My wife, Deborah, and I own a three-floor apartment house in the urban northeast.

How urban? We can walk to two Chinese takeout places, a bar, two liquor stores, two diners, two bakeries representing two different nationalities, and a fortune teller.

There are three apartments in our house, one on each floor. We live in one and rent out the other two. The house is 110 years old. If you put a marble in the middle of the kitchen floor, it rolls into the northeast corner of the room on its own. Of course, if you put a marble on the street on front of my house, it rolls onto the railroad tracks, which is why the 4-year-olds in my neighborhood don’t have tricycles.

And we have a lawn, a small scrap of tough, un-pretty, city lawn, which I mow.

My wife, on whom birds frequently land, as if she was Snow White in the cartoon, likes these small blue flowers that appear in a couple spots on the lawn every spring. She asked me not to mow in those spots, and I didn’t.

The flowers stayed for their short, three-week lifespan and the un-mowed grass around the flowers grew maybe eight inches high. If there was a homeowner’s association in this neighborhood, they’d have come to see me, but there isn’t, so they didn’t.

I sit in the yard sometimes. It’s a good place to smoke a cigar. If I smoke cigars in the house, the cigar smell stays in the curtains until after the divorce is final.

Sitting in a resin chair with a moderately priced Mexican stogie, I noticed we have more bees this year, and more bugs in general, flying and otherwise. I’ve even seen a couple of those long, pointy, airborne bugs we called “sewing needles” when I was a kid. In particular, we have one fat, yellow and black striped bee I have named “Chris” because I can’t get close enough to determine if the bee is Cristopher or Christine. Anyway, what kind of man pursues a bee waving a cigar and asking about its pronouns? It might be a queen bee, it might be a king bee, it may even be a drag queen bee.

The concern for the blue flowers means I left maybe 8% of my lawn un-mowed. In return, I got Chris and other bees, and flying bugs you’d hate to have down the back of your shirt. And I am their cigar-smoking king.

I’m gonna mow again Saturday, and I’m gonna have to mow the tall grass where the blue flowers were, but I’m gonna leave a couple of other patches un-mowed, maybe in the side yard. Eventually, I may stop mowing the side yard altogether and let it go back to what it was when the Pilgrims smoked their cigars amid the flying bugs. No one’s gonna stop me. There’s a guy three blocks over selling heroin, and no one’s stopped him.

You can’t do much with a surly little scrap of lawn, but I got a little jungle back. I made a little prairie.

To about 30% of the population, this kind of behavior means that I’m a gay, bee-loving, Communist crybaby, and may be a threat to democracy, motorcycles, red meat, the coal industry, our troops and writing in cursive.

Real men kill everything. If you see a lost baby squirrel in your front yard, and you don’t beat it to death with a golf club, it means you’re not a man, you’re not Clint Eastwood. You’re probably Taylor Swift. You don’t have to live with your kids to be a man, and you don’t have to stay with your wife to be a man, and you don’t have to be sober enough to work to be a man, but you do have to kill a buncha small lives that are no bigger than your thumb. You do that, and you’re Rocky Balboa losing the first 14 rounds of every fight, only to score a knockout in the final round.

Me and the bees, we’re sitting this one out.

Marc Munroe Dion—award-winning veteran reporter and Pulitzer Prize-nominated newspaper columnist—is an old-school newsman who fell out of a Frank Capra movie, complete with pipe and fedora.