As if boarding the Pequod, I'm preparing to spend months away in an attempt to cast dominion over a leviathan I know I can never tame.

When I return - if I return - I'll be beaten, the futility of man versus nature in my hollow eyes.

Swatting away soldier beetles, my grass widow and our grass orphans stand at the door and watch in silence as I lace up my steel caps.

My son breaks from his mother's side and throws himself towards me.

Stay dad! Stay!

My daughters sound a mournful chorus, something from their early childhood sure to stir guilt ...

Let it grow, let it grow ...

Damn this war. Damn this lawn.

Victa, Honda, Husqvarna, Stihl ... these are the constant consonants of my summer; my endless summer of violence.

I cut and I slash and I edge and I mulch and I rake. Blood on my knees, blood on my elbows.

I am Death on a John Deere.

I am Sisyphus in sock protectors.

Mowing is a calling and a curse, and it's high season in our village and hay fever throughout the district.

As if giants have lost their marbles across flush paddocks, rolled gold bales of glorious nutrition litter the region, it seems, like never before.

This time last year, these fields were crippled. The only hay we saw was on the back of trucks as they lumbered through town from the impossible oasis of the deep south with precious feed for flailing stock.

The rush to bring in all this wonderful stubble remains a reminder of how we must still bend to the seasons like (criminally uncut) reeds in the wind.

I've been mowing since primary school. I did it as a part-time job through adolescence, laid turf in my teens as well, and, inevitably, became an adult who took on a property with far too much growth considered sensible for any mortal to control.

Despite this, as if conquering new lands, I still push my mower into the red, eking out longer and wider nature strips and subduing the feral space between the backyard and the creek. It's an act of pride (and hubris) but one also motivated by fear, because I don't want a repeat of the biblical plague of copperheads we encountered upon arriving to our thoroughly free-range property more than a decade ago.

Residents of our village - a place renowned for its communal four-stroke throat-singing between September and April - discuss mowing with a certain dread. One missed weekend can quickly become two weeks of deluge, which means you may lose your chance to fully rein in the lawn for the rest of the season, which means bouts of depression, emasculation and impotency.

Confusingly, for something so omnipresent, lawn maintenance is too often bypassed by popular culture, so it's thrilling when given the representation it deserves on the big screen.

Excluding anything with a reaper (sorry, Ingmar) and being wary of red herrings (Tuff Turf, Buffalo Bill), a number of films have given at least a passing nod to keeping on top of the yard.

Most gratuitously, there's 1992's The Lawnmower Man. It gets marks for ushering in the whole virtual reality thing but loses points for making Jeff Fahey's titular character such a simpleton (lawnmower men are smart, just ask Jim).

In fact, the simpleton/misfit trope is something of a standard when it comes to celluloid landscaping.

There's Bill Murray's groundskeeper in Caddyshack, Tom Hanks' Forrest Gump, the skateboarding doofus in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Sam Rockwell's troubled soul in Lawn Dogs and Billy Bob Thornton's Karl Childers in Sling Blade (granted, not much about gardening except for the pivotal hardware cameo at the finale).

And certainly not a movie about a simpleton, but sublimely simple, is David Lynch's The Straight Story, the true tale of an elderly man who rode a mower across Iowa and Wisconsin to visit his sick brother. (I would've ridden a clapped-out piece of junk 240 miles for the chance to sit on a porch with Harry Dean Stanton, too).

Romcoms have also had their share of splendour in the grass.

Way back in 1987, before he was McDreamy (and before they were called "romcoms"), Patrick Dempsey starred in Can't Buy Me Love - yet another take on Pygmalion where an Arizona high school student diverts takings from his summer mowing gig to transform from nerd to cool kid.

More recently, Steve Carell's jilted husband in 2011's Crazy, Stupid, Love uses the cover of darkness and Talking Heads' This Must Be the Place to tenderly maintain his leafy suburban plot, complete with a round of important lawn aeration. Interestingly, the very next scene has Carell's father playing catch with his son over at his new apartment block. Pallets of unlaid turf loom in the background as if a reminder of Carell's barren bachelorhood compared with the fertility of his erstwhile family garden/life.

And talking of crazy, stupid, love, Julie Christie's Bathsheba Everdene in 1967's Far from the Madding Crowd (Carey Mulligan might just have been even better in the 2015 version) pulls off some commendable backyard tarp work when she and Alan Bates' Gabriel Oak battle to cover valuable hayricks amid a sexy storm (there's nothing worse than wet clippings).

But my favourite bit of movie mowing is when Gatsby sends the gardener over to Nick Carraway's neglected rental for a spruce-up before Daisy Buchanan's arrival (neither casts in the most recent film versions - 1974 and 2013 - nail the characters, not even the excellent Mulligan).

As the book says: "At eleven o'clock a man in a raincoat dragging a lawn-mower, tapped at my front door and said that Mr Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass."

Every word of Fitzgerald's elegant opus on the death of the American dream has been parsed and pored over in the search for meaning, and this section is another example of Gatsby's quest for perfection and status, not to mention his arrogance.

Considering, however, Gatsby's ambition is to steal Daisy from her husband and his subsequent fate, I tend to think all those scholars out there have missed the simple point of this passage; a message we exponents of neighbourly lawn and order understand only too well.

Never cut another man's grass.