The sunflowers will be nice for the next few weeks, but then they’ll start to seed. The seeds will attract the squirrels who will antagonize the dogs, both the stupid tripod that lives in my kitchen, and the god-awful, piece of shit French bulldog that lives next-door.

The squirrels will bite the heads off of the stalks and take them to various parts of the wall where they will chew the seeds out of the flower and leave huge messes of sunflower guts all over the ground below, which I get to clean up. Then, in July, the ones that haven’t been decapitated will begin their inevitable demise. That’s when the real fun begins: pulling them up.

Sunflower roots don’t go very deep, but occasionally you get a big one that puts up a fight. The real problem, though, is what to do with them. They’re so damn big, they don’t all fit in the yardwaste bin at once, so I either have to cut them up which takes time, or pull them out in stages which is usually what I do because they die in stages. So, one day a week for pretty much all of July and August, I get to wrestle giant flowers in the heat of summer.

Hopefully, we don’t get another summer like 2023 when Hurricane Hilary made landfall in California at the end of August, dousing the desert in my backyard and starting the cycle of life all over again, six months early. I spent my whole autumn and winter pulling weeds that year.

Yay, it’s summertime again. God, I’m a miserable son of a bitch.