True Story©... Accidental Terrorist

 

    I'm a serial DIY'er...
I'm bullshitting, we grew up less-than-rich and I'm a cheap ass who cannot fathom paying someone to do something I can realistically do myself.

    Of late, say the last month or so, I've become more aggressive in my research and effort into lawn care. Wild timing to do this at the end of the seson, but I digress. I bought a used pickup truck on October 9th and went right to the work of it paying for itself that very weekend, carrying around my lawn equipment for quick load/unload to get the yards that pay me done as efficiently as possible.
This ain't about that though...

    When back home over the past now three weeks, I've transitioned from "work" mode to "plan to work" mode. The planning part includes questions to myself on how to do this whole thing better; how to make the yards greener, how to prevent weeds and how as a DIY'er to do all that shit without breaking the bank. Basically, doing the homework on what household items could be repurposed for use in these tasks and thereby lessening my cash outlay.

    What I found ranged from the purely simple and scientific -- like how a cocktail of beer, molasses (or Karo syrup), plain dish soap or baby shampoo and some ammonia is effective for reasons I hadn't considered -- to the fact that Diesel Exhaust Fluid is 67% water and 33% urea and that most retail fertilizer contains urea, thus making DEF a WILDLY inexpensive liquid fertilizer by volume.
My daily trips down the rabbit hole, though, found me somewhere in the deep recesses of YouTube and inevitably Reddit, where the real experts are. It turns out that for fast greening, simple ammonium nitrate fertilizer is as good as they come, and can be had for a decent price of like $10 per 1000 square feet.

    Did I mention I'm cheap as fuck? Put a pin on that for a minute. Did y'all know what Timothy McVeigh made his bomb in Oklahoma City? That's right, ammonium nitrate, procured from a fertilizer facility. Futthermore, a fire at an ammonium nitrate fertilizer place in Winston Salem burned for like a week a year or two ago.
Why does ANY of this matter?
Well when someone is spending too much time trying to procure enough ammonium nitrate to fertilize, say, seven yards then the FBI gets understandably nervous.

    This will help to understand where the hell I've been the last couple of weeks...
While out front three weeks ago Friday, hand-pulling weeds in my garden bed, two men approached my driveway.

Me: "the Nissan isn't for sale"

Man 1: "what? No, we're here to--..."

Me: "I'm pleased with my internet provider and will not be going back to spectrum"

Man 2: "we're not here for any of that. We're here on behalf of homeland security and have some questions"

Me: "well I will use my fifth amendment right to shut the fuck up"

Man 1: "we just wanted to have a conversation"

Me: "..."

Man 1: "there's been some suspicious internet activity and we're worried someone might be trying to create a bomb. This close to election time, y'know we can never be too cautious"

Me: "..."

Man 2: "so you just aren't going to talk to us?"

Me: "is there a warrant for you to be on my property?"

Man 1: "w-well... No, but we just--...”

I sat down on my porch and folded my arms...

Me: "..."

Man 2: "so this is how we doin' this?"

Me: "..."

Man 1: "if we have to get a warrant and come back, we're tossing everything in there, it's best for you to just tell us now"

Me: "..."

Man 1: "fine, we'll go, but when we come back..."

    With that, they turned and left, I finished weeding the garden bed and went inside.
I got to thinking while I worked the afternoon, "what're they gonna find if they DO come back? They'll see I've been running a pretty good side hustle without any attention. They'll be disappointed to learn that the interest in cheap and abundant fertilizers is earnest, but their fragile little egos will be hurt and they'll find SOMETHING to moosefuck me over."
I decided that despite my only real crime being undeclared income and perhaps a few hundred gigabytes of questionably-sourced music, it'd be best that I didn't physically FACE them ever again if it could be avoided.

    Bear in mind this internal dialogue took place three weeks ago, before daylight savings, while I was still ACTIVELY putting in an hour or two of yard work every other evening, plus Saturdays. It ain't like I can just NOT go outside where my truck and all the money is. My life became a series of wily tactical maneuvers wherein I would QUICKLY have the truck loaded or unloaded, where if ANY unrecognized automobile comes down my street, I go back inside the closed and locked house and I drive like a fucking nun out on the road.
This continued for two solid weeks, completely to the detriment of my headspace. It reached a point where I said "this is fucking stupid" and quit worrying. What they gon' do, take me to court and beat me to death over $250 a week in undeclared earnings? If they get legitimately bored enough to bother lil ol' me, then all they will find is an unseasonably green lawn at my house and the tools it took to make that so. It'd be more a waste of THEIR time than a continued reason to ruin my own.

    So when the question of "where has he been for two weeks?" gets asked, the simple answer is "in the house ducking federal agents."
Not to let y'all in on anything more than you don't already know, but True Story©... requires that I go outside and experience LIFE, and being afraid to do so for fear of being accidentally labeled a terrorist prevented me from doing so.
But never mind that shit, we back now!