In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy (21 page)

HOSPITAL GOWNS

I don’t understand the hospital gown. First off, we should take the word
gown
out of it. What other gown do you wear that has your ass hanging out? (Though that would make ballroom dancing more interesting.) I have personal experience with the pain in the exposed ass that is the hospital gown.

In 1999, after many years of holding the focus pads as a boxing trainer, I had developed a large cyst on the palm of my left hand that needed to be surgically removed. It was a simple outpatient procedure, in and out that day. But they still made me do the hospital gown.

Before the surgery, they came in to get me prepped. They gave me the gown and told me they needed my underwear. Keep in mind, for this operation I would be laid out like Jesus on the cross. They were going to take my arm, strap it down and out 90 degrees, and operate on my palm. Granted, my palm and my junk are usually fast friends, but this was one occasion where they were far apart. I said to the nurse, “How much farther away from my crotch can you get?” They insisted I hand over the Hanes. So I said, “You give me one goddamn good reason I need to take my underwear off.” He replied, “Certain underpants are made of a cotton-Lycra blend that could ignite.”

I have not encountered this phenomenon of underpants spontaneously bursting into flames. Does this happen? A guy is jogging and the friction causes them to combust? Has anyone ever said, “My grandfather went that way”? I think maybe they were just trying to screw with me. I imagine them in the doctors’ lounge before the surgery: “I wonder if we can get this dipshit to give up his underpants.” “Tell him they might catch on fire while he’s asleep.” “Twenty bucks says he won’t go for it.” “You’re on.”

So I, like any person with an intact brain, responded with skepticism. The guy said, “You’ll be hooked up to some electrical equipment—it could spark and cause a fire.” I said, “Please give me the form that will release you from any liability. Give me the underpants waiver. I’ll happily give it my John Hancock so that you can work on my hand without staring at my cock. If I wake up and my balls are on fire, you will not be held responsible.” Everyone’s worried about getting sued for everything. They need you to hand over your underpants, need you to close the overhead bin with nothing in it, need you to agree not to bring peanuts into the school, need to put a warning sticker on everything, need you to leave the beer inside the pool hall when you go out to smoke, blah, blah, blah. What about a waiver? How about a dignity waiver? A universal waiver I can sign that says I get to keep my goddamn underpants and carry an alcoholic beverage outside of the bowling alley to blow a butt. If I chuck the bottle at a cop or perform a hate crime with it, don’t worry, I signed the dignity waiver. You’ve got immunity. If, God forbid, my underpants go up in an inferno and I wake up with a smoldering patch where my pubes used to be, I can’t sue the hospital. I’ve signed my dignity waiver.

I’m not uptight or homophobic, but when a group of strangers wants to drug you and the last request before you go under is to give up your underpants, you can’t help but feel vulnerable. But I lost the battle and ended up relinquishing my boxer briefs. So I wake up from the surgery, I’m groggy, my arm’s in a cast, and my ass is hanging out of the gown. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Because the goddamn thing closes in the back. It’s impossible to reach even if I don’t have my arm in a sling. This is your design? A garment that lets your ass hang out, and if you try to cover your butt cheeks, you end up going in circles like a dog chasing its tail? And never mind the ass. Even though it’s open in the back, it somehow finds a way to expose your balls, too. If you want to see some old-man back sack, head on down to the hospital. And no place has more cold metal surfaces than a hospital. You need a wool sweater for your ass, not an open-backed sheet with sleeves sewn onto it. I want a bathrobe and I want my underpants.

TAMPON STRINGS

This idea is for the ladies, although I guess it would prevent many men from getting grossed out. There is nothing more embarrassing than that string popping out of the bathing suit at the pool or beach. They should be flesh-colored so they blend up against the skin. We could make different skin tones for the women of color (or the white chicks with the horrible orange spray tans). It’s not like you couldn’t find them if they weren’t white.

Or even better, my million-dollar idea: novelty tampon strings. If you’re going to have that thing hanging out, you might as well have some fun with it. You could have a lawnmower rip cord, a dynamite fuse, or a luggage tag. Or how about one of those chain pulls to turn on the light fixture? They could be personalized, like a concert lanyard for groupies, or peyos for the Jewish girls.

And you could make them for special events, like a graduation tassel, or for Halloween, a rat tail. Imagine if you were drunk, the chick you hooked up with at the Halloween party got naked, and you just saw a rat’s tail hanging out. How freaked would you be? I’m just saying women are always striving for individuality and a signature look; this is how they can do it.

And for you hard-core chicks out there who are into barbed-wire tattoos and aggressive piercings, nothing says “I like rough trade” like a hangman’s noose dangling from your labia.

PACKAGING

The packaging on kids’ toys has gotten insane. Everything is wired down, vacuum sealed, spot welded, riveted, and duct taped. It’s a Barbie, not gold bullion. You need a microhead screwdriver, a blowtorch, a diamond-blade saw, lineman dykes, and a team of forty mules to open it. I have to start opening my daughter’s Christmas presents a year in advance. “Sorry, sweetie, I know you want this Dora the Explorer now, but I’ll have it open by the time you lose your virginity.” I understand securing a product for shipping, but anyone who’s attempted to remove Barbie’s ten-speed and realized it was impossible because they didn’t have a microhead Phillips screwdriver will tell you this is excessive. So why spend all the extra time, resources, and energy for this exercise in frustration? I think I know. Most of this stuff is manufactured in China. They’re not allowed to celebrate Christmas there, and this is how they exact their revenge. “Good luck getting Thomas the Tank Engine out of his cardboard bear trap. I’ll see you in hell, roundeye.”

BACK-UP BEEPERS

Let me hit you with a jag about back-up beepers. These are in every garbage truck, cement truck, and almost anything with wheels. They are way too powerful. If it’s trash day in Sacramento, I can hear it all the way down in L.A. How many decibels does this sound need to be? Why does the thing that only needs to alert people eight feet behind it have a fifty-six-block range? You’re waking me up on the second floor of my house that’s a mile away from where you’re crawling in reverse. What are the chances of you backing over me in my bed? How many hours of sleep have been ruined versus how many lives saved? Seriously, think about how many of those beeps you’ve heard in your life and compare it to how many times you’ve needed to get out of the way.

And have these beepers prevented one kid from being crushed by a FedEx truck? And even if they did, who cares? So what if a couple of kids get run over each year? It’s a small price to pay. That’s just Darwin driving the truck, taking out the trash. If your kid thinks it’s a good idea to play with his Legos behind a steamroller, we don’t need him and you don’t either. He’s just gonna end up crashing on your couch, eating your crap, and flunking out of junior college.

BLENDERS

We could have stopped with the blender in 1951. The blender they mixed daiquiris in to celebrate Eisenhower’s election was adequate. The same guy who told me I needed to drink fourteen gallons of water a day also told me I needed a commercial-style blender to make protein drinks. A trip to the kitchen-supply store and $275 later, I returned with a thirty-pound, five-horsepower superblender. I’m sure it would do a great job of mixing whatever was in the hopper if whatever was in the hopper wasn’t on the kitchen curtain or your face a millisecond after you flipped it on. If you put it on low, liquefied fruit will shoot out all over your shirt. If you put it on high, the ice for your margarita will actually penetrate your sternum and get lodged in the cabinet behind you. It has two speeds—Explosion and Eruption. And it has a rubber top that never stays in place and for some stupid reason has slots in it so you have to lean on it with a dishrag. The best blender that money can buy, and it still makes you look like you are in a fruit bukkake video.

CAR TECHNOLOGY

This is another thing that has gotten too powerful. Cars now have back-up cameras, cruise control that senses traffic, and some can even parallel park themselves. It’s like you barely have to drive. Cars are turning into spas. I was driving my wife’s car recently and she has massaging, heated seats. I’ve never been more comfortable in my life. Halfway through the drive I felt like I was going to crap myself and take a nap. Next they’re going to add a device that comes out of the steering wheel and gives you a hand job. I think that’s why they have airbags, so that when you nod off and drive into a phone pole you can just stay asleep on that pillow until the cops show up.

The modern automobile is jam-packed with gimmicks and features that none of us give a shit about, such as rain-sensing wipers. When’s the last time you were driving, it began to rain, and you thought to yourself, “I’m just not physically up to turning on the wipers. Maybe I can park under an overpass or stop at a dairy until the storm blows over. But I’m definitely not moving my hand laterally four and a half inches and flipping a switch a quarter turn”? Or how about the three-way seat memory? You can program in a setting for you, your wife, and Shaquille O’Neal. This is important so that when the valet moves your seat, with the touch of a button it will go back to its original location. The reason this is ridiculous is that with the touch of another button that is right below that button, you can move the fucking seat back yourself. Or there’s the air-conditioned glove box for your beverages, which is awesome if you’re homeless but you own a 2011 Infiniti.

This stuff is nothing more than car manufacturers jacking off on a brochure. It sounds great, but it doesn’t amount to a hill of shit. However, there are few things that all modern cars should have, yet almost none do. First and foremost: a system that is responsible for keeping the inside of the car below “center of the sun” in the temperature department when it’s parked out in the middle of a shadeless expanse of blacktop for three hours at a Costco in August. How insane is it that you could climb into your eighty-thousand-dollar luxury automobile with every appointment known to man, yet have the skin on the back of your thighs blister when it touches the piping-hot black leather seats? It’s a very simple equation. The car needs a second battery to run an air-conditioning pump and a fan without turning the engine on when the internal temperature of the car gets above ninety degrees. It could all be controlled by computer; it could shut itself off if the battery got too low. Believe me, if they can do the steering-column paddle shifters and the individual tire-pressure sensors, they can do this. Why they’re not fucking doing it is driving me to distraction. If you take a black car with a black interior and park it in the sun, the temperature inside the car will be hovering around 125 degrees when you get inside. That’s why pets, small children, and midgets die if you leave them for more than an hour. Why should I climb into something that would kill a schnauzer? Now, I realize some of you fucksticks are saying, “Why don’t you just turn on the air conditioner?” Okay, why don’t you take a red-hot horseshoe that a blacksmith is working on, dunk it in a pail of water, and then place it between your ass cheeks? The point is the fucking thing is still hot. Ironically, by the time the air-conditioning does its job and the temperature inside is low enough to sustain life, I will have completed the four-mile drive back to my home. I recently went to almost every high-end car dealer and asked them if their flagship even had the fan that recirculates the air to at least keep it under 115 degrees inside the car. None of them offered that option. Yet it is available on a twenty-six-thousand-dollar Prius.

The next thing we need is to be able to operate the power windows at least a minute after the key has been removed from the ignition. There’s nothing worse than shutting off your car, removing the key, putting it in your pocket, and realizing one of the kids rolled the back window down halfway. I know I sound like the world’s ugliest American when I say what a pain in the ass it is to have to reinsert the key and turn it to the on position just to get the window back up. The reason this particular one chaps my hide more than others is I remember reading an article in one of my car magazines about a Mitsubishi Starion that had this feature. That was in 1987. My 2007 fifty-thousand-dollar Audi does not have this feature. And that pisses me off to no end.

Last one: a seat-gutter system so that the wallets, the change, the ChapStick, the cell phones, et cetera that inevitably fall between the side of the seat and the transmission hump end up in the trunk in one of those trays you put your watch and keys into at the airport-security conveyor belt.

And please get the Internet in cars so my podcast can start making money.

HOTEL PILLOWS

This is another example of progress run amok. Every time I travel, I find myself at a hotel with a bed that has a bunch of those huge pillows on it. There’s not a medium one in the batch. They range from large to humongous to ginormous. These pillows are the size of an air mattress that stuntmen jump into. You can’t toss one goddamn waif pillow in the mix? How about one regular-sized pillow so normal people can sleep the way they do at home? I sleep on my belly so it feels like my head’s propped up on a parking block.

Some stuff doesn’t need improvement. Hotel pillows were fine before someone decided they needed to go on creatine. But allow me another hotel-related complaint to get into the topic of standardization and uniformity.