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.