by Dave Barry
If you can’t get money from your parents, you may be able to get some from a bank. The trouble is that banks prefer to give money to people who already have a lot of it. If you walk into a bank looking like a poverty-stricken young couple whose own parents won’t give them money, the loan officer will drum his fingers impatiently and try to get you out of his office so he can get back to increasing the prime rate. So you want to look wealthy. Wear tuxedos and evening gowns, and act as though you could not care less whether you get any money:
LOAN OFFICER: May I help you? YOU: Yes. We’d like to grab a quick bite of pheasant while Jacques fuels the Mercedes. Could we have a table please?
LOAN OFFICER: I’m sorry, but this is a bank. YOU: A bank? How very quaint. Is it for sale? I should think it would be gobs of fun to have a cozy little bank like this. Our others are so huge.
LOAN OFFICER: Uh, no, I’m afraid it’s not for sale. But I could give you a loan. Would $300,000 do? YOU: Thanks awfully, but we’re all set for today.
LOAN OFFICER: How about $450,000? Please, take it. We can sign the papers later.
If you can’t get money from your parents or a bank, you can build your own house. Anybody can build a house. My father is a Presbyterian minister who knows only the basics of carpentry, and he built the house I grew up in. The only problems are that the house took him about thirty-five years to finish and in many ways looks like it was built by a Presbyterian minister who knows only the basics of carpentry. Also some of the windows have BB-gun holes.
Here is how to build a house:
1. Find some land. You can find empty land all over the place, particularly along interstate highways. Pick out a nice batch of land and watch it for a few days: If nobody seems to be doing anything with it, you can assume it’s okay for you to build a house there.
2. Dig a ditch in the shape of the house. If you run into a lot of rocks and stuff, forget the ditch, You’re going to put a house on top of it anyway, so nobody will know the difference.
3. Get several thousand boards at a lumberyard and nail them together so they form a house. (NOTE: Do not do this at the lumberyard.)
If you don’t want to go to all this trouble, you can just put up a crude hut made of animal skins or mud and twigs. No matter what you build, you’ll be able to sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few years, when you need the money to get your children to stop following you around saying “I wanna house.”
God Needs The Money
Here are three types of people you should not trust:
People who tell you God told them to tell you to send them money. You know the guys I mean. They get on television and say: “God told me He wants you to send me some money, say $100, or even just $10, if that’s all you can afford, but in all honesty I must point out that God is less likely to give you some horrible disease if your gift is in the $100 range.”
The theory here seems to be that God talks only to the guys on television. I always thought that if God needed money all that badly, He would get in touch with us directly.
My wife gets a lot of letters from people who say God told them to tell her to send them money. She got a great one recently from Brother Leroy Jenkins, who is evidently one of the people God goes to when He needs a lot of money. Leroy is very straightforward:
The Lord spoke to me to have you send a one-time large gift. Will you send me $1,000, or $500, or $100, or even $5,000 ... If you are not able to send all of the $1,000, $500, $100 or $5,000 now, send as much as you can, and make a vow to the Lord that you will send an offering of $20 (or at least $10) each month.
Notice you make the vow to the Lord, but you send the money to Leroy. Leroy doesn’t specify what he plans to do with it, but he does tell you to send it to him at the Walden Correctional Institution in South Carolina, where he is serving a twelve-year term for criminal conspiracy. I imagine God advised him to get a good lawyer.
People who say they want to do things for the Public. I have yet to locate the Public: All I ever see is people. Nevertheless, some people are certain there’s a Public out there somewhere, sort of like the Lost Continent of Atlantis, and they keep trying to do things for it. Generally, these things consist of taking money away from people to help the Public, or passing laws prohibiting people from doing things that most people see nothing wrong with, but that are not in the Public Interest. For example:
The federal government helps the Public by taking ever larger amounts of money away from most people. The theory is that if the government didn’t step in, people would spend the money on things they want, which would cause inflation, which would be bad for the Public. So the government takes the money and (surprise!) spends it. Most states protect the Public by limiting people to only one telephone company, electric company, and so on. This is Good for the Public. It is not to be confused with monopolies, which are Bad for the Public. Your really enlightened states protect the Public by prohibiting everybody but the state from operating liquor or gambling businesses. These businesses are considered Bad if people operate them, but Good if the state does, even though the only real difference is that state liquor stores have high prices, poor selection, and all the charm of unwashed junior-high school locker rooms; and state gambling games offer sucker odds and idiot advertisements that appeal most to people who can least afford to throw money away.
I want to clarify one point: When I talk about “people,” I am not talking about “the People” with a capital “P,” as in “Power to the People” and other such slogans, which are bandied about by people who really mean “Power to Me and a Few of My Friends Who Know What Is Good for the People.” Generally, these people merely want to get control over property that is already owned by people, only not the right ones.
People who say they are doing things in Your Interest. Don’t trust anybody who says he’s doing something in Your Interest, except maybe your mother. Let’s face it: most people do what they do because they enjoy it or make money from it, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But most people feel obligated to pretend all they ever think about is helping the human race, especially you. Life-insurance salesmen, for example, tend to carry on as though the only reason they sell life insurance is that they feel it is more beneficial than the priesthood. Advertisements work the same way. The Chrysler Corporation wants me to buy a Chrysler not because it sells Chryslers, but because it wants to Help America. Mobil isn’t trying to sell petroleum products: it’s trying to Solve the Energy Crisis. And so on.
So there you have it: a list of people not to trust. You should be grateful you have someone like me, working for the Public Good, with Your Interest in mind. God wants you to send me some money.
Health Habits
Exercising Your Rights
Let’s talk about exercise and your body. First, the bad news. You cannot have a really swell body, like the one belonging to Victoria Principal. Victoria is the actress from the famous television show “Dallas” who appears in newspaper and television advertisements wearing a stretch garment that, if not occupied by Victoria Principal, would contract to the size of a gum wrapper.
In the television commercial, Victoria walks around a health club striking various bodily poses and saying something. You can’t hear what she’s saying, because when you see this particular commercial your brain tends to devote all available nervous-system resources to your eyes, but the gist of it is that if you join a health club and exercise a lot you will look like Victoria Principal or one of the major hunks of manhood behind her.
This is a lie, of course. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has decided that only a select few people can look like Victoria Principal or the hunks, and you are not one of them. These select people are destined to have swell bodies even if the only exercise they get is eating Slim Jims and drinking cheap whiskey. Certain other people can exercise constantly and eat nothing but grapefruit rinds, but they will still have the bodies of water buffalo.
This is probably for the best. Think how du
ll the world would be if we did not have wide variations in our bodily formats. We’d be like ants. If you’ve ever taken a good, close look at a batch of ants, you’ve probably noticed that they’re all equally attractive. You never see any fat ants, or buxom ants, or lean, sinewy ants. They all have identical, perfect little ant bodies, and consequently they find each other boring. Put yourself in their position: how would you feel if you lived in a world where every member of the opposite sex had a perfect body? You’d crave something different. You’d start casting a speculative glance toward the larvae, or even the pupae. If you were a male ant, you might even make a pass at, say, a queen termite, despite the fact that she is about sixty times your size, lays thirty-five thousand eggs a day, and tends to devour her sexual partners. Or is that spiders? No matter. The mere fact that you would even consider making a pass at a termite is proof of my point, which, if I recall it correctly, is that Mother Nature wants us all to be different, which means that if you are basically a squat person, you can exercise all you want, and you will still be basically a squat person.
This does not mean you shouldn’t exercise; it merely means that you should understand the real reason you should exercise, which is to prepare your body for the pain you’ll inevitably have to endure when you become older. Let’s say you’re in your mid-twenties to mid-thirties. Most of the time you feel pretty good, right? The only time you feel really lousy is when you attend a major party and ingest huge quantities of alcohol and wake up the next day naked in an unfamiliar city. But as you grow older, you’re going to start feeling more aches and pains caused by the inevitable afflictions of age, such as arthritis, the Social Security Administration, condescending denture-adhesive commercials, children who call only when they want to borrow money for down payments on houses much nicer than the one you live in, etc. You need to prepare your body for this pain. This is why exercise is so important.
Take joggers. You see them running along the street, clearly hating every second of it, and you say, “What’s the point?” Ha. Years from now, you’ll struggle to adjust to the aches and pains of growing older, whereas the joggers, who have been in constant agony for fifteen or twenty years, will be able to make the transition smoothly, unless they’ve committed suicide.
So don’t delay. Start an exercise program today, the more painful the better. If you don’t like to jog, buy the exercise book that Jane Fonda, the noted critic of capitalism, sells for $17.95, and do the exercises in it. Or just hit yourself repeatedly in the head with it.
Programs For The Unfit
Okay! Today’s the day you start on your physical-fitness program, the program that’s going to make you slender, healthy, and attractive, like the people in cigarette advertisements.
Step one is to take your pulse, because a healthy heart is the key to physical fitness. If your heart is healthy, you can continue to collect Social Security long after your other major organs have become senile and are wandering around aimlessly with no idea what bodily functions they are supposed to perform. The best way to understand the relationship between your heart and your health is to examine an actual heart. You cannot, of course, examine your own heart, unless you have a high threshold of pain, so instead you should trot down to the grocery store and ask the butcher for some surplus hearts from an assortment of animals—a cow, a pig, a fish, an earthworm, etc. Most butchers will be happy to give you the hearts for free, just to get you to go away.
Now take your hearts home, spread them out on a clean, level surface, such as a Ping-Pong table, and examine them closely. You’ll notice that the hearts differ in size, but they have one important thing in common: the animals they were removed from are all dead. This tells us that hearts are extremely important for physical fitness. Now place your hearts in Tupperware containers and store them in your freezer in case your children ever need them for science-fair projects or practical jokes.
Now you’re ready to take your pulse. The traditional method is to locate the major artery that goes through your wrist and press your thumb against it. The only potential drawback to this method is that you might squash the artery flat with your thumb, causing the blood to back up so that eventually your arm explodes like a party balloon. A safer way is to drink gin and tonic until you can actually hear your pulse pounding in your head, then walk or crawl to a nearby store and tell the salesperson you want to buy a stopwatch so you can count the number of pounds per minute:
YOU: I want a stopwatch.
SALESPERSON: We don’t sell stopwatches. This is a grocery store. You (picking up an eggplant): Oh yeah? Then what do you call this?
SALESPERSON: That’s an eggplant. Say, you’re the guy who was in here earlier asking for fish hearts. Are you drunk or something?
YOU: Certainly not. As any idiot can plainly see, I’m taking my pulse.
SALESPERSON: With an eggplant? Why don’t you just squash your thumb against your artery like everybody else? You (with great dignity): If I wanted a squash, I would have selected a squash, wouldn’t I? I’ll take this eggplant, and make it snappy.
Next, using a stopwatch or an eggplant, count the number of times your head pounds in a minute; if you’re a healthy person, this should be a two—or three-digit number. Now you’re ready to start your exercise program. Turn on your television and watch one of those programs in which people in skimpy outfits leap around in time to recorded music under the direction of a cheerful leader.
Notice I say you should watch the program: under no circumstances should you actually do the exercises, because all that leaping around will reduce your brain to tapioca pudding. You’ll wind up like the people on the television programs, smiling vacantly and doing whatever the cheerful leader tells you to:
LEADER: Okay! Let’s kick those legs up high! Great! Now let’s bend way over! Terrific! Now let’s all say “I pledge allegiance to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.”
EXERCISERS: I pledge allegiance to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
LEADER: Okay! Now let’s all hop on one foot and put our fingers in our noses’. Great! Now let’s all take out our checkbooks and ...
After your exercise program, take your pulse again, then go into the kitchen and prepare a large, nutritious breakfast. You may not feel hungry, especially after all the pulse-taking, so to boost your appetite, think about how important good nutrition is to your heart. Think about what will happen to you if you don’t take good care of your heart. Think, as you chew your food, about what happened to the cow, the pig, the fish, and the earthworm whose hearts are sitting in Tupperware containers only a few feet away from your breakfast, sheathed in frozen slime. This should give you all the incentive you need to eat a hearty breakfast, after which you’ll be ready to face the day or go back to bed.
Jogging For President
Lately, I have noticed large numbers of people staggering along the sides of major highways, trying to get in shape. I think they have the right idea: most of us Americans are out of shape. I know for a fact that I am.
When I was in high school, my friends and I were in terrific shape. Our bodies were fine-tuned machines. We would routinely drink quarts of warmish beer, then perform feats of great physical prowess. For example, during the Halloween Dance we carried a 1962 Volkswagen all the way up the front steps of Pleasantville High School, right into the lobby. I bet we couldn’t do that today. I bet you couldn’t, either.
Now I grant you that most of us no longer feel any great need to drink warm beer and carry Volkswagens into high schools, but the point is that if some emergency arose, if for some reason involving national security we had to carry a Volkswagen into a high school, we couldn’t do it. We’d go a few steps, then we’d drop the Volkswagen and collapse on the ground, gasping and heaving, and that would be the end of our national security. So I figure it’s time to get in shape.
But jogging is not the way to do it. For one thing, jogging kills your brain cells. The Army has known this for years; it forces recruits to jog every day, on the theory t
hat some of them will lose so many brain cells that they will eventually reenlist. Your really dedicated joggers know it, too; in fact, it’s one of the main reasons they jog. The idea is that if you’re troubled about your job or world affairs, you go out and jog until you’ve killed whatever brain cells are responsible for those thoughts. The problem is that you may also kill the brain cells that remember your name and address, in which case you keep right on jogging, sometimes for days. This is what has happened to the people you see jogging along major highways, the ones with vacant expressions on their faces: they left home as nuclear physicists, heart surgeons, corporation presidents, and so on, but after a few hours most of them have library paste for brains.
Remember Jimmy Carter? Every day at the White House he used to wake up at the crack of dawn, develop some brilliant plan to save the economy, then head out for his morning jog. His aides would find him stumbling around hours later, sweaty and confused, his economic plan gone forever. Jimmy might have stood a chance in the 1980 elections if he had run against another jogger, but instead he faced Ronald Reagan. Ron has his horses jog for him and thus is able to preserve what brain cells he has, although I suspect his horses are fairly stupid.
My other objection to jogging is that even if you manage to jog yourself into shape, you still don’t look all that great. I mean, look at marathon runners: they appear gaunt and desperately hungry, like refugees wearing numbers. They’re always snatching scraps of food from spectators and stuffing them (the scraps of food) into their mouths. If you were to toss, say, a side of raw beef into their path, they’d all dive for it, teeth bared, and that would be the end of the marathon.
