Saturday, March 04, 2006

Mr. F'er's Neighborhood

If you’re offended by salty language or enjoy burning books, then you might want to skip this post. Stop back in a week and we’ll try to be more genteel. If you’re here looking for the Lovehammer stuff, it’s a little further down so keep reading. If you’re looking for porn and you ended up here, you really suck at internet.


"That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say "Fuck you." I'm positive."

More about that passage in a minute. I’m no geology major, but I’m pretty sure I’ve discovered a major fault line in North Texas and it happens to be located directly beneath my driveway. It was cleverly concealed under one continuous concrete slab when I bought the house, but a series of tremors has diminished my once viable driveway to a pile of rubble that would make a Sunni insurgent proud. Of course, since I live in Texas and own the requisite pick up truck I don’t have many problems navigating the rubble; however, Mrs. F’er and her sedan have significantly greater challenges and have recently required the use of a crane and elaborate pulley system to resolve the growing ingress and egress issues. Furthermore, I was concerned over the potential liability should a pizza guy fall into one of the cracks and dislocate an elbow or something. A particularly vengeful lawsuit could wrest control of Leper Pop Publishing from yours truly, in which case you would be reading the blog of Bill the Domino’s Pizza delivery guy and Moist Rub. Not that I order that crap from Domino’s, but maybe the off-duty delivery guy that keeps putting coupons on my door every other day might bust his sorry ass in my driveway. I suspect that blog would be even sorrier.

I considered getting a new driveway several years ago, but I thought that $1200 seemed excessive for a load of concrete and some day laborers. So I instead invested in some upgrades to our bicycle fleet. But a funny thing happened after that decision. It seems that China woke up one day and realized that they have a buttload of people there, but not much stuff. So they checked their savings account and found that they had some handsome dollars from selling Beanie Babies to a bunch of silly Americans several years ago. They swung by the ATM and took a major league withdrawal and bought a bunch of steel to build some stuff for themselves, but didn’t warn anyone and created a worldwide shortage of steel. I told you it was a major league withdrawal.

Suddenly my years of undergraduate study in Economics would pay off. I whipped out my pad of graph paper and carefully constructed a supply and demand graph. Taking into consideration the increased demand from China, I correspondingly shifted my demand curve outward and studied the results. Just as I had watched my professors do years before, I drew a dotted line from the intersection of the two curves and realized that the price of steel rebar in my future driveway was likely getting more expensive than a beer at a ballgame. Unfortunately it had to be done, so we called around for some new estimates and found that the price had nearly doubled. But fortunately we found a contractor that had apparently lost some big money betting on Sasha Cohen in the Olympics and needed some fast cash to pay off his bookie. This resulted in a significant cash discount.


The day they were scheduled to start, I wanted to take the day off of work and help out with the jackhammering. It seemed like a golden opportunity to be involved in a legal, yet wonderfully destructive activity. Mrs. F’er had other thoughts, handed me my brown bag lunch and sent me off to work where I would be out of the way. I suspect that she just didn’t want to have to split the jackhammer time with me. After the jackhammering was complete she, too, went off to work.

She arrived home later that day to a fresh spanking new driveway. With the words “fuck you” written across the bottom. She carefully reviewed the contract I signed with the contractor just to make sure I didn’t specifically request that feature, and called him to inquire about the best way to mitigate the damage. From what I can tell the conversation went something like this:

Mrs. F’er: Hi, this is Mrs. F’er and you did my driveway today – I came home and there is some profanity written in it.

Contractor: Son of a bitch!

Mrs. F’er: No, “fuck you”.

Contractor: Hey, that’s uncalled for… I didn’t do it!

Mrs. F’er: No, the profanity says “fuck you”.

Contractor: Son of a bitch!


They eventually sorted it out and he gave her instructions to wet it down, smooth it out as best as possible with a straight edge, and brush it again. She did a nice job and I’m thinking of setting her up with her own paving business, but when I came home I found the word “fuck” written in the driveway. I asked her why she did that, but she didn’t find much humor in my inquiry and set out to repair the new damage.

Why weren’t the damn kids inside playing video games instead of literally “fuck”-ing with my new driveway? I must live in the only neighborhood with kids that don’t own an X-Box and a drum of Cheetos. But even more disappointing was the total lack of creativity. If they were going to go through the effort of vandalizing my stuff, at least do something somewhat more thoughtful than the lowest common denominator of vulgarity. Based on my perception of the local school system, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a reference to Catcher in the Rye. They could have thrown down the anarchy logo. Or a political statement. A gang tag. A relief of Crystal Bernard. I only wish I would have driven up a few minutes earlier to catch them and perhaps stimulate the impotent right side of their brains with a leftover piece of 3/8” rebar.

"I kept picturing myself catching him at it, and how I'd smash his head on the stone steps till he was good and goddam dead and bloody. But I knew, too, I wouldn't have the guts to do it."

I’d probably just catch the little urchin and watch him rip his Green Day shirt in his effort to escape.


We kept a vigil over the project for the rest of the night and it appears to have dried free of any profanities. But now I'm thinking I should have paid the extra for that relief of Crystal.

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

methinks they were just trying to personalize the end of your driveway for you Mr. F'er

they just spelled "er" as "you"

Oh well. Crystal called and wants to know when she can come over to see her likeness in the driveway. I told her there was an unavoidable delay and that you'd get back to her.

Anonymous said...

Ah, the beauty is in the details. How will Sasha's picture figure in the story? Done. J.D.? Oh yeah, the t-shirt-- one of the few redeeming things he did on that show, Popstar or something. Perfect choice to complement your story, once you can adapt to reading sideways... Crystal? Well I saw her playing Mrs. Santa on a Hallmark Channel movie last weekend. Everything just falls into place. Genius.

Anonymous said...

Maybe Crystal's likeness should go on the leper pop tshirts? That way, you could send her one.

Moist Rub said...

Who names their son "Holden"? I'll bet the kids were calling him "Holden Acockinyerass" by the third grade. That's why he's all messed up.

Anonymous said...

You have a good run in that neighborhood. Time to move!

Sid said...

lowkey - obviously it was a free personalization - how did I miss that?

chimon - thanks for the comments - I always wonder if the pictures are worth the time.

del - horrible idea. I would never insult Crystal by putting her likeness on a LP shirt. She demands her own line of Crystal-wear.

MR - I can only imagine the emotional toll of going through grade school as "Moist".

LA - Can you believe 12 years at that place? Yes, it is time to move. This summer as a matter of fact. I'll need some help with my buoy collection, so clear your schedule.

Anonymous said...

Is that one of those Chuckie Cheese drawn pictures of Crystal?

Whew, Moist, good thing I decided to log on as HR instead of my real name, Holden Rectumtight.

Sid said...

Fortunately, I'm not familiar with the inner workings of Chuck E. Cheese, so I can't comment.

The photo is one of the many in my collection, this one in particular enhanced with some of the tools in Microsoft Photo Editor. Not that it requires any enhancement... it was just done for entertainment purposes.

Anonymous said...

Hi Sid! I'm back, and very glad to see you've been keeping the Leper Pop light alive with these tales of your life adventures. I can see I've got a good evening's worth of reading to do.

So, what about me? What have I been doing? Corresponding with my favorite Survivor, EVER! Oh bliss, such a joy & an adventure. But he is about to go On An Adventure and I must see if my pals on the internet will have me back.

Anonymous said...

AMAI!!! Welcome, welcome! Have missed you dear. Besides the blog, don't miss checking in at Leper House ....

Sid said...

AMAI - welcome back. You can always come back to Leper Pop - we understand the internet is a big place and it's easy to get sidetracked. I figured you were just pitching a book of dirty Marty stories to publishing houses.

But I am curious - who is the best Survivor ever?

Anonymous said...

Ethan.

Oops, I thought you said who was the cutest survivor ever! My bad.

Anonymous said...

Hi Keysunset!!

"Besides the blog, don't miss checking in at Leper House ...."

Why can't I figure out what you're saying there, Key?

Hi, Sid!!

"I figured you were just pitching a book of dirty Marty stories to publishing houses."

Nope, mostly because I didn't finish writing them. LOL, it turned out Marty was an opening act, he got the fire on, but my flames went nuts over one poor Farmer Man name of Brandon Bellinger. Yes, I know he's half my age, but he's ADORABLE. So I adore him.

My autographed picture of him arrived today. God, I'm just an idiot. This will pass, I will recover. He's going on a big trip somewhere, and won't tell me doing what. He has to figure out what he wants to do with his life, and since a crazy recapper like me isn't what he'd envisaged, I'm not going to be "dropping everything" to accompany him.

I'll have to bid him farewell and hope he makes it back in one piece.

Is everyone here well & happy? Speaking of well & happy, are you guys going to comment & critique the new season of Rock Star? They've been shilling on the radio for it here in Toronto. Personally? I can't wait! I just hope there's no one who beckons me to fall in love with him. I'm feeling kind of wrung out with love.

It's nice to be back here, guys. I've missed you. Smooches & stuff.

Anonymous said...

Sid, forget your driveway. If you can get the Crystal likeness on a piece of toast, you can make major $$ on eBay.

amai, we haven't met before, but notice to have another Torontonian around to balance things out.

Anonymous said...

it only take two Torontonians (I swear that sounds like you came from a distant planet) to balance out ALL the rest of us?!

... maybe you did come from a distant planet ...

Anonymous said...

Yup.

Anonymous said...

I just thought JD's pic was there to emphasize the contractor's mantra--SOB, SOB, SOB.