The Insidious Grub Plot

This was written in response to a friend whose neighbor accused him of deliberately planting grubs in his lawn:

You grub planter you. I always knew there was something strange about you, Wilton. Now that I know about your midnight expeditions through the neighborhood, fat puffy grubs in hand, it all falls into place. Yes, the often strange behavior, the complete lack of restraint, the oddly serious loathing for fresh green lawns - obviously these were only the outer manifestations of your dark and lurid interest in Maladera castanea.

And from whence came this disturbing love of the larvae of scarabs? Could this be a link to some Egyptian past? Perhaps your New Zealand accent and pasty white guy looks are a sophisticated cover-up for the real you. Yes, I have long suspected it. You were born in Egypt and are here as part of a covert operation, working with the others in your terrorist cell group to destroy the lawns of America. All of you striving incessantly towards the final mental breakdown of the average American male as he realizes that his years of money and effort to have a lush verdant lawn have failed. Thwarting his hopes and dreams of children running barefoot, large yellow dogs frolicking about and he and his wife sitting comfortably in their lawn chairs, ice clinking in their tall cool glasses of lemonade.

There can be no rest for him now, no relaxation on a sunny summer day, not with the grubs furiously attacking the very sod on which he stands; eating away at the fruit of his labors, preying on his mind as he pictures their relentless assault on the tender roots of his newly planted Kentucky Fescue 31.

And then, when the male ego is at its lowest, plummeted to the depths of insecurity by his failure to perform even the simple task of providing healthy grass for his family, you and your cohorts in crime will strike. How insidious your nightly forays are when one considers their final aim: the slow, tortuous destruction of male confidence until he has been reduced to a quivering mass of blubbering jelly, unable any longer to defend either himself or his country.

Your neighbor, the only man intelligent and sufficiently worldly enough to uncover your scheme, will try desperately to convince the rest of his neighborhood of your malevolent wiles but to no avail. Ah, this is where the Machiavellian magnificence of your evil plot is matched only by its despicable cruelty. He will cry out in vain to an unheeding populace, doomed like Cassandra to be ignored. He will hear the cruel jeers of the neighborhood children ringing in his ears.

"Grubs are eating your grass, grubs are eating your grass, you had better move away before they eat your ass!"

He will see his neighbors, one by one, turn against him until finally, on a cold and rainy day he will pack the last remaining piece of his furniture into a moving van and as he turns to view for one final time his beloved home and brown spotted yard he will see you, beer in hand, leaning back rakishly in your Adirondack chair as you watch him from the comfort of your porch.