Monkeys Wearing Pants (2 page)

My doctor says I need to lose 50 pounds, so
yesterday I started using the Wii Fit again. Instead of the
cheerful, animatronic greeting I remembered, I was greeted with,
“What the hell! Do you think you can just waltz back here after all
this time and start over? Do you? Well, let me tell you something,
buddy boy, it doesn’t work that way! Where have you been? You heard
me! Where the hell have you been? Well? I’m waiting!” I guess it’s
been a while.

When it's cool to lie about your weight; your
drivers’ license.

When it's not such a good idea to lie about
your weight; pre-bungee jumping information form.

I think that when we eat way too much of the
wrong kinds of foods (and then feel completely miserable), that
it’s the body’s way of taking a metaphorical, rolled up newspaper
and swatting us around while saying, “Bad body! Very bad body!”
Some learn early on from that lesson in cause and effect, while
others of us take much longer to figure it out and thus find our
bodies in the fat person’s doghouse.

Five signs that you may need to lose
weight:

1. Baby ducks instinctively line up and
follow you when you walk by a pond.

2. You made the mistake of getting a booth
instead of a table at your favorite restaurant, and they needed the
jaws-of-life to extract you.

3. Your ass is big enough to affect weather
patterns and may be contributing to global warming.

4. Great Britain and Argentina are both
considering claiming your land mass as sovereign territory.

5. To you, a serving size is what will fit in
a salad bowl.

More signs that you need to lose weight:

1. Have you ever eaten anything resembling a
5th grade science experiment you found hidden away in the back of
your fridge?

2. Have you ever pretended to be on your cell
phone while at a Chinese takeout to “ask your friend” what they
wanted when you were really just getting a second order for
you?

3. Have ever used the word “calories” and the
term “Monopoly money” in the same sentence? 4. Do you buy clothes
that will compliment your gut and butt crack rather than try to
hide them?

5. Have you ever had two theme park
attendants pushing down on your roller coaster safety bar with all
their strength so it would lock in place?

6. Do you have more than four pizza delivery
places on speed dial?

7. Has a flight attendant ever moved you to
another seat to “balance the load?” Have you ever had to lie on the
floor and use a pair of pliers to zip up your jeans?

The vast majority of things I have written here are things
that I have posted on Facebook. Hey, when you have eighty friends
(you heard right, eighty, EIGHT-ZERO) there is pressure to perform.
Sometimes I get three or four ‘likes’ from one posting (Yes, you
heard right again). I used to have a Twitter account, but I
realized it wasn’t just to send electronic Haiku messages and it
lost all of its coolness for me.

If you like my
Facebook posts, you agree that I can access your public profile,
friend list, dental records, current city, nude baby pictures,
birthday, the video you made with your last “special friend,”
personal descriptions, social security number, likes and your
friends’ interests, that key under the mat, photos you have posted,
footage from your appearance on
Cops
, songs you have listened to or
shared, images from your toenail fungus removal procedure and the
size of any recently purchased undergarments.

Remember when we had AOL dial-up in the late
90’s and would wait patiently for that super-cute image of ten
frisky kittens in a basket to appear? Or we would wash the car
while we waited to download that short video of a skateboarding
teen leaving his testicles behind when he attempted the
slide-down-the-handrail trick? Now, if takes more than a nanosecond
for us to start streaming that nine-hour video on the nesting
habits of the artic loon or download the complete works of Salvador
Dali in 3-D, we freak out.

So, I have divided the group of “people you
may know” that Facebook offers up into 4 basic
categories:

1. People who I do indeed know, but want to be
friends with about as badly as I want to remove my own wisdom
teeth.

2. People who I may have heard something vague
about either through friends, via restroom graffiti or on a third
world infomercial.

3. People who I have no clue about and who are
clearly friends of friends or family seven times removed or in
prison.

4. Imaginary friends, cartoon characters and
Kevin Bacon.

I want to call tech support for my computer
and tell them I haven't been able to use my computer for two days
because I need the cursor to go just a little further to the right,
but my mouse is right at the very edge of the mouse pad!
Help!

People who only post pictures of
themselves that they take themselves in their bathroom when they
are by themselves really (really) need to get out more and make
some friends. MAYBE A FRIEND WITH A CAMERA OR A SKETCH PAD AND A
SHARPENED #2.

You can never be too rich, too thin or have
too many flash drives...

We cut our cable service to
next-to-nothing because we knew we could get by with Netflix, Hulu
Plus and our Roku devices. But when Comcast said we would be
getting minimal programming and some obscure channels, I didn’t
know that they would include such gems as: The Ginsu Knife Channel
(one infomercial from the 1970s played over and over again. If you
added some Michael Bolton music in the background, it would be the
Hell on Earth Channel); The All-Girl Scandinavian Debate Channel
features tall, leggy blonds with names like Ingrid and Petronella
talking about the relative merits of a market based economy versus
a centrally controlled economy (Note: I actually watch this one);
Hermit Crab Fight Club! This involves staged fights between trained
hermit crabs. Unfortunately, as the hermit crabs don’t actually
fight, it is fair to say that the tension is not
palpable.

I have never killed an inanimate
object before, but I’m about to put my wireless router in a massive
chokehold and squeeze until the two crappy signal bars slowly fade
away and flat line. Then, there will be nothing left but the memory
of me standing on our bed and leaning way to the left to just to
get Netflix on my Kindle.

News flash, there is a lot of random stuff in
here. I tried to make categories for everything, but after making
the category, ‘famous sayings related to razor burn and a major
religion’ I realized that I had gone too far. I had pushed the
envelope, literally, all the way to the ‘pushing the envelope’
category. I will invite you, if you are so inclined, to put every
random passage into an imaginary category of your own invention.
This is particularly fun if you sublet a basement in your mom and
dad’s home and have no real friends.

In a million years, cockroaches will finally
be extinct, but Pop Tarts will have survived.

My new favorite headline: "Man’s prosthetic
eye falls out during trial, judge declares mistrial." OK, cue
justice is blind joke here...

Whenever I want to feel better about myself,
I head on over to the "Faces of Meth – Before and After Photos"
website.

"Giant Goat Cheese Fire Closes Norwegian
Roadway for Six Days." This is my new favorite headline.

Is it just me, or is there something slightly
Medieval and sinister about the name of 'Black Forest Ham?’

Some things in life are not important.
However, understanding and appreciating the difference between a
dangling participle and an undescended testicle is critical.

I want a font that says, “I'm pissed off, but
I'm dealing with it.”

We can put a man on the moon, but we can't
make a squeeze bottle of mustard that doesn't dribble out that
yellowish, watery stuff no matter how much you shake it.

The Times New Roman font bothers me. There,
I've said it.

I hate it when you mangle a word so badly
that not even spell checker recognizes it. Then you have to rewrite
it, making it slightly less horrible each time, hoping that spell
checker finally figures out what the heck you were trying to
write.

It really bothers me that people who send
spam can't spell better and lack a grasp of basic grammar. I blame
the Nigerian school system.

On January
23
^rd
,
it's going to be the Chinese Year of the Dragon, but if you're like
me, it will take you 2 months to stop writing ‘Year of the Snake’
on your checks.

I'm sorry but I'm fed up with generic, boring
fortune cookie fortunes. Panda Express may be feeding my stomach,
but they're not doing a thing for my yearning for intellectual
enlightenment and my need to have the secrets of the universe
spelled out for me on a little piece of paper in 50 characters or
less (Wait a minute! Holy crap, the Chinese invented Twitter!). To
combat what is clearly a glaring need, I'm going to start writing
some of these up myself: you will meet a stranger who will spend
quality time with you to deepen your understanding of this thing
called the Dish Network.

Why are there no B batteries? We've got AA,
AAA, C, and D batteries, but no B. I see a new cause in my
future...

I started out as a morning person.
Then for a long time I became a night owl. Now I would love to
spend more time just lounging around in bed, but my alarm clock
does not care about my happiness.

This year, "F-bomb," "sexting" and "man cave"
are among the newest terms that were recently added to
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. I think you could make the
case that these three terms have spent some quality time
together.

According to scientists studying Chilean
earthquakes, the Earth has been permanently deformed by huge
quakes. But please, try not to stare because that's really
impolite.

Why is it that 72 hotel room degrees feels
like 98 regular degrees?

So San Francisco, arguably the most liberal
city in the U.S., has banned nudity in public. Another case of the
not-very-good-looking naked people ruining it for everyone
else!

Apparently, Bangladesh is the largest country
to have never won a medal at the Olympics. I'm fairly certain that
will change at the next Olympics now that the entirely new event of
“12-year-old girls sitting on concrete factory floors knitting
sweaters for rich Americans” has been introduced. Go Bangladesh,
go!

I want the super power of knowing the really
intimate details about people that embarrass them the most. “Oh,
yeah? Say what you want, but I'm not the guy who wet my pants on
that eighth grade field trip!”

This is terrible, but today, I was talking to
a guy who had a blackhead the size of a seedless grape, and all I
could think about was getting him in a headlock and popping the
hell out of that thing. What is wrong with me?

I’m going to start living more dangerously –
only looking one way when I cross the street, only chewing each
bite eleven times, getting stuck toast out of the toaster with a
fork. You know, crazy stuff like that.

If I were really rich, I would develop a
subdivision of homes just so that I could name the streets. I would
give them all really awful names, like Hump a Camel Court, Ass Wipe
Circle, Peeling Scab Street, etc. Then, I would make the homes so
cheap that people would buy them despite the terrible names. The
best part would be when I ran into them as a total stranger and
struck up a conversation. So, where do you live? Huh! What? You're
kidding, right? That's the name of your street? Oh my God, what
mental degenerate thought of that?

I am writing an erotic
novel about a young, well-to-do stud horse and a young,
inexperienced filly called
50 Bales of
Hay
.

I went through a period
when I gave a lot of thought to the last words I would ever say
before kicking the bucket. I realize that I probably don’t have a
choice in the matter, but I don’t want the nasty rumor circulating
around at my memorial service that I left this world after stating,
“Hey everyone look at this bucket? I wonder how far I can kick
it.”

I’ve started compiling a list of what I DON’T
want my last words to be. Too much time on my hands? Maybe. Here
are the first five:

1. Old chainsaws really are the best!

2. Can you believe a brand new Xbox for $50?
I’m meeting this guy I found on Craigslist…

3. Hey buddy! Why don’t you pick on someone
your own size!

4. This is my 15th Red Bull, and, honest to
God, I still don’t feel a thing!

5. I had no idea you could buy black market
lunch meat!

I’ve started compiling a list of what I DON’T
want my last words to be. Here are the next five:

1. Chupacabra? No, that’s just some kind of
weird-looking dog…

2. Sure, a plunger will work, but let me show
you how I like to do it.

3. I just got the KIA tuned up; get ready to
feel the power.

4. Is it the black or the red cable that’s
the ground? In this rain, I can barely tell them apart…

5. Just to be sure I have this noodling thing
down, I catch the fish by letting it swallow my arm, right?

I’ve started compiling a list of what I DON’T
want my last words to be. Here are the next five:

1. So if I buy two extra-large meat lover’s
pizzas, I get the third one free? Really?

2. OK, I’ll stand here, but don’t take the
picture until there’s a really big wave behind me.