Dave Barry's Homes and Other Black Holes by Dave Barry Read Free Book Online Page B

often had to go outside and gain artistic inspiration by pretending I was the U.S. Olympic basketball team, challenging the Soviet team for the gold medal. The part of the Soviet team was played by my dog. You will be pleased to learn that the U.S. team always won, because (a) the Soviet team couldn’t dribble—it would just sort of nose the ball around the court—and (b) the U.S. team had this very effective play where it would yell, in a stern voice: “No! BAD dog!!” which caused the Soviet team to crouch down on the court in a guilty fashion, and the United States would cruise past for an easy layup.
    Anyway, the way I erected the basketball post was, carefully following the instructions that came with it, I dug a hole three feet deep and thirty inches wide. The instructions said I was supposed to put the post inthe hole and fill it with concrete, only I had no concrete. I had never, until that moment, given much thought as to where concrete even came from. Large oceangoing freighters was my best guess.
    So I looked in the yellow pages, and lo and behold, there was this place that sold concrete in special trailers that attached to your car. I called them up, and they told me each trailer held a “yard” of concrete.
    “A ‘yard’?” I said.
    “Yes,” they confirmed. “A yard.” Whatever the hell that meant.
    Well. It turns out that they use the name “yard” because this is enough concrete to cover North America to a depth of three feet. I had a very adventurous drive home from the concrete place, propelled by a trailer that weighed far more than my actual car, a trailer with no respect whatsoever for the tradition of stopping at red lights. But finally I made it, and I positioned the trailer over my basketball hole, and I opened the little gate at the bottom, and in one second the hole was full of concrete, using maybe one trillionth of the available supply, which I needed to find a use for pronto, becausethe burly men back at the concrete place had made it clear that if you bring them back a trailer full of hardened concrete, their policy is to roll it back and forth over your body.
    This is when I came up with the idea of making a lump. I backed the trailer over to a section of our yard that had always looked like it could use some perking up, landscapingwise, and I created this free-form pile of concrete that is not only attractive, but also very durable. If, millions of years from now, when all other man-made structures have disappeared, intelligent life forms from other galaxies visit the planet Earth, they will find this lump, and they will wonder what kind of being created it, and for what purpose. I bet basketball will never occur to them.
    And the hell of it is, the concrete lump was one of my better projects, in the sense that I also got a working basketball post out of it. Most of the other ones turned out much worse. The full impact of this was driven home to me forcibly when we decided to sell the Pennsylvania house, and we paid several thousand dollars (I am still not makingthis up) to two men, both named Jonathan, to come over and eliminate all traces of all my homeowner projects—bookshelves where you could see the shapes of dead insects under the paint, paneling that looked like it had been installed by vandals, etc.—in an effort to make our home look as nice as it did before I started improving it. After the Jonathans took out all my projects, the house mostly consisted of holes, which they filled up with Spackle. When prospective buyers would ask: “What kind of construction is this house?” I would answer: “Spackle.”

    Do-it-yourself concrete lump
    So to get back to my original point, I am now violently opposed to doing anything myself. I think there should be a federal law requiring people who publish do-it-yourselfbooks to include a warning, similar to what the Surgeon General has on cigarette packs, right on the cover of the book, stating:

    WARNING: ANY MONEY YOU SAVE BY