I didnt have shit in my backyard. Nothing. Not even grass. Really! When we first moved there, fuckheads that we were, we apparently hadnt gotten the septic tank inspected or something.
Within two weeks of living there the goddamn thing had to be dug up, hauled away and a new one put in. Right smack dab in the middle of the backyard. The classic thing though was, when it came time to fill the fucking hole back in and cover the bunker-like cement tank, the crew put all the topsoil in the hole first and, quite lovingly and oh so carefully, spread the shit soil all over the entire backyard. Which was about 10 square feet, but still.
So no matter how much Scotts Turfbuilder 2 my dad fruitlessly coated the area with, it was a muddy eyesore. Forever.
Oh, and there was a massive pile of said shit soil left behind. It would have taken 10 minutes and $50 dollars for our crew to haul the crap away but you know what my dad does? You guessed it, he says No way! Im no goddam idiot. Im not wasting $50. Ill shovel the fucking dirt into an aluminum garbage pale perched in a 70 year old wheel barrel. Honestly. Then Ill wheel the 500lb thing across the yard, shimmy through a knuckle bashing 36in. clearance between the garage and house, and, and then, and then because the fucking can is way too heavy to even think about lifting it out of the wheel barrow, Ill shovel the dirt out of one trash can and into another, which I astutely and with no common sense whatsoever, placed smartly in the truck of my one family vehicle. Can you imagine? And by now you must be able to conjure up a clear imagine of the fucking disaster we called our car.
I mean the pile was 18 feet in diameter and 5 feet high. A no nonsense pile of fucking crap. And, yep, every night, after dad came sullenly home from work, the weight of the world quite obviously already on his shoulders, for 8 or so grim weeks, we, my dad and me, would be out there. Two lunatics as far as the neighbors were concerned. And the carnage added up. A new wheelbarrow tire. A new metal rake. A shovel handle. Grass seed for the muddy path we wore to the car. Also the foot traffic and muddy overspill that killed the grass out by the driveway. The GAS to drive said cans of dirt across town to an anonymous spot out where they were, at the time, building a highway. Oh yeah. The dirt wasnt just tipped out of the can, down the end of my street. Nope. It was driven a good 7 miles to the other end of town. Shovels were then drawn from the back seat and we would take turns, the two of us there, like two raving lunatics, shoveling it out by this seeming arbitrary spot, by the side of the road. After 3 horrific weeks of this, and honestly not even making a dent in that fucking pile, we figured out that, after shoveling 2/3rds of it out, the can could be, with some amount of effort, and teeth gritting fear of losing a finger, raise the can enough to tip the thing, spilling in all over the bumper and, eventually, the ground. But it was still quicker.
Next car inspection would uncover that our car had a cracked frame and I cant help to think it had to do with the fact that one day my whistling dad showed up after work with a sparking new aluminum trash can. He figured two cans in the trunk would cut our time in half. It was quicker, and if you disregard the obvious fact that it probably wasnt at all good to have the back bumper 3 inches off the ground and if you overlook the hideous, teeth clenching sound of the rear snows bottoming out inside the rear wheel wells, and if you didnt take into account that the whole business didnt steer all that hot when the front tires were floating above the ground after every dip or hump; if you didnt quibble, two cans DID make sense. Even though, according to my dad, the car pulled something fierce for the few months it lasted afterwards it did hurry the asinine affair along. When the pulling got so intense that even dad couldnt ignore it anymore, like if he took his hands off the wheel to light a cigarette, the car would rocket for the shoulder, making a bee-line for any random tree, pole, lawn ornament, what have you. It was like a magnet for anything that could do serious damage, it really was. It didnt take long for someone with even a very limited knowledge of automobiles to declare what I had secretly been suspecting, that the frame was cracked and, in essence, our car was condemned. The mile or so walk home that day was needless to say a quiet one.
Oh and about four hours after we made our last dirt trip, diggers and backhoes and jackhammers showed up on our street. The town was converting everyone to sewers and started digging up our very street and most notably our non-existent lawn. Our prized septic tank was now, in fact, useless. Oh we were fuckheads all right. FUCK. HEADS. Fuckheads.