-powered leaf blowers — during the months when leaves are piled highest (November and March). Those are the months when the lawn care companies send out their biggest crews and their loudest equipment for the many hours it takes to serve the 10 or so homes on our street that hire the crews.
I frankly wish one company in particular would warn the neighborhood ahead of time when they are scheduled to do one of their 7-hour, gas-powered leaf blower jobs. At least those of us who work from home could make arrangements to go to an internet cafe or something. But they don’t warn us, and probably never will, because they don’t give a crap about folks who are not their customers.
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I know it shouldn’t be your burden, but maybe try calling the company periodically to try to find out when they’ll be around, so you can plan ahead. Or email, or find some means of communication with a human there. If they don’t bother to warn you, pester them… Or alternatively maintain a good relationship with one of your neighbours who uses them, and then find out from them when it’ll happen. It sucks to have to go to such lengths, but at least it gives you a shot at avoiding the pain.
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I probably will call to find out when the next major job is. Hopefully they are done for the (northern hemisphere) fall because the trees are just about bare. The next one of these major jobs will be in March when they do all the post-winter cleanup.
Or, they could do the right thing and just get rid of the gas-powered leaf blowers altogether and replace them with the battery-powered kind. That, I could live with. But naahhhh….
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I hate those mutherfucking gas-powered leaf blowers too! Landscape companies use them all time here in the Coachella Valley though, thankfully, our leaves are relatively few, so landscape crews aren’t making horrendous noise for too long.
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts — always appreciated. I cannot think of a single person who likes those things outside of the folks who profit off them. They really ought to be banned, at least the gas-powered kind. They’re maybe the worst goddamn invention ever.
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Every Monday morning from April through November, a landscape service shows up near us and fires up for a couple of hours. Mind-numbing background noise to start each week out. I hate it, Vance. Of course, living in a development means other services and other leaf blowers at other times, but while many others do their own lawn, they too seem to drag out small jet engines just to clean small plots of land. We have an electric mower and blowers, and I try to keep the blowers to a bare minimum since I don’t mind letting leaves hang out on the lawn to help it you know…be a lawn. It really is ok if a lawn has leaves on it. Really. The best part is, all the leaves here get blown into the street, and just get passed on to the next lot, or wind up back where they came from. I do agree when someone is coming into an area for the entire day, there should be some notification. It is the decent thing to do. Then again, the really decent thing to do would be to have a sound limit on the things or eliminate them entirely.
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Absolutely 100 percent agree, Bruce. A few extra leaves lying around aren’t going to hurt anything — and in fact, they actually help by serving as compost. If we’d just leave nature alone it knows what to do a lot better than we humans.
I feel for you regarding having to deal with the noise every Monday, every week. Here it’s even more often because different households hire different crews, and they all come at different times. So theoretically we can have a loud racket here every weekday, and even on certain weekends.
It’s simply insane how much people put into their lawns these days — or, more accurately, what they pay others to do with their lawns. It is one of the worst trends of the last 20-30 years. Some towns have done the smart thing by banning gas-powered lawn equipment. Even our town bans gas-powered leaf blowers during part of the year, except it’s not the most important part of the year, like late fall and early spring, when the crews are beefed up and at their most obnoxious loudest. Like you, I just hate it.
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