We finally finished clearing out my father-in-law's storage unit today, reducing twelve years of accumulated crap to an empty twenty-by-ten space. And there, once the boxes were cleared away and the shelves broken down, once the trash was dumped and the dust swept out, were the naughty words.

They must have been there for years, a decade and a half at least. Carved into the floor when the concrete was wet and covered over since Reagan was in the White House, some vandal had tried his hand at immortality. Except the limit of his vocabulary appears to have been four letters, because after a few choice profanities -- the classics -- etched into the floor was the word: