I mowed the lawn the other day.

Well, I kind of mowed the lawn. I missed a lot of spots, and I didn't weedwack the borders or trim the shrubbery.

Mostly, I sat on the front steps and drank beer. I drank eight beers, if you wanna count. I say that because if you drink while you work, somebody usually wants to count. I threw the eight empty cans into the shrubbery in the front yard. If you don't trim the shrubbery, no one can see the empties.

I have what you call a "no-bid contract" for mowing the yard. I'm semiretired, but my wife goes out to work every day, and we don't have kids, and we're not going to pay one of the local landscapers $200 a month to mow the lawn. I know my wife, so I get the job automatically.

I don't get paid to mow the lawn, but if there's a debit card amount of $15.65 to "Big Carl's Liquor Store," my wife doesn't ask questions. One hand washes the other. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. Quid pro quo. Funny how we need several phrases to describe the business of not doing the job, and skimming off a little cash.

Once the job was done, I stuck one of those little American flags on a stick in the middle of the yard and cracked another beer. Those little flags are handy, and you can buy 'em at the dollar store for less than the price of a pack of off-brand cigarettes. In fact, you can buy three of those flags for the price of a pack of off-brand cigarettes. This establishes the patriotism of dollar stores.

Once the flag-on-a-stick was stuck in the ground, I wobbled out to the middle of the street and checked the job.

It looked good to me. Nothing looks bad if there's an American flag on it. That's why they put a flag on coffins. It's also why businesses paying the minimum wage fly the flag out in front of the business. Inside the building, you got 40-hour-a-week workers who need an EBT card. Outside, you got Old Glory snapping in the wind, scattering memories of heroes all over the parking lot.

My wife Deborah was too tired from working to check out the yard when she got home from work, but I drew her attention to the flag-on-a-stick.

"Look at the flag," I said. "People used to drive by this house, they didn't know Americans live here. We coulda been illegals, communists, werewolves, anything. Now, they know what kind of people live here. God Bless the USA!"

She was off work the next day, and she went out in the yard to salute the flag, say the Pledge of Allegiance, and fire a 21-gun salute with her purse pistol.

"Did you actually mow the yard?" she said, coming back in the house.

"What do you mean?" I said. "It's beautiful. Did you see the flag?"

"There's all these spots you missed," she said, "and there's some kind of weird, creeping weed that's taking over."

"It didn't look like that when I finished," I told her. "Did you see the flag?"

"I saw eight empty beer cans behind the shrubbery," she said.

"My God," I said. "Vandals."

" What do you mean, vandals?" she said.

"They musta snuck in at night, and thrown grass seed and fertilizer all over everything, and planted that weird weed," I said. "The vandals even stopped to drink eight beers."

"People see our lawn, they see America, and they hate America," I said. "It was probably seeing the flag out there that made them do this terrible, awful thing."

"Radical far leftists," my wife said." They're destroying our lawn!"

"Muslims," I said.

"Gay Muslims," my wife said.

"ANTIFA," I said.

Before she went to work this morning, my wife said I could use the debit card at the liquor store again. It's a hot day, and I've got to go mow the lawn, and get rid of the weeds.

It's going to be perfect when I'm done.

I just hope the vandals don't come back.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com . Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

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