Digging up the back yard
Cashed in on February 18, 2007.
Finally becoming tired of my life as a transient indigent this week, and beginning to consider an existence comprised of hovering around my town’s stumblebum stables to be irksome, to say the least, I decided to give it all up and go home once again. After all, home is where the heart is, and it’s where I left my very own cardial organ last week when Mr. Wilson ripped it out of my chest and nailed it to a wall after he found out about the voicemail I left his mother. So, I blithely slithered in through my front door and welcomed myself home with a surprise party—a party that only I knew about, until it got so loud it blew out Mr. Wilson’s windows and he boxed my ears with a boxing glove. At that point, I invited all the neighbors over, so long as they came barefoot, but no one wanted to set foot in my palatial house—all those gorillas in the extra bedrooms frighten some people, apparently.
After the party was over, I sat to think a bit. Since my attempts at earning a living by shouting at people for pennies had failed once again, I decided to dig my savings out of the back yard and attempt to subsist on that. After exhuming seven of the 55-gallon drums full of $20 bills and medieval gold coinage, I decided that was enough for the foreseeable future and meticulously filled the holes back in, lovingly covering each with a piece of sod. I couldn’t leave a single trace of activity in my back yard, lest the lawn gnomes awaken and throttle me for disturbing their sacred underground abodes beneath my back yard.
My savings exhumed, I proceeded to buy up all the property surrounding my homely little home and boot out the neighbors. The first to go was Mr. Wilson: I gleefully handed him the eviction notice myself, riding up to his front door in the bucket of the very bulldozer that would, ten minutes later, turn his house into a pile of rubble. Cackling madly as the ’dozer tore into his house and he ran about the front yard, screaming and howling in anguish, I rushed to the next house and informed them that they, too, would be evicted in exactly nine minutes and twenty-seven seconds.
Within a few hours I had safely secured for myself and my posterity every square cubit of land on both sides of Bouillabaisse Boulevard, from one end to the other. Within another few hours, every house but my own was reduced to a smoking pile of rubble: Smoking because after the bulldozers tore ’em down, I dynamited the suckers just for fun! Bam! Bam! Bam, bam, bam!! And by nightfall, with my ex-neighbors scattered throughout the land and lamenting the losses of their lands and women, I had erected defensive walls about my street, forty feet high and twelve feet thick. The finishing touches involved a moat, forty-six gun turrets installed along the walls at strategic points, and a ceremonious renaming of Bouillabaisse Boulevard to the Alyssa Milano Footpath. Three side streets—Witherspoonworth Lane, Frummwich Drive, and Apple-Latchier Circuit—would soon be renamed Jennifer Love Hewitt Lane, Spice Girls Drive, and Britney Spears Circuit (she’s got fine feet, too!).
Pretty awesome what seven barrels of cash and gnomely treasure can do for little old Crazy Phil, ain’t it?