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On Sunday it suddenly occurred to me that I had been straying from my masculinity. I was sitting on our back porch,
A) drinking cranberry juice
B) reading Pride and Prejudice, and
C) trying to develop the first shade of a base tan.
Nothing felt right. And it was because:
A) Juice is what little girls order in family restaurants.
B) Pride and Prejudice is what slightly more grown up girls read when they go to high school. (It was written in the Victorian era (maybe - I’m not really sure when that was - or what it’s named after - perhaps a famous naval Victory?) and it’s a BAGFAG book, which means it’s written By A Girl, For A Girl. I should have been reading something more guy-oriented, like a coffee table book about motorcycles or famous naval Victories.)
C) I don’t even know what a base tan is.
I needed a manly diversion.
Dods, exhibiting perfect timing, walked on to the porch. He wasn’t the manly diversion though. That’s coming in the next paragraph.
Dods donned his sunglasses and gazed at the empty lot strewn with garbage next door. It was at this point that I decided we needed to turn the lot into a lawn, and we needed to do it now.
The lot needed to be converted into a lawn for four reasons:
1. If we cleaned up the lot, we wouldn’t have to be embarrassed by our close proximity to it, and bums would be less likely to throw plastic bags of feces into it (which they do).
2. We could convert it into the kind of space that would be perfect for Whiffle Ball, BBQs, or tag-team wrestling matches.
3. We would get to go to the Home Depot to buy supplies.
4. If we began work on the lot, we could also begin daydreaming about how awesome it would be when completed. Specifically, we could begin daydreaming about installing a zipline.
So once Dods and I had decided that we were going to attack the lot, I symbolically threw down Pride and Prejudice like I was spiking a football during an end zone celebration, dumped the cranberry juice all over myself so it would look like I just got in a fight, and prepared to go to the Home Depot.
Home Depot is basically the Spike TV of megastores. Spike TV, let’s face it, airs pretty crappy programming. It’s all Seagal movies, washed-up former professional athletes competing against washed-up amateur athletes, and random Asian people falling into trenches while smiling. Yet for some reason, guys are attracted to the channel like moths to an explosion. It’s because we’re idiots. When someone tells us that a television channel is for us (just dudes), we think we should go there.
Similarly, when a store bills itself as a “Home Improvement Center” we can’t help but flock. And for some reason it makes us happy. The Home Depot, if you think about it, shouldn’t be fun. It’s just a big warehouse full of tools, fertilizer, and toilet accessories, and none of it is free.
Until Sunday, I never understood why guys liked to go shopping for tools. Tools, for me, have always = work (the manual labor kind), and I have always hated the manual labor kind of work.
Maybe this is my biological clock ticking, just like it does, I assume, for all males at some point, gradually turning our dislikes into likes, making us enjoy activities like landscaping, convincing us to buy shoes that aren’t sneakers, and instilling us with a previously undiscovered attraction to pregnant women.
Because I really enjoyed shopping for a weedwacker. Dods and I also bought work gloves (what could be more manly than no shirt, just work gloves? Maybe a tool belt. Okay, so what could be more manly than no shirt, just work gloves, a tool belt, and let’s throw in wraparound shades, too. By the way, this is supposed to be with pants. No shirt, but definitely pants.), a rake, and Husky yard bags, which are like regular garbage bags, except they’re for men who do yard work.
We were ready to get to work.
With a little help from our friends, we began wacking weeds, raking brush, and removing trash. We found, among other gems, a single bicycle wheel, a mostly naked decapitated Hulk Hogan doll, a bag of shit (literally), and two beat-up pornographic movie cases (one still with DVD).
(Later that night, I walked into the kitchen and witnessed Dods at the kitchen sink, carefully scrubbing what looked like a CD or DVD. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Gonna see if the porn works,” he said.
For the record, the porn, Natural & Legally 18, does work, but the actors are nowhere eighteen. They’re way closer to middle-aged.)
As we labored, we took frequent breaks to drink Bud Light and dream about throwing parties on our new backyard. Dods suggested adult-sized monkey bars and slides. We discussed renting one of those inflatable castles that are good for jumping and headlocks. And we thought about installing a zipline, one that would go directly from our back porch to the middle of the lawn. This, we decided, would allow us to make a grand entrance to our first party.
“We could let everyone congregate in the lawn ahead of time!” I said excitedly, nearly breathless. “And they would be sitting there wondering where Adam and Dods were, and then we would come swooping in on the zipline!”
“Like the Count of Monte Cristo!” Dods said.
“Yes, like the Count of Monte Cristo!” I said.
Unfortunately, if we arrived via zipline, we would probably have to go tandem-style. Otherwise one of us might steal the other one’s thunder. So maybe we would be less like the Count of Monte Cristo and more like Batman and Robin. I’m fine with that as long as everybody understands that I’m Batman. I’m thinking about shaving the Bat logo into my chest hair, by the way.
Sunday night, after we had put a significant dent in the lot, and as the sun was going down behind the Back Bay, I went out to the back porch. This spot, let me remind you, is where the day started, where I spiked Pride and Prejudice and dumped cranberry juice on myself. The back porch is always a good place to look west because you can see the Prudential and the Hancock Building, and when the sun is going down, it reminds you what skylines are for, if you’re into that type of thing, which I occasionally am. But you don’t want to look east from our porch - or at least in the past, you didn’t. To the east was always the empty lot strewn with garbage.
But as I turned around on Sunday night and looked at the lot, it didn’t look half bad. Half of it still looked like crap, but the dent part looked pretty good. Then a skunk slinked out from a hole in the fence and walked through the crappy section. I decided that it was probably a man skunk, out hunting for some garbage to chew on, or maybe a girl skunk to hit on.
The skunk, like me, was looking for a manly diversion.
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