the filthy, shrieking culprit

90 million.

That's how many filthy, dirt-caked leaf blowers Americans currently own. Collectively. Not 90 million each.

According to the National Institute of Health, more than 10 million Americans already suffer a form of permanent noise-induced hearing loss. 30 million more will eventually have hearing problems because of noise pollution. Why?

Leaf blowers.

You think you know loud? Try waking up every day at 7 o'clock in the morning inside your studio apartment, which is delightfully cheap but surrounds you with the sheer comfort of wafer-thin walls. Walls so sparse, you could use them as the Body of Christ at communion and no one would be the wiser. Might even save you on porno DVDs if you dig Harley Davidson-collecting fetish folks living below you screaming "I NEED MORE OF YOUR WARM PISS IN MY MOUTH!" at 3 a.m.

Let's can the digression and get back to the real shit: leaf blowers. You're asleep in your apartment, hung over from drinking the Evil Eye. Two cans = blackout. You drank four, got to bed at 5, and have to be at work by 9. The next hours of sleep are imperative ones - they'll make the difference between a painful-yet-normal day and a day that includes you getting fired from your job because, in your state of sleep depravation, you choked a customer into unconsciousness for being snide. Jail time. Anal gang-rape. A shoddy 8-ball tattoo on the back of your shaved head. All because the leaf blower woke you up at 6:12 this morning and ran continuously until you left your apartment, too groggy to beat down the NASCAR shirt-sporting gardener.

It's 2005. We have iPod. Xbox. So much internet porn that you never have to masturbate to the same scene more than once. And they're telling us that while they've found a way to clone our pets, we can't have leaf blowers with decibal levels that DON’T sound like a jet taking off? We can't enjoy the last few hours of our tawdry one-night-stands in peace?

The gauntlet has been thrown. It's time for some action.

My idea: I'll write a letter and include quotes from several different residents and gardners that are fed up with the companies that manufacture insanely loud leaf blowers when we all goddamn well know that the technology to make silent leaf blowers has been in place for decades.

You ready? Here is the letter.

##

To whom it may concern at stupid leaf blower manufacturing companies:

before lazy people got smarter

You guys should closely watch Back to the Future II. I was watching it the other night and I had an epiphany: hover boards don't make noise.

Try using that technology.

I talked to a young man named Dignan (last name withheld) that worked for a gardening outfit called The Lawn Rangers.

"Yeah, I'd like to see silent leaf blowers. What would I do if I didn't see one? Well, that poses an interesting question," said Dignan, firmly entrenching my vehemence:

If you don't start making silent leaf blowers, I'm going to find out where you live and put hundreds of REALLY HEAVY STEEL LEAVES on your front lawns. Then you'll have to bend over and pick them up.

You don't want that, do you?

your enemy,

Brandon N. Huigens

##

For the time being, I’ve decided to choose the route of the humble Amish coupled with the mind set of a lazy anarchist: I broke into the storage room at my apartment complex and switched that leaf blower out for a good, old-fashioned rake.

The Lawn Rangers' leaf & weeds bagger

And a note taped to the handle saying “With a little elbow grease, you won’t even notice you’re not using a leaf blower.”

This, of course, does not solve the problem at hand on a broad scale. It does provide me a bit of comfort while I wait for a response from the leaf blower company.

Another few weeks of waiting and I’ll be forced to alert them that I’ve taken one of their brain-melting products hostage.