A dissertation on the relationship between weed eaters and hearing aids

I'm not deaf, but I am dumb when it comes to weed eaters. I am getting smarter, though, and I have figured out that the inventors of hearing aids and weed eaters have to be either the dumbest or smartest people on earth.

Neither item ever seems to work, but they keep selling them like hotcakes. I haven't bought a hearing aid, but I know a lot of people who have. They wear them because they spent so much money for them and what good is a $2800 hearing aid that sits on the bathroom counter. Might as well stick it in your ear and hope. I've talked to a lot of people with those little buggers planted in their ears; in most cases, they are still hoping but not hearing.

I'm amazed that hearing aid inventors have spent all these years developing newer and better miracle ears, yet the folks who buy them can't hear any better than the folks fifty years ago who bought those bigger models with the cords that hung off their ears and went down to do something inside their shirt fronts.

The same is true with weed eaters. No one that I know of has ever built a better weed eater, unless we talk about those models that weigh 200 hundred pounds and wrestle you to the ground while you're trying to get them to start. We have one of those. Bill enjoys exclusive use over it.

Until yesterday, I'd never met a weed eater that I didn't hate, and, believe me, I've met lots of them. They don't sit on my bathroom counter like some people's hearing aids, but several varieties do hang out in our storage shed leading the good life of inactivity after working for two minutes and then frustrating the hell out their operator.

How do weed eaters do such a thing? Well, let me tell you. Their favorite method of not working has to do with that damn string that gets balled up inside the weed eater head, just like some people's brain mass. Once the operator has hit a rock, brick or a weed with a wooden stem, the string on the outside breaks, and the string on the inside refuses to come out of the hole. It just sits in there acting stubborn like a 1,500-pound cow which won't lead.

Cussing ensues. Hands get dirty. The operator stomps off to the shed for a screwdriver to pry the damn top off. Once the top comes off, all that plastic string which refused to budge comes popping out, unwinds and falls to the ground. Of course, the operator, who's never loaded a weed eater head, has no idea how to stuff all that string back inside that iddy biddy area, so the next scene gets really ugly.

With more cussing, good ol' Fumble Fingers wads the string up, crams it inside and tries to get the top knot to screw down tight. The top knot, knowing physics better than the operator, refuses to do such a thing, pops off and lets all that wadded-up string loose again. The process continues until Fumble Fingers throws all tools, gathered from the shed, to perform this delicate operation to the ground, walks the weed eater back to its resting place and goes to find another project---all to keep from literally blowing a brain gasket.

I know all about this because I did it yesterday, and I was glad that any hearing-impaired folks who came to visit would not be able to discern the ugly stuff that was spewing out of my mouth.

As yet, I'm not hearing-impaired, so I did hear "that word" really loud one night a couple of weeks ago when I asked Bill to please look at the Co-Op weed eater and see if he could make it run. It had earned its weed-eating hiatus by refusing to rotate just moments after I had properly threaded a new segment of string inside its head. Maybe that was brain mass.

Anyway, Bill took the weed eater to his new shop, and I went off to water flowers, hoping just like those hearing-impaired people do about their miracle ears, hoping that Bill could perform miracles on my most recently purchased weed eater. As I dragged the hose to the front yard, "the expletive-deleted" came raging out the garage door, not wafting but raging.

It was that word that Presbyterians would be surprised to hear dear Bill utter, but Annie and I claim responsibility for being the only people on earth who can prompt Bill to say that naughty word, which, by the way, is included in George Carlin's repertoire of seven. After the word raged from within the shop and I walked by with the hose, Bill turned around, with weed eater in hand and said, "Take it to Leon. It won't work."

So, after mentioning to him that the Presbyterians and the next-door neighbors might be surprised at what he just said, I agreed to take the weed eater to Leon at Sandpoint Small Engine Repair.

Later, I was telling this story at our family reunion, and my cousin Sue suggested that the only weed eater that works is the cheap one you can get at Wal Mart. She swore by hers---not like Bill swore next to ours, but she insisted cheaper is better when it came to weed eaters.

Later, I asked Bill if we had a cheap model among our collection.

"Yeah," he said, "that little electric one out there does work, and it's cheap."

I immediately sought it out, only to discover that it had no string inside its head. It took me two purchases of string and a lot of words Presbyterians and Catholics would cringe at hearing, but yesterday afternoon, I finally got the thing suited up properly with string/brain mass, and when I plugged it into the 200 feet of extension cord, the little darling worked like a charm.

I won't tell all the details of waiting an entire summer for a better weed eater to show up at Co-Op or Sears (which I did and they didn't), but I shall proclaim that someone at Wal Mart did better than all the other weed eater inventors. Only problem is they probably haven't made a lot of money off their cheap model that actually works.

I don't care, though. All I wanted was to get rid of my weeds, and Sue led me down the path of weed eating righteousness. Now, if I could find that inventor who came up with a cheaper, better hearing aid, I'd quit this dissertation all together.

Well, maybe I should right now. Have a good day from the weed free Lovestead. And, thank you, Sue.