I was speaking to a mate a while back about Murakami’s What I talk about when I talk about running and how it had a big impact on him when he first read it. And when he revisited it more recently, it fell a bit flat and didn’t spark the same flames as last time. But it got me thinking and so a new series is born.

When the guy arrived to fill his trailer with green waste a day late, I told him in person what I sent him in a text message – I don’t know how much green waste will fill a four-cubic-metre trailer but I think there’s plenty. ‘Our garden’s pretty jungly,’ I added. His laugh made me second-guess myself. Then I remembered I’d just moved from a sparse rental and, before that, a concrete cube in the sky, and that he earned his living clearing green waste. His jungle rating probably had a pretty different calibration. ‘That’s too far from the road,’ he said. So I got my gloves and started dragging the huge tangle of dead branches down the hill. He thanked me for warning him about the two-inch-long spikes on the lemon tree branches and when I told him I had to take my son to his swimming lesson and that I’d leave him to it, he told me to have a good one. 

He was long gone by the time I returned home and I learnt that either we had a heap more than four square metres of green waste, or that he didn’t really try to compress it to fit more in the trailer. He was, after all, charging per load so I guess it makes sense. But the most powerful lesson came two weeks later when I found a garden mulcher on market place for $50.

In the first three months of living in our place, I’ve filled two full-sized green waste bins to overflowing every week. Cutting back our jungly-to-me garden felt like trying to kill the Hydra. And then one morning, I noticed something extremely beneficial and gratifying for my denuding project. The green-bin truck collects on our side of the road first and then returns to collect the bins on the other side of the road after about 10 minutes. Ample time to fill a bin again and drag it across the road for a bonus bin. Genuinely, the dopamine hit I got from ‘bonus binning’ made my week the same way a new album from The Black Keys used to (up until El Camino, inclusive).

With a trailer load and over 30 green bins (plus two bonus bins) removed, I was starting to see what it might look like properly cleared. But there was so much to go. So much to pull out and then clear. And that’s when a mulcher changed my life. The first one I bought, a “near new only used three times” Ryobi mulcher, looked perfect. It wasn’t. It was a dud. Wouldn’t even start. I opened it up to see if I could fix it with the same baseless and boundless confidence white men have done most things throughout history. I was sure I wouldn’t get my money back but the seller apologised, said she was embarrassed and I got my cash back. I was still mulcherless and it was no way to live.

Inexplicably encouraged by my first strike out, I found another mulcher, called the ‘Silent Shredder’ the next day and after a quick spritz of WD40, it roared to life and has significantly changed mine ever since. I bought it from a woman who looked nothing like her profile picture. Maybe it was the discrepancy in long gone Day of the Dead face paint. Without judgement, there was decades of difference, maybe even a generation. She and her husband had the same puffy skin I’d seen many times before with people who once upon a time had an unhealthy relationship with drugs and or alcohol. They were lovely, grateful, wished me well and told me to enjoy it. I had no idea just how much I would.

One of our next-door neighbours sold up and moved overseas. We spoke a handful of times in the three weeks before she left, having the same conversation each time. They told me how much they loved dogs but could I please stop my dog shitting on their flower bed. I apologised, asked them to show me where it was so I could pick it up. They said not to worry about it, which immediately made me question whether he’d actually pooped there. Maybe, maybe not. If someone complains about something, a solution is offered and they reject it, it seems they’re more interested in complaining than anything else. They also said they’d buried their dog in the garden. 

I know you can both love dogs and be annoyed one is shitting in your garden. The defensive qualifier about loving dogs annoyed me and from then until they finally left, I was hyper-vigilant anytime I let the dog outside. I realised after a few weeks any noise by the front door made me worry they were coming over for a rehash of the same conversation. It wasn’t stressful, just annoying and more intrusive than my usual intrusive thoughts.

So when it came time to fire up the mulcher, sorry the ‘Silent Shredder’ (which one pedantic reviewer clarified was technically a crusher because of the way the giant-toothed gear crushed whatever you fed into it against a metal block rather than sharper blades actually mulching it), I was waiting for a visit from poop garden. Looking for the positives, I figured it would at least be a new conversation for a change, ‘Hi, yeah me again. Look I love music. I actually murdered a cover of Wonderwall in my backyard (and buried it there), but could you please shut the fuck up? Also, I love dogs and I’m watching you.’ Another converastion in my head that never came to be. The Silent Shredder tells you how loud it is on the sticker. A whispered call to get your dog back from where the boundary fence should be is 30 decibels. A terse conversation about errant dog poo is 60 decibels, and at 93 decibels, the mulcher is slightly more than those combined. 

Like someone who just started talking to the person who’d become their first lover, I could never have guessed the excitement that lay ahead. I thought I’d test the mulcher with some sugar palm fronds (imagine mini palm fronds). Once the crushing gear got a hold of the fronds, it calmly pulled them through and spat them out onto the ground. I stared at the mangled fronds – definitely not shredded, but condensed. Reduced from a bushy bouquet to a small pile of crushed waste – like your heart after your first love inevitably doesn’t work out in part due to the fact that you’re a teenager.

I felt a little conflicted about destroying what were beautiful plants. I knew we needed to thin the garden out to give what remained a better go at things. It also gave us space to plant a more diverse garden. I sought and found comfort in the carbon cycle. Yes, I was ruining what would amount to months if not years of growth, irreversibly undoing thousands of hours of photosynthesis. Plants to mulch, dust to dust. The way the mulcher dismantled dried branches, which used to take up the most space in the green bins, looked like reverse flat-pack furniture building. Instead of galvanised hex keys dropping out of a box, it was twigs, and chunks of branches. Disassembled, we had far less than four square metres of green waste. And better yet, it would all be going back into the soil.

Two hours in, I realised I’d been in such a deep state of flow I’d forgotten about lunch – as close to an impossibility as could happen with me and food. I’d been listening to an audiobook with noise cancelling headphones and took them off to check how loud the shredder was unmuffled. The same pang of concern rushed back like the first moment you realise you have diarrhoea and you’re going to need a toilet in seconds not minutes. I realised this neighbour-induced dread was a fear of taking up space – a new sensation for a straight white man. Not for the first time, it struck me that this feeling was a diluted version of how every persecuted group of people throughout history feels. On edge for existing, afraid to hold space, worried about upsetting someone over nothing. An important difference of course, is their persecution was real (not imagined) and usually caused by simply existing rather than mulching or letting their dog outside to shit on their neighbour's flower garden.

Sometimes, that is what I think about when I’m mulching.