Ever since I was old enough to pee in the kitchen sink I can remember the nightly regiment consisting of my dad (100% grade A inner-city union redneck) crawling up the front steps, shouting obscenities at the old lady, and finding a comfy place in the craterous ass groove in the living room La-Z-Boi, not unlike a mystic elder in the lofty cliffs of a Mongolian mountain range. From atop this perch he saw fit to bestow upon me the wisdoms he had accrued whilst dragging his face through a puddle of his own vomit mere hours earlier

"You just don't F*** with sprinkler-fitters"

Naturally, this always followed the removal of his Old Style stained shirt and an occasional wetting of the trousers (the rest of us didn't sit in the chair often), and swelled from a sage-like recantation into a Salem-fueled rage that was prone to precipitate heavy casualties in the family pet department. On a good night. On a bad night, he'd find his way up to my bedroom at 3am (god knows how he drove home, he fell down the stairs at least twice by my count), tore the covers off, and began a tutorial on sod installation that would have stayed with me to this day ...

... if it had been spoken in Earthling.

When my eyes had finally opened, I was standing in my underwear in the back yard looking over the field of dog urine-soaked compost that was our lawn. "Why..." — before I could even get the words out of my mouth a smile crossed his lips. "I found free sod. Yer puttin it in tomorrow." At which point, he handed me a shovel. Technically, it was tomorrow.