I’ve come to a grand conclusion — one so profound it shakes the very fabric of society. May I share it with you? It is this: do-it-yourself projects are for fools. Yes, fools! Dummies. Imbeciles. Ignoramuses. People afflicted with a deadly disease that I like to call “manure for brains.” Don’t be offended. No, no. Don’t get so upset. Listen, I’m the king of do-it-yourself. The “King of the Ignoramuses.” My manure is brought in by the truckload.
The wretched son and the flower box failure
And now to sound like a horrible, awful, no-good son who says things like this: I should have bought my mother a Christmas present instead of agreeing to build her flower boxes. Yep, I said it. I’m a lout. An ungrateful sack of rotting kidney beans. I should have bought her socks or ear muffs or a gift certificate for plants. Something … anything! It would have been over and done with. Delivered on Christmas morning. Unwrapped, fawned over and forgotten.
The Moron Gene and Wrestling with Chimneys
Isn’t it time geneticists turn their attention to one of society’s greatest afflictions: Why men believe do-it-yourself construction projects will be easy. It is one of the great issues of our time. Of all time. A stressor of marriages back to the earliest days of civilization. Historians have found evidence of an emperor telling his wife, “Hon, chill out. Rome TOTALLY can be built in a day. Let me get the hammer.” It’s been downhill ever since. What is wrong in our brains that we believe the things we say? Because we’re not liars. When we survey the scene, we really think there isn’t that much involved, that it will take next to no time to complete and (maybe the worst part) that there will be virtually no mess to clean up. (How many of us have uttered the fateful: “Put a tarp down! Why in the world would I put a tarp down? I’m gonna’ be real careful.”)