Tales From the Underground

According to my idiot neighbor Dale, a watched pot never calls the kettle black, or rust never sleeps, or something. The point of it being (I think) that you have to take the initiative if you don't want some weird German dude with no body hair eating your lunch. Because it's a dog eat dogfood world out there. And I have to admit that his confusing point really hit home for yours truly, and it gave me indigestion. It's clear that Omar Bricks has rested on his laurels far too long. It's time to build an underground city.

According to this issue of Omni magazine, which my neighbor Dale got a subscription to because for some reason he thought it was going to be full of cheesecake pics of the girls from those Robert Palmer videos back in the 80's, but it's actually all about science and bullshit future predictions, but according to Omni we're all going to be living in underground tunnels in, like, five years. That's because you can only fit so much shit on an acre of land, but if you tunnel down to the center of the earth, that's like five acres or something. Way more room. So it's basically free land, the kind of thing this country hasn't seen since the Gold Rush or back in the day when people would run around grabbing trees and lakes and crabs, yelling "Mine!"

Now you know Omar Bricks is going to jump the gun on that inevitability, sure as futuristic shit. So I immediately drew up plans to add an extension to my house—straight down. I figured it would be bitchin' to make another mirror image of my entire house underground, just the kind of thing to freak people out and make for some righteous "Dancin' on the Ceiling" video re-creation hijinks and whatnot. But then I realized that even if I pulled that off, I still wouldn't have a pool, so I decided to tunnel under my neighbor Dale's house as well, since that lazy fucker hadn't even read his own magazine. His loss is my real-estate gain. And from there, who knows? We could have a real Omarpolis on our hands in no time.

The more I thought about it, it became clear that I should probably start Project Dig under Dale's house, since it was his magazine and everything. All I needed to start was some kind of crazy-ass digging machine, since Omar Bricks has never been good with a shovel or backbreaking physical labor. I was drawing up plans for a complex Bricksmobile modification involving a gigantic diamond-tipped drilling cone piloted by test monkeys (just for the shit of it) while I waited in the drive-thru lane at Arby's, when the divine inspiration hit. Why waste precious Bricks-hours and other people's diamonds building a Digmobile that was just going to sit in the garage and collect dust when I was done, when I could just hire the crew of this Arby's to do the same thing for a day's wages? They all looked like strong, able-bodied men and boys, with hardly a green card between them. It was brilliant.

The sell took some doing, since I don't speak any Spanish, and one guy kept trying to give me curly fries, but within minutes I had Arby's entire workforce in my trunk, heading back to the Bricks Manor to make suburban history. Did I feel a little guilty about the whole thing? Of course. That guy behind me in the drive-thru lane probably sat there for hours before he realized nobody was coming to take his order. But you don't make history without some sacrifices.

After liberating a half-dozen shovels and a wheelbarrow from my other neighbor Mitch's garage, Project Dig started smooth like a shaved baby's ass. Those guys could tunnel like the Vietnamese, only without the distracting hats. Though it turned out Dale was a little smarter than I gave him credit for, since he rigged the land under his house with all kinds of crazy booby traps and shit, trick pipes blocking the way that spray ice cold water when you try to hack into them with an axe, electric cable shock traps, and a huge underground tank of shit I don't even want to know where he bought.

But rest assured that Omar Bricks and Team Dig went all Tomb Raider on that bullshit, and the dig went silky smooth until we got to the other side of Dale's house, when that unreliable fucker's foundation collapsed, caving in the tunnel back to the base camp behind us. Luckily for us, those Mexicans dig faster than I can breathe, and we came aground in Dale's neighbor's garden like some kind of gopher from hell. I don't even know who lives in that house, since the only time I'd ever been over there was the time Foghat came home drunk one night and passed out in the wrong doghouse, and some asshole woke me from a dead sleep like he was absolutely certain it was my dog that barfed on his garage. Some people.

So in the end, a valuable lesson was learned. You have to tunnel more than six feet deep if you plan on digging under a house that's full of heavy shit. Wiser and dirtier, I paid off the Mexicans and bought their silence with the promise of a ride back to Arby's.

True, the cause of underground living was set back a bit that day, but future underground-living generations will no doubt benefit from the knowledge gained. They won't have to suffer though having their neighbors' houses collapse into the earth, sending shockwaves through the ground that knock over their favorite Darts Champion trophy back home, cracking the top corner a little. But all the pioneers have to suffer; it's a fact of life. If that's what it takes to be remembered forever, then Omar Bricks says "Hey, fuck it."

Bricks out.

Remorse Code
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