Category: Humor

I don’t have too much money, and as a result I’m quite fond of the money I do have. I haven’t named every $20 bill in my wallet. I’m not crazy. But I want my money to be happy, and to feel loved and useful. I like my money to think it’s worth important things like air conditioning and shampoo and ice cream sandwiches. If you let money think it’s only worth lottery tickets and cheap booze, then you end up with sad money.

These days everybody wants their money to take care of them after they retire. I’m no exception. But we probably won’t even find family members who’ll take care of us after we retire, so we’re really saying that we want money that loves us more than our family loves us. That’s a challenge, but then I’ve never punished money for obliterating a FedEx drop box with a car full of drunk 16 year olds at 1:00 a.m. In my car, by the way. Money and I do not have that kind of shared history, so we’re able to start fresh and build on mutual respect.

If my money wants to help set me up so I can eat something besides chicken necks and cardboard when I retire, it will have to grow into more money. It will have to grow into a hell of a lot more money. I admit that my money is ambitious, but damn—it has a huge journey ahead of it. So, like a lot of people I try to help out my money by looking for good ways it can grow.

My money and I have discovered something over the years. A pig has no friends in the sausage factory. Likewise, my money and I have no friends in the financial markets. I’m not saying the financial markets are particularly crooked. It’s just that a lot of people work there, and they like money too. The place they get their money from is, well, me. They don’t have much incentive to see my money get friendly with their money, unless my money goes over to play in their backyard.

Here’s an example. I was driving along with my money and heard a radio commercial for some folks who wanted to sell me gold. I thought that sounded pretty interesting. Gold just sounds cool, like a gold-plated pie server or something. I listened to these folks, and they said they expected gold might triple in value over the next couple of years. I thought to myself, damn, why do you want to sell me your gold then? If you just hang onto that gold you’ll triple your money. What can you invest in that’s going to give you a better return than that? Whatever it is, I want to buy some of that shit. Keep your gold.

Those gold guys are part of the gang that isn’t too interested in my money growing fatter. Otherwise, they would say stuff that makes more sense. But there are all kinds of folks in the markets who sound sensible even though they want to stab me in the armpit with a thousand dollar pen and lead my money into Biblical servitude. I read a while back that the stock market averages a 10% or 11% gain every year. My money and I got excited about that. But real people like me only average about a 2% or 3% gain each year. What the hell? Well, people sell when they’re scared and buy when they’re greedy, and they end up doing those things at lousy times.

There are these fellows in the markets called market makers. They sit in the middle of the trading like spiders dressed in Armani, and they make trades happen. They take a little money for their trouble on every trade. I’ve also got a broker who makes money every time I buy or sell some stock with an ignorant sounding name. So far, so good. These folks deserve to make a living. But if I buy stock in Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream and hang onto it for five years, my broker isn’t earning dick, and the market makers aren’t doing any better. So they and their financial market friends regularly tell everybody about the catastrophes around the corner and the unbelievable deals to be had, so that I’ll be trading my ass off chasing them. My returns will drop to nothing, and these guys will gather up my money, even though I doubt they respect and appreciate money like I do. Meanwhile, my remaining money and I will sit drinking shitty tequila while we listen to Freddy Fender and weep.

By the way, you can’t buy stock in Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. It’s now owned by the Unilever corporation, makers of other fine products such as Axe Cologne for Men, and Vaseline.

So what are my money and I going to do? Mutual funds? Real estate? Insurance? Cash in a shoebox in the back of my freezer? Maybe throw myself in front of expensive cars and hope for good settlements? It’s a puzzle. I think we’ll have to address this in an off-site strategic planning session for the board of directors of My Money and Me and Screw Everybody Else, Ltd. I hear that Barbados is nice this time of year.

You can find my money and me here next week.

It’s necessary to understand arson on the Sabbath in order to understand my father.

My father took me to Pete’s Barbershop for my first haircut. Pete owned the largest barbershop in my hometown, with ten chairs, and with mirrors running the length of both walls so you could see yourself into infinity while getting your hair cut. Pete operated a gun store out of the back end of his shop, a logical side-business for any barbershop.

Pete’s entrepreneurial spirit soared above hair and guns. He also served as the town’s only arsonist in residence. If you had money troubles and needed your warehouse or your grain silo burned down for the insurance money, Pete would make that happen for an appropriate fee. He never left enough evidence behind for the fire department or insurance investigators to call it an intentional blaze—Pete was a professional.

At that time my Southern hometown enforced the Blue Laws. These laws prohibited hundreds of items from being sold on Sundays, because Sunday was holy and should be spent it in prayer and contemplation. The Blue Law rules about what couldn’t be sold made lots of sense. For example, you could by a hammer, but you couldn’t buy nails. In moral support of the Blue Laws, all of the barbershops closed on Sundays, except Pete’s. Pete remained open, cut hair, and sold guns on the Sabbath.

Eventually the leading citizens and businessmen worked up a fair amount of outrage about Pete’s improper behavior. They began throwing around talk about boycotts, city ordinances and fines. Then one Sunday night one of the town’s barbershops burned down. The next Sunday another barbershop burned. Local businessmen, especially the barbershop owners, stopped calling for Pete’s to be shut down on Sundays. No one else ever complained about Pete.

All of this happened before I was born, so my father had to tell me this story. I could see that he looked upon Pete’s strategy with approval, and even amusement. But I realized that I didn’t care about Pete. I cared about my father’s approval of Pete, which I recognize to be singular and not an attitude adopted by everyone.

Since the time my father told me about Pete, James Bradley published a popular book called “Flags of Our Fathers.” It concerns the famous photo of the US flag being raised at Iwo Jima, one of the most iconic photos of the last century. The author’s father was one of the six flag-raisers, and the book is about his father and the five Marines who raised the flag. I liked this book. Clint Eastwood even made a movie of it.

Some of my friends enjoyed the book, but they objected to it as well. They said it was sometimes inaccurate in terms of facts and numbers. They pointed out that it seemed unfairly biased against the Japanese. They criticized it for not treating some of the flag-raisers even handedly. These are poor qualities in a history book. I don’t disagree with these criticisms, but I disagree with the conclusion. “Flags of Our Fathers” isn’t a history book, it’s a book about a man’s search for the man his father used to be.

It could seem peculiar to want to know your father before you were born. It sounds like any one of a dozen bad movies. But I know I’ve changed since I was young. Now I have fewer hangovers and more back hair. I keep my mouth shut a lot more, so when I say something stupid the results are far more catastrophic. I know what my own youth looks like, but my father’s youth is an empty place, and there’s nothing a man likes to do more than fill an empty place.

I’ve seen my father work a lot of nights, outsmart executives who thought they were smooth, and design tools to handle strange, pain-in-the-ass problems. He nearly killed a clerk with shock once by giving back money he got by mistake. He crushed a fellow who admired him but who kept making mistakes, and when a stranger close by puked all over himself and the vicinity, my father cleaned the man up. He never told a joke, but he made people laugh. That’s how I’ve known him personally. But of course, it’s only through incidents I’ve been told about that I can know the man he was before I was born.

I do know a lot of the dates and places of my father’s life. But that doesn’t help me understand him, just like knowing the factory and manufacture date won’t help me understand a chainsaw. People do things, and that’s how we know them. My hometown was a rural place when my father was a small boy, but the roads were dangerous enough that his dog kept knocking him into the ditch whenever he tried to walk on the shoulder. His pet raccoon slept in the pocket of an old overcoat hanging on the porch. My five year old father got infuriated when he wasn’t allowed to do what his brothers did, but they were much older—in fact, old enough to fight in the war, and for one of them to die in it.

But the quintessential detail I have from my father’s childhood is of him standing in the kitchen with his dog, and his mother at the stove holding her baby girl. His mother had just refused to let my father do something he wanted to do, and he responded, “If you weren’t holding that baby, I’d throw this dog at you.” Obviously my father was a willful child and not to be trusted, so his parents gave him a .22 rifle and turned him loose in the local woods for the rest of his childhood.

Another war had begun in Korea when my father turned 19, and he thought joining the Marine Corps would be smart. He was a big, strong kid who could hit about anything he shot at, so the Corps slapped a uniform on him, gave him a rifle, and sent him to Korea. My father never told me many light-hearted stories about Korea. He served with the first helicopter unit ever used in combat. That’s less glamorous than it might sound, since his job was to climb down from helicopters on flapping ropes, use axes and explosives to clear a half acre of woods, and watch the damned Navy pilots land those helicopters.

On one occasion, my father’s platoon guarded a small valley, and the Chinese Army decided to send an outrageous number of soldiers through it. Over the next quarter hour the Chinese frothed through the valley killing Marines, who in return killed them in job lots. My father recalled having “the biggest gun that fired the fastest,” and he killed a lot of Chinese kids about his own age. Most were so close he could easily see their faces when he killed them. By the time the Chinese decided that this was a pointless exercise, my father and his sergeant were the only Marines alive. My father told me about this incident with no pride and no pleasure when I was a grown man. In fact, he had blotted out the memory of it and only recalled it 50 years after it happened.

After Korea, my father went to college and played football for a while. Later on one of his friends from college called him for advice. The friend had gotten a job as a P.E. teacher, and he wasn’t sure how to handle his upcoming duties. My father had never taught P.E., but his friend asked his advice anyway. My father told him to “go in the first day, pick out the two toughest guys in the class, and beat the shit out of both of them at the same time.” Then he wouldn’t have any problems the rest of the year.

My journey to understand who my father was before I knew him must necessarily end at the moment I become a nasty, bellowing newborn. So this last incident involves how my father and mother put themselves in a position to create such a repellent creature as the newly-minted me. When my father was 23, he noticed my mom and found he wanted her to be aware of his existence, and also to consider it a good thing. But my father suffered from incredible shyness, and he couldn’t think of anything to do that would make this happen.

My father’s younger sister was my mom’s best friend. He asked his sister if she could help him, and she said, “You bet!” His sister asked my mom to go out Saturday night, as they often did, and my mom said sure. On Saturday my father and his sister arrived at my mom’s house in his car. My mom thought it odd that my father was there, but she shrugged and got in the car. Then my father’s sister said, “Oh, I forgot I have something to do!” and she buggered off, leaving my father and mom alone on what had just become a date.

They went to the local establishment where everyone in town gathered on Saturday nights. My mom knew everybody, and she laughed, and danced, and had a great time with her friends. My father, rather less outgoing, sat in the corner all night drinking beer and said nothing to anyone—including my mom.

The evening ended, and the time to go home arrived. In the parking lot my parents found that someone had parked their car behind my father’s car, and he couldn’t get out. He solved this problem by picking up the back end of the offending car and dragging it out of the way so he could leave. My mom thought, “Huh.” That is exactly what she later told me she thought, word for word. During the ride back to my mom’s house, my father still said nothing. He let her out at the curb and drove away. My mom went into the house and thought that this was the strangest thing that had ever happened to her.

On Sunday evening, with no planning or discussion, my father pulled up in front of my mom’s house. As my mom looked out the window, she felt perplexed and unsure of what to do. She didn’t see many options, so she went outside and got in my father’s car, and they drove away on their second date.

Six months later they were married.

Unfortunately, none of these incidents include anything about my father’s hangovers or his back hair. My picture of him as a young man remains a fuzzy sketch. But it’s a start. After all, any kid who threatens to throw a dog at his mom has to grow into a father to be proud of.

I don’t have many enemies, but I look upon the ones I have with venomous wrath. If I were allowed to select their eternal torments, my first choice would be drowning in a lake of boiling excrement while insane hornets hatch from their ear canals. If that’s unavailable, my second choice would be sitting in a hospital room, staring at a sick person in the bed, feeling stupid and helpless.

People don’t go to hospital rooms for amusement. They are neither fun nor funny. I don’t know of any jokes that begin, “A nurse, a man with no kidneys, and a bag of plasma walk into a bar…” Patients don’t go to these rooms voluntarily—they’re carted in on vans like veal delivered to an Italian restaurant. Their family and friends are dragged along by affection, obligation, sympathy, and terror.

When you’re sitting in a hospital room, you know almost nothing about what’s happening around you. The nurse could be injecting a pain killer, or she could be sucking the blood out of your mother’s heart for a satanic ritual. You’d never know the difference. Your ignorance is matched only by your inability to accomplish anything more useful than shifting pillows and moving flowers closer to the window. It’s not exactly busy work, but you know it has nothing to do with whether the patient will be breathing when she leaves the room.

When a person lies in a hospital bed, the room tightens with the pressure of uncertainty. I imagine it feels like the inside of a shaken soda can. That pressure erodes you, and you start begging nurses and doctors for slivers of information that might say what direction things are headed, and how long this whole experience has to last. You unobtrusively consider death, even if the patient is only suffering from a hernia. Death has been in this room, and it marked its territory like a bear. It can snatch anyone it wants in here.

You focus on the patient, which is the one thing you think you understand. If she doesn’t want to talk about her pain, you talk about what a bitch Aunt Lilly is when she calls for a half-hour chat. If she does want to talk about her pain, you nod and tell her that things will be better soon. If she doesn’t want to talk, you hold her hand. Fussy patients are the best, since they give you a lot to do. You bring blankets, adjust the bed, help them cheat on their hospital diet, and comb their hair. It relieves you more than it relieves them. If the patient wants socks and ice chips, then maybe she wants life, too.

After a ponderous length of time, you find out how this will end. If the patient is going home, you first want to know when, because you’ve got to get out of here before you’re reduced to paste. You tell the patient how great she looks, and you talk about having dinner next week, and you pack up vases of flowers that she’ll throw away tomorrow. And everyone talks, with sterling reverence, about how glad they will be to get out of this hospital room. The tension bleeds off a bit, but not much, because pain still hangs in the air, and if it attacks again you couldn’t do anything about it. At last you exit this room with its fake air and crappy TV and wall paint that’s trying a little too hard to be cheerful.

If the patient will never ride a wheelchair out of this room alive, the pressure intensifies—sort of as if the hospital room was now on the ocean floor beside the Titanic’s engine room. You knew earlier that you couldn’t do anything useful, but at least you hoped that someone else could. Now you know they can’t. You realize that there are not many good things to say to someone about to die. Maybe there aren’t any. So you let the patient say what she wants to say, and you hope your answers aren’t stupid and don’t upset her—as if anything you could say would upset her more. As the patient slides away, the air gets as tight as harp strings. Each time she closes her eyes, you feel a nick of panic that you’ve forgotten something important and now time’s run out. When she’s finally unconscious, nothing else can be said. Maybe you try anyway and tell her things you think you’d like to hear. Maybe you stare at her, trapped like a bird in the ugly hospital sheets that have carried dozens into death before her. Maybe you lean back in a plastic chair and pretend you won’t be relieved when it’s all over and you can get out of here. Maybe you sing to her, and she cries in her sleep. That has nothing to do with your singing, but no one around is a big enough jerk to tell you that.

When the patient leaves the room, it collapses on itself. Occupied, it had character. All of its character was lousy, but it had some. Now it droops like an empty balloon, as purposeless and generic as you could imagine. The patient carried every splinter of life away with her when she left. Then you leave too, perhaps with a happy rush, or perhaps wandering out like the victim of a train crash. But in any case, you leave with relief.

That relief is what helps you go through this and not smash clocks and chew on tires. And that relief is what I wish to deny my enemies. Or at least I thought I did. After a little reflection, maybe I’ll just poke my enemies in the eye and put a rat in their beer.

Robert Fulghum wrote a wonderful book called “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” It’s about the simple rules that people learn in kindergarten for how to act and be and treat others, and how those rules are really the wisdom we need to live a good life. It’s a great book. Read it right away.

Unfortunately, I didn’t go to kindergarten. My younger sister went, so the reasons I missed it always seemed vague to me. I was a squinty little runt then, so perhaps my parents wanted to hold off and give me from age 5 to age 6 to fill out. But the fact is that I didn’t go, so I didn’t learn any of that important stuff that Mr. Fulghum wrote about in his book.

Instead of spending that year in kindergarten, I spent it at home annoying my parents. That may be less socially acceptable, but I maintain that it was not time wasted. I learned lessons just as valuable as any that kindergarten could have taught me. These are the things I learned:

Persistence pays off. You can ask for something more times than someone else can say no without bursting a blood vessel.

Don’t get caught.

When the beatings are taking place, be somewhere else.

Playing outside is always more rewarding than working inside.

If you just lie, you will always get caught. If you tell most of the truth, you will often get away with it.

Be nice to the dog. He’ll hang out under the table, and you can slip him the food you hate.

Crying to get what you want is only successful in proportion to how cute you are.

Any number of things can be temporarily hidden while you make your getaway.

You should always share while people who have power over you are watching.

There’s always someone stronger and smarter than you. You have to be sneakier and more ruthless.

When you’re in trouble, your peers make valuable allies and convenient scapegoats.

When you have time, imagination, and people to target, there’s no such thing as boredom.

Sometimes you have to accept that the answer is, “No.” You do not have to accept that the answer is, “Never.”

Indulging in too many good things will make you puke.

If you want something, always ask first. If that doesn’t work, then you can employ other methods.

Anger is normal and acceptable for human beings. Force feeding someone a Tonka truck is not.

Stealing something (like a cookie) always makes noise, even if you don’t think it does.

They can make you go to bed, but they can’t make you stop asking for glasses of water.

And finally, never underestimate people’s capacity to forgive you, even when you absolutely don’t deserve it.

When did politics become more important than sex? Every person I know isn’t just talking about politics, they’re breathing fire about it. I’m not apolitical. I have opinions. But politics has become like a demolition derby, except that all the cars have slush funds and great hair. Every political party conjures an ocean of facts and evidence to prove it’s right, and I’d almost prefer that we could just tell them to bring us the Holy Grail and then we’d listen to them. Honestly, if I could figure out which party was lying to us the most, I’d go to their headquarters, ring the bell, and leave a flaming bag of dog shit.

I took my pathetic political ignorance to the wisest man I know, Fat Mike, the owner of Fat Mike’s Rib Shack. It was 112 degrees in the shack, and Fat Mike was sweating like a horse after the Kentucky Derby. I bought a pound and a half of beef brisket and asked him to explain politics.

Fat Mike waved his flyswatter like a magic wand and said, “Bubba, the problem is that the thing people think is politics ain’t really politics. It’s actually policy. Whatever you think and want—that’s policy. The way you get it—that’s politics.” He nodded at me in dismissal and turned away to stir up two gallons of iced tea with the long end of a framing square.

I cleared my throat, and when Mike glanced around I gave him a look of gaping incomprehension. “All right, I see you’re slow,” he said. He flopped his sausage-like forearms on the counter and deigned to continue. “Imagine that you’re two years old, and you’re at the grocery store. You see some piece of crap plastic toy car, and you decide you need the thing. That is policy. Since your mom ain’t dumb and knows the car will fall apart after ten minutes in your destructive hands, she says no. You don’t like it, so you pitch backwards on the floor in the middle of the store and shriek like your testicles are being torn off. I mean, dogs in the street are dropping dead.” Mike leered at me and slapped the counter, smearing some barbeque sauce. “That’s your way of getting what you want, Bubba. That’s politics.”

Mike turned back to his iced tea and dumped in eight cups of Imperial Pure Cane Sugar. I waited, pondering what he’d told me. As Mike ambled back to the counter, scratching a hole in the belly of his stained wife-beater undershirt, he said, “Damn it to hell, are you still here?” I thought about the futility of telling him I was a customer, and instead I nodded. Mike shook his head and said, “All right, since you’re so particularly dim today, let me break it down for you. Policy and politics are important, ‘cause we got big problems right now. But if you don’t keep the two separate in your mind, it’ll hose you up every time.

“Before I found sanity, I had a corporate job,” Mike said. I would have been less surprised to hear he’d been a millionaire Cambodian transvestite. “A lady I worked with got an impossible project. Some people wanted it work, some people hated the idea, and that was policy, all fine and swell. But the Big VP who hated it the most got himself made sponsor of that project. However, my friend’s own boss VP wanted that project to work real bad, and he had some pull.”

Mike sniffed a pan of peach cobbler, poked his finger in it, licked the cobbler off and nodded. “My friend was real smart and worked damn hard. Whenever the Big VP screwed her over, she went to her own VP, and he’d give her some good advice. She’d go follow that advice, but that son of a bitch Big VP would just screw her up again. The project was going nowhere, and everybody was getting pissed at my friend.

Finally, my friend’s VP told her to just fire the Big VP as her sponsor. I tell you, she was pretty shocked. She didn’t realize she could do such a thing. But the project was going in the ditch, so she went to the Big VP and fired him. You cannot possibly imagine the shit storm that fell on her then. Everything happened to her except getting turned into a pillar of salt.”

Fat Mike leaned back against the far counter and jostled an aluminum tray, spilling a good trickle of bean juice down his Bermuda shorts. He said, “My friend’s career was ruined. She’d have to move to Guam to get a job washing the cafeteria tables. She went to her own VP weeping to ask what had happened and whether he could help her. He laughed at her and said, ‘I guess you won’t be on the Big VP’s Christmas card list.’ You see, her own VP never had given a crap about the project. The whole time he was just using her to make the Big VP look bad.”

Mike tapped a Camel out of its pack and lit it with a shiny Ronson. He sucked in a drag as if it was his ticket through the Pearly Gates and said, “That, Bubba, is politics.”

They don’t look so vicious now. Wait until they grow up and start taking PAC money.

 

Yesterday a news report on the radio terrified me so much that I nearly crashed my car into Wendy’s as I drove by. It was some chilling stuff, and it literally made me forget about every other bad thing that could possibly happen in my life. I was so petrified that I don’t remember the report verbatim, but the reporter was interviewing an expert, and it went something like this:

Reporter: “Doctor, what can you tell us about this threat to our safety?”

Expert: “We’re talking about a neurological condition here. It’s caused by an amoeba swimming up your nose and into your brain.”

“Holy Mother of God!” I think.

Reporter: “That sounds awful. Can this amoeba attack you while you’re just standing around in your house, or does it live somewhere in particular?”

Expert: “No, it generally lives in warm, freshwater lakes and rivers.”

I think, “Okay, I don’t go to the lake that much.”

Expert: “But it’s been known to live in home water systems.”

“I’m never taking another shower! Or drinking water!”

Reporter: “That means that none of us is safe! What does this amoeba do once it attacks you, doctor?”

Expert: “The symptoms to watch out for are fever, headache, and stiffness in the neck.”

I start to breathe again.

Expert: “And then it eats your brain.”

Reporter: “What? It eats your brain?”

Expert: Yes, it takes about two weeks and then your brain is eaten and you die.”

Reporter: “Isn’t there any cure?”

Expert: “Unfortunately, no. Only one infected person in history is known to have survived, and we have no idea why. If the amoeba attacks you, you’re pretty much a goner.”

I think, “This is like a horror movie! Who gives a shit about zombies when we’ve got real amoebas eating our damned brains? Why the hell are we spending money researching cancer and AIDS when these amoebas are stalking us?”

Reporter: “What can we do to protect our children from certain death?”

Expert: “Fortunately, humans are not this amoeba’s preferred prey. They would rather eat some nice, tasty bacteria. So, amoeba attacks on humans are not all that common.”

Reporter: “How many people have been attacked this year?”

Expert: “Well, only three.”

Reporter: “In the city?”

Expert: “No, in the entire country. But they all died.”

Reporter: “Are there precautions we can take to prevent these amoebas from devastating our families?”

Expert: “I’m happy to say that very simple precautions can protect you from the amoebas. The best one is to just hold your nose.”

At this point, in my mind I took over the interview.

Me: “Did you say, ‘Just hold your nose?’”

Expert: “Yes, although I suppose you could get someone else to hold it for you.”

Me: “Isn’t three people a year nation-wide a low success rate for the amoebas? It seems pathetic. Shouldn’t they get into another line of work?”

Expert: “Well, they’re doing their best. I did say that humans are just a sideline for them. I’m sure they do better with bacteria.”

Me: “Doctor, why are you wasting our time with a so-called threat that kills three people a year?”

Expert: “It’s not a waste of time. The amoebas live in warm water. It’s summer, so the water is warm. People should be alerted to the dangers.”

Me: “Isn’t it true that thousands of people die every year for reasons we’re unable to determine at all?”

Expert “Yes, that’s true, but—”

Me: “For all we know, those people could be getting killed by ghosts. Why aren’t you stumping the radio news circuit warning people about the ghost catastrophe?”

Expert: “You don’t have to be that way about it.”

Me: “You’re right. I can’t possibly employ enough sarcasm to make you look more idiotic than you already look.”

Expert: “I don’t have to take this shit. I have an MD and a Ph.D.!”

As the expert slams down his phone in my imagination, I pull into my driveway. All of my normal fears once again cluster around me like drinking buddies. I have standards. I demand high-quality fears, and any piss ant fear like terror of amoebas can just find somebody else to drink with.

Cower in fear, humans. And bacteria.

They won’t let you cut out a guy’s kidney unless you have a college degree. I asked. And it has to be a medical degree. Medieval Russian Literature won’t convince them to let you scrub and order a nurse to hand you any of those obscure, scary surgical instruments. So, if you want to do something like this, I recommend snagging a college degree or two. Even if cutting out kidneys holds no appeal for you, a degree looks really snappy on a resume. It gives you something to list below your first job at Hobby Lobby and above your personal interests in Angry Birds and pornographic origami.

Keep in mind that if you don’t want to do something specialized like medicine, the exact type of degree may not matter much. I personally went for one of those degrees that makes some people say, “What do you expect to do with a degree in THAT?” Now, I would like you to please do me a personal favor. The next time you hear someone say that to a kid, look around for the heaviest thing you can lift and hit that person on the knee with it as hard as you can, because he is a damned moron who deserves to limp for the rest of his life.

I’m not the brightest guy on my block, but my degree never kept me from getting a job. Think of an employer’s problem this way. Employers only hire when they’re in pain. If everything was fine and they weren’t in pain, they’d just keep the money and not hire anybody. Now, if you were in pain, say from your hand being crushed in a car door, would you care whether the guy running towards you was a certified mechanic?

If you’re considering college, I’d like to share a little of my perspective. During my years in college there were facts being tossed around by the bushel basket. But in the end I learned only three significant things.

First, I learned what makes soap work. I mean how soap works from the chemical standpoint. I won’t go into the details, but this is the coolest piece of knowledge ever, and learning it justified every dollar and every hour I put into college.

The second thing I learned was almost as great. One day I was walking through the Student Union. That’s the place on campus where guys go to pretend to study while they look at pretty girls out of the corner of their eye. A crowd blocked the hallway, and I saw that the dean of my university was giving a speech. I had never before heard him speak nor even seen him in his actual flesh. Then I heard the golden, magical portion of his speech. He explained that he, the administrators, the professors, and the staff were the university. The students would come and go—we were transitory, and when we moved on the people who ran the place would still be there. We, the students, did not count—and we’d damned well better not forget it.

That did make me cock my head in a Scooby-Doo moment. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to kiss the man right on the mouth. Oh, certainly he was a nasty sack of moose piss, but amidst his mean-spirited locust swarm of a diatribe soared a single white dove. That dove landed on my shoulder and said to me, “Grow the hell up.”

The third thing I learned was, oddly, about learning. Sometimes people call universities “institutions of higher learning.” People do not call universities “institutions of higher teaching,” and there’s a reason for that. University professors will point you in generally the correct direction, but they have better things to do than spend a bunch of time teaching you stuff. It’s your responsibility to teach your own damn self. During my college career, the occasional dedicated teacher manifested, but as a rule my professors treated students the way alligators treat their young: “There’s the bayou, kid. Either teach yourself to hunt or get eaten by a muskrat, I don’t give a shit which.”

To summarize, my advanced university education consisted of the lovely mystery of soap, the revelation “Grow the hell up,” and the directive “Teach yourself if you don’t want to remain as ignorant as a sack of rusty screws.” Everything else was secondary, although I admit that lots of it was interesting.

I consider it all to be time and money wisely invested.

Yesterday I finished my interview for the upcoming anthology An Honest Lie Volume 3: Justifiable Hypocrisy. The interviewer hit me with a nice mix of both serious and funny questions. My favorite was “Do you consider yourself to be perfect?” I consider my answer to be pretty good, so that should count for something. An Honest Lie Volume 3 will be released later this year, including my story about belief and panic.

Just because I’m still in an interviewing mood, here are some questions I wasn’t asked, along with answers. Feel free to answer them for yourself!

If you were a method of breaking off a romantic relationship, what kind of method would you be?

A note in sky-writing at her family reunion.

When you reach Heaven, what will you say to St Peter?

Did I miss the exit for Lubbock?

If you were a flavor of ice cream that could never exist but should, what would you be?

Satanic Music Videos and Cream

If you were a lame excuse for coming home late, which one would you be?

The dog ate my car.

If you awoke with a cat perched on your chest, what would that cat be thinking?

You can be tolerated, but you sleep like an amateur.

If you were a zombie standing next to another cute zombie, what would your Zombie Pickup Line be?

How about a picnic? I’ve got a toddler crammed in this little basket.

If you were sitting on Santa’s lap and wanted to be remembered next year, what would you say?

I want a bike like you brought me last year, except one that won’t fly apart and break Grandma’s hip.

If you were Santa Claus, what would you do the day after Christmas?

Hit a topless bar with 8 tiny reindeer and 500 $1 bills

I do not worship at the altar of logic. I refuse to bring it frankincense and goats. I’ve employed deductive reasoning in my work for years, and I’ve read its instruction manual. So when I tell people that logic isn’t always the best way to know the world around us, they look at me as if I’ve been replaced by a dancing pixie from the Land of Dreams and Candy Corn.

A friend taught me a crackerjack quote from our buddy, Albert Einstein: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Don’t misunderstand me—I love logic in its proper place. In the world of things that can be measured, logic rules with a mighty fist. Will my car not start? Logic is my ally. Do I want to build a helicopter? Logic stands ready as my sword and shield. Do I want to tie a Windsor knot? Logic throws me a party in Monte Carlo with dancing girls and baccarat.

But if my wife asks me how much I love her, logic is a tiger shark eating my damned leg off. If I fire up my spreadsheet to answer her question, I will be dragged below the surface and never seen again. To illustrate my point, try to assess these statements logically:

  1. When your 16 year old son wants to borrow the Jaguar and you deny him, he will calmly understand this if you provide him a matrix showing the probability of him slaughtering half the city, including the dogs and cats.
  2. When two groups of people massacre each other because their common ancestors moved to different neighborhoods 2,000 years ago, giving them a Venn diagram that shows they’re one big family will solve the problem right away.

Please hand in your answers at the end of class, and be sure to show your work.

Years ago my job included helping people jointly make decisions when they hated each other. I had a nifty, logical tool for the job. Everybody loved it. It involved giving ratings and assessments to various factors. It used actual math, and the option that got the highest score at the end was the logical one to choose. Not once—ever—did a group select the option with the highest score. Yet they always agreed unanimously on a different choice. They all walked away happy. They all stuck by their decision, although otherwise they remained bile-spitting enemies.

When people aren’t building pyramids and fixing faucets, they are not logical. They live by intuition, and applying logic to people problems leads to misery and death. Or at least, to unpleasantness and failure.

But people should be logical, right? Isn’t that the problem? I agree that it is. People should be logical in the same way that tanning should be a fat burning activity and trees should be covered in lollipops. People just are not logical when it comes to people-related stuff. If you spend time trying to make people logical, you should also spend time trying to make a toaster cry when it hears La Traviata.

So what is the answer? We can’t abandon logic. It’s too darn useful, like that TV remote that does nothing except activate slow motion, but you keep it because none of your 7 other remotes does that. I suggest that we just embrace intuition when we’re dealing with the illogical dominant species on our planet. And when our wives ask how much we love them, we’ll all know that the correct answer is, “I cleaned the litter box before you got home.”

I like the friends I have on Facebook. I’ve culled my friends list ruthlessly, like a dog breeder drowning puppies while trying for a new type of canine, maybe a Saint Berdoodle. So now my friends list contains real friends, or at least acquaintances I like. This has led me to do far stupider things than I did when my Facebook friends included my dentist’s uncle and the guy I met at the gas station.

The Wise Folk advise us to avoid certain subjects in polite company. We should not discuss sex, religion, or politics. I think this is usually great advice. But now on Facebook I’m not in polite company, I’m among my friends. So I say to the wise folk, “Screw you, you god damn commies!” I feel comfortable talking to my friends about delicate subjects. They’re my friends.

Allow me to show you the stupidity of my ways. Say I’m scanning posts and see that a friend linked an article. It reveals that last Christmas Eve the Republican National Committee held a cross-dressing orgy and sacrificed goats on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. My friend has commented: “This is outrageous! These guys are traitors to the nation!”

Back when my friends list included the guy I met at the gas station, I would no more have responded to this than I would have inhaled Drano. But now I’m among friends. I may freely read this article and offer friendly insights.

I admit that the image of the RNC writhing in ecstasy under Abraham Lincoln’s gaze is amusing. Yet I try to be honest, and I comment: “I read the article and am not sure it’s accurate. The article was written by a plumber in Little Rock who said he’s never been east of the Mississippi, and he relied on his nephew’s field trip to DC for his source material. I couldn’t locate anyone else who saw this event, and unless the RNC has a Romulan cloaking device then someone should have seen them and said something. And while the article appears on a website named www.window.on.truth.com, it’s in fact owned by the non-profit ‘Kill Republican Maggots Who Kick Orphans.’ I’d say exercise some skepticism.”

Half an hour later my friend responds: “Maybe, maybe not. There’s no proof that they DIDN’T have this orgy, is there?”

I suppress my knowledge that it’s impossible to prove a negative. My friend knows how she feels, and I’m not determined to change her opinion. She likes her opinion. We had a friendly conversation, polite on both sides, and I’m happy. So I comment: “I see what you’re saying, and you’re right—I can’t prove the orgy didn’t happen. If some of these guys have their penises fall off later, that could be evidence that an orgy might have happened. But overall, go you!”

Fourteen seconds later a comment appears from one of my friend’s friends. I’ve never heard of this person, and if he was on fire I probably wouldn’t bother to write an app to simulate a stream of urine directed onto him.

He comments, addressing my friend: “I don’t know where this guy came from, but he’s just the kind of shit-for-brains reactionary who’s going to drive this country into a revolution that will end in an influenza pandemic and nuclear war! Just because someone’s a plumber doesn’t mean his words are false—that’s nothing but elitist thinking from a lackey of the rich and privileged who have filled this country’s prisons with the innocent poor and are conducting scientific experiments on them to create a super-soldier! I’ll bet he’s never even been to an orgy! I’d like to see this asshole debate the real issues instead of drooling his opinions—I’d shred him in 2 seconds! But I doubt he has the guts!”

As I read this, I reflect that they are called Wise Folk instead of Pretty Folk for a reason. I should listen to them more. I feel a gut-wriggling urge to respond to this snot-streaming cretin, but it’s evident that hours of spiteful conflict will ensue with a person I do not know, care about, or wish to see in the gene pool. Only evil lies at the end of that path.

There is salvation. It’s called the “Block” button, and I punch it as if it was the ejector seat and my F-18 was flaming out.

Sure, Facebook is a social network, but social isn’t always good. Most murders are committed by someone close to the victim, and the most vicious wars are fought between people with only a few degrees of separation. If I want to enjoy my time online, I’ll keep my fingers in my pockets when those touchy subjects float by. If I want a fight, I can always walk up to someone in a bar and call his mother a clot of nose-filth.