may have noticed that nowhere in this book do I ever talk about how to Do It Yourself. This is because I have done a great many things myself over the years, and in every case I have ultimately come to realize that I would have been better off if I had just walked around my house firing random shotgun blasts. No matter how hard I tried, my homeowner projects always produced highly comical results, such as the enormous concrete lump in the yard of the house we owned in Pennsylvania.

I am not making this lump up. We acquired it as a result of the project when I erected a basketball post, which I needed because, as a professional writer, I 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 lay-up.

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 in the 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.