Read In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy Online

Authors: Adam Carolla

Tags: #Essays, #humor, #American wit and humor, #Form, #General

In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy (8 page)

BOOK: In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy
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REGGAE MUSIC

Reggae music sucks but no one except me will say it. Bob Marley’s “Jamming” is one of the shittiest songs ever made. And no one ever utters a word about it because somehow you’re either uptight, racist, or square if you don’t like reggae music. Here’s my problem with reggae music: You only need one reggae album in your collection to officially own every reggae song ever recorded because they are all the same.

Having a collection of reggae music is like having a collection of garbage disposals in your kitchen. If you’ve got one, you’re covered. Here’s how you know reggae music sucks. Whenever you argue with someone about reggae music they go, “Are you telling me that with your feet in the sand and the Caribbean as far as the eye can see, sipping rum out of a hollowed-out pineapple, that reggae music doesn’t sound great?” Of course it does. A recording of my mom getting raped would sound good under those circumstances. What if I made that argument? “Are you telling me you don’t enjoy Ben Folds when you’re getting your cock sucked?” Nobody else works where you are and what you’re doing into the music argument, just reggae defenders.

LED ZEPPELIN

Not only one of the greatest rock bands of all time, but one of the most secure. We’re living in a time of shameless self-promotion, where Ed Hardy T-shirts have “Ed Hardy” printed on them 250 times, Fergie’s first single was called “Fergalicious,” and every player in the NFL refers to himself in the third person. (I have a theory on the whole athlete-third-person phenomenon. They don’t do it because they’re pompous, they do it for when their wives confront them with a pile of text messages from their mistresses. That way they can say, “Debrickashaw Jackson doesn’t cheat. Debrickashaw loves his family. That doesn’t sound like the Debrickashaw Jackson I know. But if you want, I can talk to him next time I see him.”) So it’s refreshing that Led Zeppelin intentionally made their song titles confusing. Here’s a list of Led Zeppelin hits. I guarantee you know every one of them, but not by title, because they’re not mentioned in the lyrics of any of these songs.

Black Dog
D’yer Mak’er
Immigrant Song
Moby Dick
Over the Hills and Far Away
Four Sticks
Trampled Under Foot
The Wanton Song
The Battle of Evermore

This is why “Stairway to Heaven” is Led Zeppelin’s most requested song. Because no one wants to call the radio station and say, “Could you play that one that goes ‘Da-da-da, I live for my dreams and a pocketful of gold.’ ” The song titles are complex, but when it comes to the album titles, they lay them out like IKEA instructions:
Zeppelin I, Zeppelin II, Zeppelin III, Zeppelin IV
. The fifth album,
Houses of the Holy
, is where they regain their insanity. Just to fuck with you, it does not contain one of their few hits that has the title in the lyrics, “Houses of the Holy.” That’s on
Physical Graffiti
. The antithesis of this is another great rock band from the seventies. The name of the band: Bad Company. The name of the first album:
Bad Company
. The name of the first single … wait for it … “Bad Company.” Paul Rodgers also named his first daughter Bad Company.

Here’s a tip for all you folks who enjoy Kenny Chesney or Céline Dion but are scared you’ll get your ass kicked by hipsters at the cool-guy party. If anyone asks you what’s in your iPod, you just tell them Motorhead and Radiohead—or if you like, you can put the word
early
in front of any artist’s name, and it works. “I’m into early Clapton.” “I’m into early Billy Joel.” “I’m into early John Tesh … before he went corporate and lost his edge.”

In conclusion: Artistically, we humans are capable of such great work as
The Wizard of Oz, Songs in the Key of Life
, and
All in the Family
. Yet we choose to drown ourselves in a sea of
Paul Blart: Mall Cop
, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” and
Cougartown
.

MOTHERFUCKING
NATURE

I’m fascinated by nature because it’s got a lot of range. On the one hand, it seems boring. It’s got a lot of browns and oranges and colors from furniture in the seventies. And then once in a while you’ll see some multicolored fish from an exotic locale and think, Holy shit, how did nature come up with that one? Sometimes nature’s so straight, Republican, and uptight, and other times it’s like the gayest guy ever. The peacock? Come on. That’s a gay-pride parade on two legs. The word
peacock
even sounds gay.

It’s not just animals. Think about the range pumpkins have. There’s the minipumpkin you put out for the table centerpiece on Thanksgiving that’s the size of an apple, and then there are the ones that collapse the suspension of the farmer’s truck they’re sitting in. The ones you see at county fairs. There are big humans and small humans. But the smallest go sixty pounds and the biggest go six hundred. With pumpkins it’s seven ounces versus seventeen hundred pounds. And they look exactly the same.

And we have a lot of range in our reactions to nature, and it doesn’t necessarily follow logic. Take our feelings about bats. All bats do is eat grasshoppers and mosquitoes and sleep in a belfry, yet we’re completely freaked out by them. Even Hollywood can’t decide how to feel about the bat. Think about Count Dracula and Batman. No other animal has had that kind of cinematic range. There’s no manatee that either saves a city or comes in at midnight through the French doors and rapes an ingenue.

Or bugs. We’ve decided there are good bugs and bad bugs. For some reason we hate cockroaches, but what did a cockroach ever do to anyone? Bugs really tell you a lot about human nature. If you live in the United States, unless you’re one of the four people ever to be killed by a black widow spider, bugs should be neither here nor there. Yet we spend a lot of time thinking about them, talking about them, and figuring out ways to get rid of them. They’re almost a metaphor for how our psyche works. They’re small, mean us no harm, and pose no discernible threat, yet if we know there’s one in the bedroom with us we can’t go to sleep. Also, we don’t really define bugs along the lines of whether they’re dangerous or not; we define them aesthetically. What’s the difference between a moth and a butterfly except one is gray and one looks like the gay flag?

SPIDERS
I love the idiots who say you should be happy to have spiders in your house because they take care of the bad bugs. That’s like saying, “I like to keep a Crip around the house. It keeps the Bloods out.” Also when’s the last time you walked into the kitchen in the middle of the night and saw a spider locked in mortal combat with a silverfish? I used to put them outside, but then they would just go out, fuck, get pregnant, and come back in. There’s a reason they’re inside. They’re not lost. They came inside for the same reason you came inside. It’s warm and there’s food.

There’s nothing that makes you look stupider than walking into a spiderweb. When you step out of the house and get one in the face, your neighbors think you’re having a seizure because they don’t see what you hit. They just see a crazed maniac throwing punches in the air. And it comes out of the spider’s ass. If it came out of a seagull, you’d have to take a shower.

DUNG BEETLES
This is a bad draw in the animal kingdom. This is your whole life—you roll around a pile of shit until a hawk eats you, which is a sweet relief. The dung beetle would be one of those insects other insects couldn’t complain in front of. Like when you tell a guy how miserable you were at Boy Scout camp and he tells you he did three tours in Nam. A pill bug couldn’t be like, “Oh, man. I have to live under a rock,” or a moth couldn’t go, “Goddamn. Every time someone turns on a porch light, I have to go flying at it,” because a dung beetle would be like, “Cry me a river. I have to roll around a ball of elephant shit that’s three times my height.” Could you imagine how low the self-esteem of a dung beetle must be? If I get a zit I won’t even leave the house. This is worse than Sisyphus: At least he was pushing granite, and not rhino flop.

ALLIGATORS
Every time I turn on the TV there’s some jack-off in khaki shorts diving off a boat onto an alligator or wrestling one at an amusement park in Florida. This has to be really confusing for the alligators. Five million years of people being scared shitless of you, but in the last five years every asshole with a fan boat and a roll of duct tape is jumping on your back. I’d love to be a fly on the wall at the next alligator convention: “What the fuck? I used to just slide up on the shore, yawn, and scare the bejesus out of any native within a hundred miles. Now every yahoo with a video camera and a Red Bull wants to throw down. What the hell? Does anyone know what the fuck’s going on? Why aren’t these goddamn people scared of us anymore? One of your guys in Florida is gonna have to eat a toddler. Get these assholes back in line.” I bet when Steve Irwin died, they were pissed that a stingray got him. “It should have been one of us, man.”

FISH
I love the hypocrisy of the people who for “moral reasons” won’t eat beef or poultry, but when you press them on it admit they eat fish. To me a swordfish is much more majestic than a chicken or a cow. And the way you catch and kill them is usually less humane than what a cow gets. A cow will get a bolt to the head, quick and easy. A swordfish gets a hook through its mouth, is dragged out of the water, and essentially drowns on the deck of the boat while guys with beards hit it with those weird small boat bats. If it’s lucky, it gets its head cut off first. Either way, it was alive and now it’s dead, and someone served it up to you with a side of mashed potatoes. So what’s the difference? Get a fucking steak, you pussy.

Recently I was thinking about fishing and I realized why I don’t like it. It’s because you use little fish for bait. Fish are essentially cannibals. They eat smaller versions of themselves. This would be like me saying, “I’m hungry. Somebody get me a midget.”

DOLPHINS
It’s too bad dolphins can’t get laid by humans. There isn’t a hot chick alive who doesn’t love dolphins. Dolphins are the only thing that lives in the sea that women would actually have sex with. If there are any single guys reading this and you’re trying to get laid when you’re on the first date and the chick asks you, “What do you do for a living?” say, “I work with special-needs dolphins.” They are the only creatures that live in the ocean that make us brag, “They’re smarter than us, you know. If you’re ever out and there are sharks around, they’ll ward them off. They’re family oriented and highly intelligent.” They’re very curious and we love that. It’s funny because when dolphins or otters or something that’s cute are curious, it’s adorable. When it’s rats, roaches, or fat chicks, we want to put them down.

WHALES
Every year or so, a whale gets lost and ends up in a river or a bay and the news covers it 24-7. Why is it that whales used to be lantern oil, but now if one goes astray the whole world shuts down? And when a whale tries to beach itself we all go apeshit? Big whoop. It’s decided for some reason it does not want to continue to live. Can’t we respect that? Imagine if one day you decided you were just too tired to go on living but a bunch of guys in bandannas and Birkenstocks dragged you out of your house and forced you to get a job and start dating? Why can’t we just let whales kill themselves? Why do we have to have whale interventions? “You have too much to live for. There is so much krill left to eat. Think about your pod.”

BEAVERS
I think it’s cool that beavers live in lodges. Gophers live in holes, beavers live in lodges. It sounds as if they’re in there smoking pipes, watching sports, and bitching about their beaver wives.

DOGS
I have a sad relationship with dogs. I wanted one my entire life. All I wanted was a German shepherd. But my cheap parents didn’t even want to feed me, never mind a dog. And maybe they were too liberal: German shepherds are the most racist dogs. Watch one episode of
Cops
with the K-9 unit and you’ll know what I’m talking about. My parents were divorced and my dad was living in an apartment. I bugged him and bugged him and bugged him. He said one day when we moved to a house, he would get me a German shepherd. My father never made promises he didn’t keep. Not because he was a man of honor, but because he never made a promise. We moved into a house in North Hollywood that cost my father fifteen thousand dollars. Now to be fair, those were 1975 dollars, but still, the average house was going for between sixty-five and eighty-five thousand. So you can only imagine what that piece of shit looked like. I woke up every morning and ran downstairs. Actually it was only one story. But I’d go into the living room with the indoor-outdoor carpet praying to see a German shepherd puppy with a bow on it. The dog never showed up. Eventually my dad remarried and moved into a house with one and a half bathrooms and I let go of the dream of ever getting a German shepherd puppy.

Twenty years later when I was living in my first house in the shadow of the Hollywood sign, working on
Loveline
and
The Man Show
and making a good living, I thought, “What ever happened to that German shepherd puppy I wanted so many years ago?” I decided to go out and rescue one by giving six hundred dollars to a bull dyke in Arleta who ran a puppy mill. I named her Lotzi after my beloved Hungarian step grandfather who died a few months earlier. And a love affair began. She was beautiful and rambunctious and had one ear that wouldn’t stay up. When she turned six months old, I dropped her off at the vet to be spayed, was due to pick her up that afternoon, and got a call from the vet saying that she was dead. Some sort of liver problem. I never got to the bottom of it. I was now in my early thirties. I’d had one dog in my life for a total of two months. It’s a sad tale, but I tell it in case there are any kids reading this book. The message is: never follow a dream.

Lotzi

After Lotzi died I swore I’d never love again. Unfortunately for my wife, I expanded that proclamation outside of the canine realm. Almost ten years later, after moving into another house, a package showed up at the door. It was a car cover I’d ordered online. But just behind it was a blond Lab named Molly. She was shipped out from Chicago: A combination of neglect from my wife’s nieces and nephews and their mom getting new furniture meant a one-way ticket to Hollywood for Molly girl. We immediately bonded and a love affair soon began. Sweet, energetic, and loves to play. My wife, whose biological clock was ticking so loudly that it was more of a tell-tale heart than a clock, poured all her maternal energy into Molly as well.

Molly

One summer about five years ago after a particularly rousing episode of
Oprah
, she walked into the den and announced, “We’ve got to get Molly rattlesnake training.” I said, “For what?” She said, “We’re in rattlesnake country and it’s summertime.” I pointed out, “We’re also in earthquake country and this is earthquake weather. Should we also be training her to work one of those wind-up flashlight-radios?” She replied, “There are rattlesnakes all over these hills. If one bite’s good enough to take down a horse, that’s plenty good to take down Molly girl.” I said I would be goddamned if I was going to pay some guy in desert boots with his ponytail pulled through the back of his cap to come over here and shake a rubber snake in front of my dog. She came back one more time with a “What about Molly girl?” and I gave her the speech she’s probably memorized like the Pledge of Allegiance by now: “Just because we live in Hollywood doesn’t mean we’re going Hollywood. All that nonsense is for paranoid Whitey who’s got too much money and too much time on his hands. We don’t need to buy into Oprah’s scare-of-the-month club.” I put my foot down, into a pile of Molly’s shit, and that was it.

Two days later we were sitting in the den watching
Entertainment Tonight
when Molly came into the room and plopped down in front of the TV set. She seemed lethargic. Even though it was dark and the room was only illuminated by the television set, my wife noticed some swelling on the left side of Molly’s snout. (You probably know where this is going.) Then she noticed two bloody red dots about an inch apart on her nose. It didn’t take that guy who was eaten by grizzly bears to know those were puncture wounds. She’d been struck by a rattlesnake. Lynette immediately sprang into action by screaming at me. Then she jumped up to grab Molly girl, obscuring my view of a shirtless Matthew McConaughey sea kayaking. She yelled, “I told you! This is your fault!” and threw Molly into the car and sped off into the night. Four thousand dollars and zero blow jobs later, Molly was saved. Once again she cheated death. She’s known around the neighborhood as the Osama bin Laden of blond Labs. The vet explained that if it had happened during the morning or afternoon when we weren’t home, Molly would have just curled up in a ball and died. This didn’t help my case. And between the antivenom serum and the multiple trips to the vet for follow-up, the guy with the magnetic sign on the Vanagon that said
SNAKE WHISPERER
would have been a real money saver.

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