Now, there are some minor frustrations attendant to children. Like children's music. All I can say is the wheels on the bus go round and round ... and round and round and round. I don't know why that's so fascinating to kids. I mean, that's what wheels are supposed to do, go round and round. So why write a fucking song about it?
And what is it about the word "shit"? My son Holden heard me say it one day and he now repeats it nonstop. I hear the word shit more than a night manager at a Jack in the Box in Puerto Vallarta. Of course the problem with little children that modern science, NASA, or Bill Gates just can't seem to solve is that they grow up. One day you've got a little princess who thinks her daddy is a knight in shining armor, the next thing you know she's got a tattoo of Courtney Love on her back and she's in the driveway tongue-kissing a guy named Cyclops on a Harley while you're frantically trying to locate Mr. Peabody for a quick spin in the way-back machine.
Hey, there are no hard, fast rules about children, but here are some things you should know about raising kids that will make it easier for you.
Children leave food on all furniture and rugs. That's their job. It's an either-or proposition. You can't have kids and have nice things.
Don't try to be the hip parent. All my friends who had hip parents ended up getting into really hard drugs.
Here's why. When we enter our teens we want to rebel against our parents. But if your parents are rebellious themselves, then you have to work that much harder to get fucked up more than them. All right?
Show your spouse affection around the kids. Sometimes we become so harried, we forget to be affectionate around the children and they grow up assuming that all marriages are loveless. Think about it. Nobody in the audience tonight can even imagine their parents fucking. You know why? Because none of us can even imagine our parents looking at each other when they talked.
And be an adventurous parent. Don't be afraid that you're doing permanent damage. You are doing permanent damage. All humans are flawed goods. There's no getting around it. You are going to ruin your kid no matter what you do, so sit back and enjoy the ride, Mr. B.
In a nutshell, just be good and kind to your children because not only are they the future of the world, they are the ones who can eventually sign you into the home.
You know, yesterday evening I turned to my son at the dinner table and I said, "Eat your broccoli or no dessert." And then it hit me. I am irrevocably a parent. Once you utter those exact words to your kid, there's no turning back.
Eat your broccoli or no dessert is the official password that opens up an eighteen-year labyrinth strewn with nitroglycerine-encrusted Faberge eggs that parents try to navigate in a pair of Elton John Pinball Wizard boots. And you know what, I would not trade it for the universe. It is the reason that I am here.
As long as I live—on this planet, I mean, not just on HBO—I will never forget my youngest son Marlon's first words.
One day I was sitting in the kitchen reading the newspaper and he toddled over to me, looked up, and said, "Yo, Perry White, how's about putting down that fish wrap and doin' a little turnover on the Huggie here. This little shit-Speedo's more full of crap than Rush Limbaugh." And all I could think was "Yup, that's my boy!"
Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Modern Psychology
Do you realize they have psychiatrists for dogs now? That in and of itself can screw up a dog. "Hey, pal, am I allowed up on the couch or am I not allowed up on the couch?"
Now, I don't wanna get off on a rant here, and I wouldn't, but I can't help myself, because, you see, I'm addicted to ranting and I am not responsible for my actions right now because I have what they call PCRS—pay cable rant syndrome. Somebody call Leslie Abramson and find me somebody to sue!
Let's face it, folks, as far as therapeutic introspection goes, we've become a nation of such insufferably unbridled me-monkeys, every hiccup of our psyche, every aberrant twinge of our consciousness no matter how insignificant, has become a springboard for the kind of fervent discussion and speculation that used to be reserved for Zapruder footage and the Sgt. Pepper album cover.
It seems to me that we are on some mission to discover every deep-rooted reason for being unhappy. We employ sophisticated therapies to plumb the depths of our very psyches. The first thing it seems people have difficulty grasping is the simple premise that life often just is not fun. Okay, I suppose the pursuit of happiness seems ofttimes almost as tragic and futile a gesture as the loading of the ice-making machine onto the Titanic.
Today we spend more time on our therapists' couch than on our own two feet. Psychotherapists are now the skycaps of our emotional baggage, except they're getting $150 tips and putting our bags on a flight that never seems to land. We have 12-stepped over the line, people.
I mean, back in ancient civilization there was no psychoanalysis. The only treatment they had then for depression was the plague. You knew why you were blue, because everybody on your fucking continent had just died.
You know, I would put more faith in psychotherapy if it weren't so susceptible to every goofy trend that rolls down the Mental Health Freeway. Let's look at some of the basic and not so basic options.
Now, some people are so eager to Scotchgard themselves from taking personal responsibility, they conveniently blame the shit in their lives on shit that supposedly happened to them in their past lives. Given the quality of American schooling, most people's knowledge of world history is so spotty that invariably, they can only claim in their past lives to have been either Cleopatra or Bob Dole.
Next, we have couples therapy. Now, the trick to picking a couples therapist is finding one who will side with you and not your wife. As any good shrink will tell you, there is no point in you going in for counseling if you're not going to go in there and give it all you've got to try and win, win, win.
In group therapy you get all the embittered losers together so they will have someone to talk to. Hey, isn't that called the back room at the post office?
The practice of aromatherapy makes the claim that smelling certain essential oils can help you overcome anxiety, depression, and stress. The theory that exposure to pleasant fragrances helps create a happy mood goes a long way toward explaining why the French are so cranky all the time.
Then, of course, there's pharmaceutical therapy. It has been established for some time that drugs can have a tremendous effect on a person's mood. Many people at different times in their lives have experimented with drug therapy, it's just that the "therapist" was then some guy named "Weiner" that lived down the hall and carried a four-finger Baggie in his tube sock.
Listen, I'm all for psychotherapy, I have more unresolved guilt than Gil Garcetti's office, and I'd venture a guess that over the years I've logged more frequent-fetish miles than most of you. After extensive therapy, I have concluded that I have the worst Oedipal complex in the history of psychoanalysis. I'm actually in love with Oedipus. Every summer I go to Greece looking to sodomize an old blind Greek guy.
In an age where science has triumphed over religion, psychotherapists have become our shamans, our exorcists, and our parent confessors. They are privy to our most intimate secrets, things we can't, or won't, tell lovers, families, or spouses. And in exchange for performing the distasteful task of rummaging through the rancid, cobwebbed, appallingly personal contents of our cranial Dumpsters and tilting quixotically at the windmills of our minds, they charge us prices that are steeper than the heels on The Artist Formerly Known As Prince's wedding pumps.
So, do you think you need therapy?
Well, if you're out on a date and you think everything is going well, and you're talking and talking and laughing and laughing and smiling and your date turns to you and for what seems like no reason she asks "You're not going to hurt me, are you?" ...
Listen, maybe we're not supposed to know the dark secrets of self. Just accept the fact that the thought of being spanked with an empty Elmer's glue bottle turns you on. Accept it.
Impulse is what keeps life interesting. Freudian peccadilloes are not necessarily bad. Think about it. Centuries ago some guy in Holland got off on the way wood felt on his feet ...
You know, the ocean of life is full of swells and not-so- swells and you have to ride them out. You don't need Prozac because somebody flamed you in the X-Files chat room, okay. You don't need Zoloft because Darcel from Solid Gold never answered your fan letter.
Your parents fucked you up. Get over it. Let it go. A parent's job is to prepare you for the rest of your life by fucking with your head.
So at the end of the day you know what the big answer is, the solution to the entire problem?! Well, what it is is ... oh, I'm sorry, our time is up. We'll continue with this next week.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Elections 2/16/96
See the New Hampshire debate last night, huh, among the eight remaining Republicans'? I think it's a bad sign that the most frequently used phrase in the debate was "I know you are, but what am I?"
It's another presidential election year, and as we careen toward our quadrennial first Tuesday after the first Monday in November goatfuck, we once again get to watch a sweaty gaggle of Republican nozzleheads engage in exactly the same kind of foul, shameless, vulgar sack race that the Democratic nozzleheads engaged in four years ago. All these politicians are interchangeable. That's why the American voter feels as frustrated as a choking victim at a Christian Scientist's award dinner.
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but elections on every governmental level are now Pyrrhic wars of attrition. Potential candidates must run a gauntlet tighter than Phyllis Diller's forehead. You know any real leader won't even get in the game, leaving Americans with a choice between desiccated party apparatchiks, megaloma- niacal bazillionaires, and totalitarian fanatics who think that Pol Pot deserves a posthumous MacArthur grant.
If you want to run, all you need is enough cash to get your platform seen by everybody and enough savvy to craft a brazenly hollow message that cuts like an itty-bitty book-light beacon through everybody else's brazenly hollow message.
And money is just the coal that feeds the Bessemer converter inferno that is mass media.
Television is a continuously expanding black hole of filthy lucre and misinformation. Most current candidates choose a negative advertising campaign. Negative advertising is mean-spirited, intellectually dishonest, and, most important, brutally effective. Just ask Barry Goldwater about the mushroom cloud that ate his career. He's installing cable in Scottsdale right now.
Y'know, negative campaigns work on television because there is no way to answer them. It's like ticktacktoe. The person that goes first always wins. And the public devours it like Hannibal Lecter on a refugee boat leaving Cuba.
Let's cut to the chase. In present-day America, clueless politicians compete for baseless votes cast by uninformed citizens for frighteningly irrational reasons.
Our moral standards are so low and the intellectual field so barren that if John Wayne Gacy rose from the dead tomorrow, he could put on his clown suit, hire Roger Ailes, and get enough name-recognition votes in New Hampshire to knock Dick Lugar out of the race. And then Dick Lugar could drop his alias, reenter the real world, and go back to his given name, Cock Beretta.
Why are Americans so disinterested in politics? Because we can be. Democracy is voluntary.
And our lack of interest hasn't happened overnight. It can be traced directly back to our ever-decreasing attention spans. We need anything politically important rationed out like Pez—small, sweet, and coming out of a funny plastic head.
You know, folks, the truth is, really great men never run for President. That's because the mere act of running for President makes you less than great.
Anybody who is willing to endure the indignity of putting his life as well as his family's privacy in the line of fire on the off chance that forty million Americans will see fit to elect him, well, that automatically makes him an asshole.
Only an asshole would want to sit through a five-hour state dinner for the President of Estonia.
Only an asshole would expect his wife to gaze blankly and Stepford-smile while he outlines some bogus plan to use private funding for Strom Thurmond's annual carbon-14 test.
And only a narcissistic asshole would think that he could bring this crazy quilt of 250 million self-centered assholes together. By being all things to all assholes.
As long as a candidate can't be pinned down, he'll win the office. He must feign competency without actually acting in any way where success or failure could be proven. It must look like he is constantly doing something while accomplishing nothing.
Like Vanna White in a power tie. This is the signature of a successful modern-day politician. This is how a politician stays in office.
And politicians today who do get elected to office always have their eye on reelection, turning them into fifty- year-old Eddie Haskells.
"Gee, that's a nice tax plan, Mr. Voter, gee, that's a lovely position on welfare, Mrs. Voter."
Well, you know something, I want the human being representing my country to be just that, a human being. Not a robot, not an android, not some animatron. He should be someone who's alternatingly bold and scared shitless, like we all are. I want someone who smoked pot, I want someone who got laid. I'm sick and tired of our Presidents being these half-formed body snatcher pods that turn up in Jeff Goldblum's mud bath.
Hey, if you look hard enough, you're gonna find a reason not to elect anyone.
Bob Dornan is so insane that he actually undersells Crazy Eddie.
Pat Buchanan. Okay, forget the fact that his chief aide keeps Hitler's missing testicle in his inside coat pocket. Buchanan is further to the right than a bicyclist on the autobahn. Pat Buchanan is a registered trademark of the National Rifle Association and cannot be used without their express written consent.
Morry Taylor. Hmmm, should I vote for Morry Taylor or should I vote for Mel Cooley. No, no, maybe I'll vote for Larry "Fate and his running mate, Dr. Bellows.
Lamar Alexander's about a month and a half away from playing Norm to Jimmy Carter's Bob Vila. At least Alexander is insightful enough to realize that the current American electorate are such chronic droolers that they would actually vote for a fucking shirt.
Bob Dole. I don't know if I want a President who is congratulated on his birthday by Willard Scott.
And finally, how can I vote for Dick Lugar when he doesn't even have the courage to use his real name, Schlong Uzi.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Sportsmanship 3/15/96
What the hell happened to our formerly pastoral pastimes? Sports in this country. Owners are rapacious and disloyal, players are spoiled, ill-mannered lowlifes, coaches are abusive psychopaths, hot dogs are $6.50 ...
Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but the level of sportsmanship in America is dropping faster than the balance in Steve Forbes's daughters' trust funds. If I see one more athlete make a routine play and do a wild banshee itchy dance, I'm going to slap the man senseless with my remote, strap him in the Tony Burgess chair, toothpick his eyes open, and make him watch a little bit of the old Nike ultracommercialism till he pukes.
Today's athletes are so wrapped up in the entertainment aspect of sports, they can't complete the most basic of tasks without performing some kind of field, ego- driven, self-congratulatory ritual that makes ESPN's Plays of the Day look like that newsreel footage of Mussolini being oh-so-pleased with himself. Football players dance after sacks, they dance after touchdowns, they dance after they put their goddamn cup on. I bet just out of habit even O.J. did an end-zone dance and spiked the knife into the ground when he was finished.
I mean, if I have to see Neon Deion Prime Time Do-Rag Video Game Rap Album Krugerrand-Necklace Wearing Pizza Hut Two Sport Sanders high-stepping into the end zone like some kind of Bob Fosse-trained Nazi one more time, I think I'm gonna do the icky shuffle
right off a fuckin' cliff.
Bad sportsmanship has now become just another attitude. I mean, somewhere along the way winning became not enough. All of a sudden not only did you have to win, you had to make your opponent look bad in the process. You know the attitude, you stand like a statue at home plate watching the ball sail out of the park, you hover over the quarterback you just sacked and point your finger in his face, or you drag an unsuspecting child out of the stands onto the court and threaten him with a bucket of water that you know is really filled with confetti. Damn you, you evil Globies. Damn you to hell.
And today's fans aren't much better either. Their rudeness makes it impossible to go to the stadium and enjoy the game. For example, why is it at every football game, even in Buffalo, where it's twenty below in the sun, there's always that guy in the stands with no shirt on?
Ranting Again Page 9
