“Read this,” the home inspector told us. “Do what it says and you’re home will last a very long time.”

As a first-time homeowner and as someone who was never construction-inclined, he might as well have been telling me to read a book on Kung-Fu Mastery written in Mandarin. I know The Debra felt the same way.

Needless to say, when we moved into the house we were thrilled…and terrified. Every seam in the drywall, every nail-pop, every creak in the wall was a potential fatal flaw that could bring the house crumbling down around our ears. The Debra went through her Chamber of the Horribles, which is her dark path from uncertainty to acceptance. She would lie awake in bed and scan the walls and ceiling. “What if that crack up there is the roof about to cave in?” she would say. “I’m sure it’s just the house settling,” I would reply. We had ferocious winds in our neighborhood that would blast down the street sounding like freight trains in the night. “Will our house blow over?” she would ask and I would tell her no, that we might lose some shingles off the roof but that the house would stand.

But I’ll confess that when the heat pump died and the basement utility room flooded and when the lawn mower kicked the bucket and the monster trellis I built in the backyard needed a little help, when the R-values of the wall insulation came up for debate and when it was time to enter the neighborhood Lawn Olympics and fertilizers and the biological characteristics of grass and weeds were suddenly important (monocots versus dicots and the impact of fertilizer run-off on the algae bloom in the Chesapeake Bay) - when all that came up, I admit I was at a loss.

Fortunately I had at my disposal an incredible resource of immeasurable quality: Chris O’Neill, my next door neighbor.

Chris.

Knows.

Everything.

And Chris shares what he knows. Without hesitation. Without compensation. He worked and thought and puzzled and noodled on my behalf so many times I can’t even begin to count. And he did it when he didn’t even know me, when I was just the clueless long-haired dude who moved in next door.

“Chris, my lawn mower won’t start. Any ideas?” Ten minutes later the lawn mower was in pieces and Chris had jury-rigged a spring to stretch from the thing to the whats-it and he’s pulled the starter cord and I’m back in the lawn-chopping business.

“Chris, I can’t figure out why my water heater is flooding my utility room.” And minutes later we were in the basement and I was getting a master class on water heaters and drainage and the downward sloping groove the original owner cut into the basement slab into which he had laid a runoff pipe designed to carry water to the sump pump and how heat and moisture can grow crud which blocks the pipe and causes water to back up and flood the utility room. “Bleach, Michael! Bleach will do the trick!” And we got a funnel and poured a half-gallon of bleach into the pipe and the utility room never flooded again.

I can go on and on. The trellis, the heat pump, adventitious roots, tree-houses, square foot gardens, the diabolical root systems of dandelions, the stealth qualities of gold-colored cars, the glory of re-wiring kitchen soffits, core-aerating the lawns, planning the tunnel we were going to dig from my basement to his…and of course the holiday extravaganzas: leaping from a coffin in a garage filled with dry ice smoke, bungee jumping off the second floor landing to deliver candy to the trick or treaters while bouncing from a cord fastened to an eye-hook in the ceiling of the two-floor foyer, the potato cannon on the Fourth of July, Rocket Man and the weekly unofficial holidays in the backyard where we all drank beer and wine or some other concoction while summer breezes lifted the humidity. Chris was at the root of all of those things.

A couple of years ago - on March 27th 2007, to be precise - a small ceramic deer appeared in our yard. We had no idea who he was or where he came from. He just appeared. This was him:

At the time, I wrote,

Mystery Fawn traveled back and forth between our house and Chris and Cindi’s, each time dressed up in something different.

Mystery Fawn became Leprefawn…

and Bridal Fawn…

and Rastafawnian…

and Kommoniwannafawnya.

It was a friendly game of one upmanship, with each iteration of Mystery Fawn being a little more outrageous than the last. And then summer came and everyone got busy and Mystery Fawn nestled quietly in Chris’ garage and went to sleep.

Until this week.

Cindi was in Calitastrophe visiting us when the job situation blew up in March. She got the full story of The Plagues of the Calipocalypse. She heard about the wildfires that nearly burned down our house, the mudslides that threatened our property, the vicious Santa Ana winds that blew pounds of ash and soot and leaves and charred debris into our pool every day, the lightning strike that knocked out the data center I worked at, the endless power crises that crippled that same data center for months and ultimately led to its demise, the food poisoning and the IRS bill and then the grand finale: losing my job. Lucky Cindi, she was there to hear all of that. And thank God she was or we would have lost it. We needed a friend to lean on and here we had an O’Neill! And when we decided that enough was enough, that we were fleeing what we called The Anaheimville Horror, when I had to fly from Califiasco to Virginia on a Monday to interview on a Tuesday and then fly back on a Wednesday, Chris and Cindi opened their home, took me to dinner, loaned me their car and massaged my weary feet until I fell asleep.

Ok, they didn’t touch my feet or massage anything else. But they might as well have for all the love and friendship they showed. Because that’s the kind of friends they are. And when The Debra and I returned to Virginia for good, schlepping our worldly possessions across the country for the second time in a year, they housed us and fed us and made us drinkies and then, once all the dust had settled and we were settling into a rented townhouse in Herndon, Chris made us laugh again.

Debra and I went for a walk one evening this week. As we returned home and turned the corner onto Rose Petal Circle, Debra laughed suddenly and said, “Oh my God. Look.” She pointed to the small bed of flowers in front of our front stairs. There sat Mystery Fawn.

The only way to describe this new iteration of Mystery Fawn, whom we’ve dubbed Califawnia, is from the ground up.

Our little friend sits on a California-shaped slab of foam which is split at the top by a bold red lightning bolt which doubles as the harbinger of doom for the data center (death by lightning strike) and the twin earthquakes which rocked our house in April (epicenter: two miles away under some dude’s driveway up the street). Califawnia is threatened by flames and wears a surgical mask so he can breathe while he fights fires with a garden hose and save the homes of the neighborhood.

His shiny coat is smudged with soot and he’s got bandages binding his wounds. A dashing silvery-pink scarf blows lustily in the Santa Ana winds, defiantly announcing that yes, winds of Calistupida, you may fill my pool with dirt and ash and leaves and soot and make me labor for hours every day to clean it, but I’m going to look like million bucks while doing it!

Screw you, Calipocalypse, Califawnia says. I see your disasters. I see your betrayals and stupid natural calamities and I stick out my tongue at you and say nyah nyah because I am home and I am whole and I am, once again, among friends.

And so Chris, I wrap up this very long piece by saying to you, thank you. Thank you for Mystery Fawn. And thank you for being a fantastic neighbor, a port in the storm, an encyclopedia of knowledge, a co-conspirator and, most of all, a damn good friend.

Now I’ve got to find a way to one-up you on the next Mystery Fawn. I already have an idea…

Anyway, I ended up not sending the email due to a suddent attack of tolerance. But I did notice these two advertisements on the dictionary website when I looked up the word but:

Girl Buts - up to 75% Less
Incredible prices. Find girl buts & save up to 75%.

Hot Chicks Making Out
Find hot chicks making out and Compare prices at Smarter.com.

Now, if you’ll pardon me, that’s just stupid.

Me: I’m reading the llama Learning PERL book and one of the first things it says is that PERL uses double-precision floating point blah blah blahs for internal computing. Do I care about that? Or is that information just there for people who really want to know?

John: You don’t care. That information is just there for people who really want to know.

Me: That’s good, because I’ve spent half an hour reading about floating-point calculations and I’ve a.l.m.o.s.t got it, but not quite. And I’m tired of reading about significands and radixes and mantissas.

John: You can stop now.

Me: So I don’t need to know what a mantissa is.

John: Correct.

Then we discussed his fantasy football league, which is something I actually do know something about. And the Baby Jesus giggled in his manger because he was warm and wrapped in fuzzy soft cloth.

To the tune of Smoke on the Water

The screen showed a bad icon
Then died with an awful sound
A funky sound was clicking on and off
As the hard drive ground
When it all was over I had to buy a new device
But swiss time was running out
A new iPod touch would be nice
Smoke from my iPod, I think it’s gonna die
Smoke from my iPod, it’s time to say goodbye

Sad: opening the fridge to discover a Diet Coke has exploded inside.

BWEEP! BWEEP! BWEEP!

“May I have your attention please. May I have your attention please. We are conducting a test of the emergency fire alarm system. Please pay no attention to the young men running through the halls with dynamite strapped to their chests.”

BWEEP! BWEEP! BWEEP!

I’m just waiting for the BOOM.

(I swear to God he’s broadcasting from a missile silo in the heart of a volcano.)

She said yes.

“You know what I thought as I was driving home from Le Chef’s today?” asked The Debra over a plate of noodles, eggplant and tomato sauce.

“Tell me,” I said.

“It was raining and I thought, ‘This is free water!’ Because in Calitastrophe, outside of February, you pay for every drop of water you use. Isn’t this great? It’s free!”

*****

There was a fire alarm at Government Building X today. We knew it was coming - there had been announcements all week long telling us to expect the tests. What we didn’t expect was the very malevolent Arab voice that broadcast the beginning and end of the test. Between blasts of an air horn that dripped with the kind of reverb one might hear in a massive airplane hangar, the voice announced the commencement of the test. To be honest, when he started to speak I thought he was going to tell us that he had taken control of the building and that if we didn’t cooperate he was going to blow us all to kingdom come. The entire test had the ambient feel of a Bond movie from the Sixties…one of those films where Dr. Sinister takes over a small island in the South Pacific and builds a base inside the heart of the island’s volcano from which he plots his nefarious schemes and where he builds a giant thermonuclear warhead which he threatens to launch from his über-secret hideout using the missile that he stole from the Russians. The voice making the announcement, the sirens and air horns, the echoing reverb - it all sounded like it was being broadcast from the depths of a mountain while hordes of Japanese and German scientists in white lab coats and black horned-rim glasses raced back and forth doing their Master’s bidding.

I told one of my colleagues I’d give him a hundred bucks if he’d tape fake dynamite to his chest and run around the corridors of the building. He passed. The coward.