In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy (9 page)

I love Molly, but I do have a complaint. She sleeps everywhere except in the two-hundred-dollar bed we bought for her. I would love this ability—I’m envious. It usually takes a good fifteen beers before I could fall asleep on a bathroom floor. She’ll sleep on the cold tile floor right next to her super-expensive suede bed lined with angora and stuffed with camel hair, I assume to mock me. I’ll say, “Why don’t you sleep in your bed, Molly?” And she’ll look up like, “Nah, I’m good here on your sweatpants.” I end up getting angry: “Get in the fucking bed, we paid for it and it’s too small for the kids. Listen, you goddamn dog, you’re going to be comfortable if I have to use my boot to mash you into that bed.” If Molly had balls she’d just rest them on the edge of the bed to fuck with me. Why not sleep on the comfortable thing that’s built for you? I’ve never gone to a hotel, seen the bed, and thought, “Hey, look at that. Goose-down comforter, California King mattress, soft pillows. Wow … Okay, I’m gonna go sack out next to the toilet.”

I like a big dog. But then there are the people that are into Great Danes. Is a golden retriever not big enough for you? Who needs a dog the size of a donkey? I’m not going to hook it up to a plow. I need companionship, not something to pull my car out of a ditch. I don’t want a dog that’s so big that if it decides to have sex with me, there’s nothing I can do about it. And if a week of the dog’s fecal matter weighs more than you, you shouldn’t be allowed to own it.

CATS
While we’re on a fecal tangent, let’s not forget about cats. People, especially guys, don’t like cats. But let’s give credit where credit is due: Cats bury their own crap. A cat, with quiet dignity, lets himself out of the home, goes in the yard, drops a deuce, and then covers his tracks. If I were a publicist for cats, that’s all I’d be screaming about. Humans are so horribly insecure. If the pet doesn’t run up to us when we get home and literally start kissing our ass, like a dog, even if it just wants to get food from us, we can’t handle it. We’re like, “I don’t like her. Why isn’t she worshipping me?” Pets aren’t here to make you feel better about yourself and your shitty life. That’s what drugs are for. But cats bury their dook. Does anything say “I love you” better than that? Let’s give them their props.

SQUIRRELS
I’ve seen two hundred million squirrels in my life but I’ve never seen one take a shit. I walk my dog and she shits every nine feet. (I’ll share my thoughts on bird shit shortly.) But I don’t even know what squirrel shit looks like. There are as many squirrels running around the trees on my property as birds. Shouldn’t I come out to my car in the morning and say, “Fuck, I just had it detailed and now it’s covered in squirrel shit”?

BIRDS
Okay, one last shit-related thought. I hate birds because they hate us. It’s clear they hate us because there is more crap on cars than there is on the ground. To me this is evidence that they’re aiming. They’re acting with malicious intent. There’s constantly bird shit all over my car. And if you own a restaurant by the ocean, you might as well just paint your roof white. They should just call those restaurants Bird Shit by the Sea. I love when the plastic owl they put on the roof to scare off seagulls is covered in bird shit. The seagull is saying, “Hey tough guy. I’m on to your ruse. Hold on, I ate Mexican last night.”

Let’s be honest—if you could fly, you’d shit on things too. You’d be like, “Hey, there’s the mayor’s motorcade,” or, “My ex-girlfriend is walking in the park with her new man. It’s about time for an aerial deuce dropping.” Imagine the damage you could do. If birds were as big as medium-sized dogs, we’d all be dead.

Let’s talk about Pegasus for a moment. I know mythical flying horses don’t really exist, but it is an animal, after all. Have you ever seen a pile of horse shit? Imagine that coming down on you from two thousand feet. I have this fantasy of getting a Pegasus and flying it over the cars and homes of my enemies. I’d spend a week feeding it lunch-truck breakfast burritos and Dodger Dogs. Then I’d steer it toward my neighbor’s house, the one who called the cops about the noise from my place at nine on New Year’s Eve, and drop a bunker buster. When he came over the next day to complain, “Hey man, your Pegasus shit a hole in my roof,” I’d be like, “Wasn’t my Pegasus.”

PANDAS
Pandas hate us. All we want them to do is mate, and they won’t. They are the only species on the planet that refuses to screw. Every other species loves fucking so much it has become a problem. We have to spay and neuter dogs, thin the deer population, and beef up the border, all because we can’t stop the screwing. (I didn’t say which border, so that makes you the racist for thinking Mexico.) All but the pandas. We actually have to show them panda porn to try to get them to mate. This is more than just erratic mating habits; they’re openly mocking us. I witnessed it firsthand.

I went with some zoologists to a panda-bear habitat and had the rare privilege to observe two pandas mating. The male panda mounted the female panda from behind, and after about ten minutes he looked up, made a grimacing face, pulled out, and came on her back. Later in the day I witnessed the same panda being blown while he wiped his ass with the American flag.

We should breed them with dogs. Dogs never stop fucking. We need to invent a pan-dog.

I also don’t like that we can only lease them from China. They won’t give them to us, they’ll only let us borrow them. Why are they so stingy with their bears? Not only do they eventually want them back, they come with a list of sanctioned names, and Todd’s not on the list. We have to give them names like Ling-Ling and Ching-Ching. Fuck China. If we gave them a buffalo and they named it Pan-Pan, we wouldn’t give a shit. We get their panda and we have to name it Mitsook or some other stupid Chinese name. Let’s give China a bald eagle and force them to name it Gary.

LLAMAS
My only problem with llamas is I don’t know if we can ride them or not.

BULLS
I envy bulls. Not because of their power or strength, but their psyche. Let’s face it, we’re all miserable because we got dumped by our prom date, or our Little League coach benched us, or our folks didn’t pay enough attention to us when we were growing up. We just can’t get over our shitty past. Bulls don’t cling to their past. They are locked up in that stall and there’s a guy on top of them tugging a rope that’s wrapped around their balls. They’re thinking to themselves, “When that guy opens the gate, I am going to buck this asshole off of me, and once that hundred-and-forty-pound shit kicker hits the ground, he’s gonna feel two thousand pounds of bull horn going right through his sternum.” Then the bell sounds and the gate opens, and for eight seconds all the bull can think about is, “I am going to kill this motherfucker for humiliating me. Once I get this guy on the ground, he’s dead.” And then he bucks him off, sees him lying on the ground helpless in front of him, and thinks, “Now I am going to kill you for what you’ve put me through.” He lowers his head and prepares to finish him off, but at the last second a guy wearing Wrangler shants, rainbow suspenders, and clown makeup jumps in front of him and the bull thinks, “Huh. Maybe I should kill this guy instead.” In a split second all is forgiven, and the bull’s entire focus is on killing a guy whose only crime was stealing Robin Williams’s suspenders. While we’re all punishing ourselves for our past, the self-actualized bull looks toward the future.

A quick tangent on rodeo clowns. Is there a more dangerous job that doesn’t translate into an ounce of poontang? Chicks love firemen and there’s danger involved, but not every day. With rodeo clowning, every day your job is to dress up like you’re in a Telemundo skit and jump in front of a pissed-off one-ton murder machine. But at the end of the night you go home, alone, to a trailer and remove the makeup with your own tears.

BATHROOM
DOOS AND
DON’TS

This chapter is my attempt to get us all on the same sheet of toilet paper. Society runs because we have certain agreed-upon rules and standards. Red means stop, we read left to right, and with the exception of a few stoned celebrities, we don’t enter the freeway on off-ramps. But when it comes to this great nation’s bathrooms, it’s anarchy. A lawless free-for-all of urine and fecal matter. I’m gonna try to put an end to this by laying down some simple guidelines.

RULE #1:
THE BATHROOM DOOR SHOULD ONLY BE SHUT WHEN THE BATHROOM IS IN USE.

I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve wasted standing in hallways at parties waiting for someone to leave a bathroom that was empty. The problem is when the door is shut, we assume someone’s pants are around their ankles, so we wait. And after a few minutes we do that sheepish palm-toward-your-face, single-back-knuckle knock. That’s followed up by the more aggressive, multiknuckle, hope-you’re-not-mid-dump knock. When you finally enter the head and realize it’s empty, you feel violated. You stood in the hall, this close to shitting yourself, while every attractive person at the party walked past you for nothing. Why the fuck would you shut the goddamn door on the way out in the first place? It’s not like there’s a fucking raccoon in the bathtub. You’re not letting in a draft. Even if you shit the place up, why are you sealing it like Tupperware? Leave a few inches of daylight between the door and the goddamn jamb just to get some cross ventilation.

Quick anecdote: I was at a party where some wildebeest had destroyed the bathroom with his ass moments before I was to use it. I walked in the john with a lungful of party air, shut the door, and headed toward the commode. When I exhaled the party air, which smelled of sangria, and inhaled the bathroom air, which smelled of ass, I realized the shrub in the backyard would have been a much better alternative than the shit pit from
Slumdog Millionaire
. I immediately turned around, flung open the door, and there was a hot chick waiting to use the bathroom next. I gave her a halfhearted “It wasn’t me,” but the music was loud and we were both on the move in different directions. I’m sure when she was watching
Dancing with the Stars
a few seasons back she was like, “Oh, man, can that guy shit up a hallway bathroom.” The point is, this wouldn’t have happened if we could all just agree that closed door means occupied, open door means come on in, and cracked door means enter—but more like a cop entering a warehouse at the docks.

RULE #2:
NO LOUD CELL-PHONE CONVERSATIONS IN PUBLIC BATHROOMS.

I was burned two times in the same week because of people ignoring this rule. First time was at a steak joint with Jimmy Kimmel. I was standing at the urinal with my back to the door when I heard a loud “How’s it going?” I, never wanting to be antisocial or one of those aloof celebrities, immediately answered back, “Going great.” Of course a second later, a guy who looked like Suge Knight’s scary older brother pulled up to the urinal next to mine and continued his cell-phone conversation. If he had been familiar with this rule, I wouldn’t have made an ass of myself interrupting the hit he was putting on his business partner. Three days later I was backstage at
Dancing with the Stars
when I walked into a small bathroom, with a single urinal and a single toilet, and began evacuating my bladder. Roughly about a pint and a half into the piss I heard a voice come from the stall, “How you doing?” Assuming it was one of the many people who work on the show recognizing my Capezios, I promptly answered “Good” and followed it up with a “Getting paid to take a shit. Not too shabby.” A second later a loud voice rang out from the stall, “I’m on the phone.” I know it’s a free country, but you can’t use your cell phone for the two hours you’re in a theater or the six hours you’re on a flight—how about you stay off it for the three minutes I’m taking a piss?

RULE #3:
SOUNDS OBVIOUS, BUT FELLAS, LIFT THE FUCKING SEAT BEFORE YOU PISS.

When you’re in a public men’s room and you don’t lift the seat, you’re essentially peeing on some stranger’s ass. It almost makes you gay. The only reason the seat’s there in the first place is for those unlucky souls who have to take a dump in unfamiliar surroundings, and you’ve now compounded their problems by making them have to mop up your piss before they can off-load. Part of the blame falls on the manufacturer of the toilet seat: A) All the toilet seats used for commercial applications are wishbone shaped. They’re not shaped like a doughnut like the one you’re sitting on right now. They have a two-inch gap in the front that gives guys false confidence. “I don’t have to lift this seat. I can thread the needle. I’m a regular Lee Harvey Oswald. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if my cock had rifling.” And it’s true, 96 percent of the stream finds its target. But that doesn’t mean there’s still not some collateral whiz damage from the final rogue burst or the drizzle created by the Fosbury Flop you do with your cock before you holster it. Now I’d be more, pardon the pun, pissed at you people, but it’s not entirely your fault. This gets us to part B of my beef with the toilet-seat manufacturers: There needs to be a handle to lift the toilet seat. Preferably one that could be operated by foot, like the kick pedal on a drum kit. Do you jerk-offs really expect people at a gas station to blindly reach down between the bowl and the bottom of the toilet seat to lift it? People as a rule will do the right thing, but not at the risk of getting a stranger’s piss on their fingers. Everyone I know recycles, but that percentage would go down quite a bit if the lid of the blue barrel was covered in trucker piss.

RULE #4:
AND SPEAKING OF THE SEAT, LADIES, QUIT BITCHING ABOUT US LEAVING THE SEAT UP.

A) We take eight pisses to your one; B) It takes more energy to lift the seat than it does to put it down. Hell, you just have to get it started. Once you get past 90 degrees, gravity kicks in and does the rest of the work for you; and C) Guys don’t like exiting the bathroom with the seat down because it makes the next person who enters think you just took a shit. In the fecal game, it’s what we call a tell. I know what your argument is, ladies. When you use the toilet at night and it’s dark you’ve sat down, felt the cold bowl, and almost fallen into the toilet. I have two things to say about this. One, if you almost fell into the toilet, congratulations on not having a fat ass. Nobody from the cast of
Precious
would be in danger of falling into the toilet. And two, how about you suss it out before you plop down. I’ve gone into plenty of bathrooms at night that had the lid down, but I didn’t shit all over the top of it. No wonder you guys are only making seventy cents to our dollar.