In my wanderings around town I'm finding myself passing judgment on people based solely on their front yards. The selection in this neighborhood is especially eclectic, ripe for casually scornful interpretation. There'll be a primly manicured, neurotically watered, astroturf-green lawn, clear evidence of massive psychosexual sublimation, next to a brown overgrown nightmare of neglect with waist-high weeds and rusted machine parts behind a chicken wire fence, a setting reminiscent of the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike, or some misbegotten industrial zone where the mob dumps corpses out of moving cars. Me being me, I find something lacking or psychologically revealing or patently damnable about every single yard. This one's twee, too just so, a whiff of homosexual fussiness, like it's the yard of Larry Tate from "Bewitched". That one's too showily "contemplative" and faux-Japanese, to the point where it's somehow zen-like and meretricious at the same time. Another is just a disaster, a lot of loving attention in the service of poor taste, what with the stone animals that look like household pets frozen in mournful effigy after the blast at Herculaneum and the burbling eternal fountain bought from the big parking lot sale at Home Depot. Across the street there's one where the yard itself is acceptable but it's ruined by a preposterous white picket fence with a hilariously over the top gated entrance, reaching so nakedly for some Norman Rockwell In Hell imagery it's ludicrous. Next to that is one with no grass or foliage at all, the front yard is completely covered in smooth rocks. Either the owner has terrible allergies or he just can't even be bothered. That one I can definitely respect, plus it reminds me of the street I grew up on in Vallejo, California.