WE JUST WANNA WATCH
First, let me say that most people take these so-called tragedies like Columbine and Oklahoma City far too seriously. You have to remember, it’s all part of the American way of life. If you live in America you have to go along with these things. You can’t be sitting around whining, “Ohh, a lot of people got killed.” These things happen, folks. People get killed.
But concerning the guys (it’s always men) who commit these mass killings—and other less dramatic murders for that matter: After the sentence of death is passed, you will usually see the whining families of the “victims” insist on watching the execution up close, through a little window. They want to see the guy die. Don’t these people know there’s nothing to see? It’s uneventful. An attendant gives the guy an injection; it’s like watching someone get a flu shot. There’s nothing to see. But they often get their wish and are allowed to witness what’s little more than a medical procedure.
Now, my feeling is, if you’re going to let people watch some guy get executed, it would make much more sense to put on a little show for these ghouls. Entertain them. Place the guy in a small steel room and send in four or five of these sadistic prison guards with steel pipes and let them beat the guy to death. For about an hour. A constant, uninterrupted, sixty-minute clubbing would seem far more in keeping with our national values.
And, of course, this method would be much more satisfying to the families of these so-called victims; these fine, upstanding religious families who believe in a merciful God. They’d enjoy watching these psychotic, animalistic prison guards doing what comes naturally—administering a nice, brutal clubbing. Prison guards who, by the way, dare I say, are also all fine, upstanding religious people as well. Folks, if you’re gonna do these things, don’t settle for halfway measures. Do them right. Do them the Christian way.
KEEP AMERICA CLEAN
As a public service, next weekend Boy Scouts will be picking up litter and trash from America’s highways and dumping it in America’s rivers. If you’d like to pitch in and help the Boy Scouts, bring some of your own trash from home and throw it out the window of your car as you drive along your favorite road. You’ll be doing your part to keep the highways clean. By the way, if you have any ideas about cleaning up the rivers, let us know.
GET THE FUCK OOT
I’m tired of these Canadians who have worked in the American news media for years and still haven’t learned to pronounce the words out and about. Peter Jennings is one of them, and there are about three or four more. These people need to be taught that it’s OUT and uh-BOUT, not OOT and uh-BOOT. I say if you can’t learn the language, it’s aboot time you got the fuck oot of here. Besides, Canadians are just disguised English people, and it’s a well-known fact that all English people deserve to die.
UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU
Things I wonder about the FBI’s list of the “Ten Most Wanted” criminals: When they catch a guy and he comes off the list, does number eleven automatically move up? And does he see it as a promotion? Does he call his criminal friends and say, “I made it, Bruno. I’m finally on the list”?
How about when a new, really dangerous guy comes along and they absolutely have to put him at the top of the list without delay? (Call it “Number one with a bullet,” if you wish.) Doesn’t everyone else have to move down a notch? And doesn’t one guy get dropped off? How do they decide which guy to drop? Is it automatically number ten? And how does he feel about that? Does he feel slighted? Does he feel maybe it should’ve been someone else? Has anyone who was demoted ever killed the new guy to gain his spot back?
One last question: Does the FBI search harder for number three than they do for number seven? I would. Otherwise why have the numbers at all? These are the kinds of thoughts that keep me from making any real progress in life.
TOO MANY PEOPLE
There are too many people. Period. There have always been too many people. From the beginning. If these diaper-sniffing Christian babymongers would stop having so many of these cross-eyed little kids, maybe the rest of us would have a chance to spread out and have a little fun. Excess children waste our natural resources. If this society wants me to conserve energy, it had better get some of these child-worshipping religious fanatics to stop having five, six or seven babies. When they do that, I’ll start turning off the lights. And yes, I know the fertility rate is down. Good. It should go down even further. Every family should be allowed half a child. If that.
AN L.A. STREET PROBLEM
Who are all these guys in their twenties, out on the streets skateboarding at two and three in the afternoon? Get off the streets and find work, motherfucker! And by the way, I’m not talking about X Games guys who are really good at it; that’s different, that’s a way of life. I’m talking about these skateboard fucks who look like they’re actually going somewhere. As if the skateboard were a means of transportation. What the fuck’s the deal with these guys?
Same with these Rollerblading and scooter fucks. Why are these fully grown men out on the street, playing with children’s toys during working hours? And wearing helmets, for chrissakes! Jesus, I would be so embarrassed to wear a helmet. Grow up, motherfucker. And, while you’re at it, stay out of the range of my car; I might just decide to run some consumer tests on those helmets. I might also decide to clear the streets of all nonessential traffic. So get a job or play on the sidewalk with the rest of the kids.
BITS AND PIECES
• I’m starting to get more compassionate. I gotta watch that.
• Children’s Hospital in New York is quite an amazing place. On a recent visit, I saw two seven-year-olds performing a kidney transplant.
• Be careful whom you befriend. They will eventually ask you for something.
• When she was getting fucked by Roy Rogers, do you think Dale Evans ever screamed, “Giddyup, Roy”?
• Here’s a dead-end business: a shoe-shine stand at the beach.
• Mexico has a new holiday known as the “Name-Calling Fiesta.” People dress up in colorful costumes and do a series of folk dances while they call each other “cocksucker” and “motherfucker.” Then they all get drunk and eat a big meal.
• Michael Jackson missed his calling. If he had become a Catholic priest, he could’ve spent thirty or forty years blowing all the little boys he wanted, and no one would have said a word.
• Hard work is a misleading term. Physical effort and long hours do not constitute hard work. Hard work is when someone pays you to do something you’d rather not be doing. Anytime you’d rather be doing something other than the thing you’re doing, you’re doing hard work.
• Cosmologists are just now beginning to accept the possibility that the big bang was actually caused by a huge explosion in a meth lab.
• “Hello. I’m Howard Finely, and I’m running for state’s attorney general. This is my pledge to you: If I am elected, and someone breaks the law, I will personally go to his house and beat the shit out of him. Thank you.”
• Why does it always take longer to get somewhere than it does to come back?
• What’s with these recumbent bicycles? Listen, buddy, if you wanna take a nap, lie down. If you wanna ride a bike, buy a fuckin’ bicycle.
• I prefer people with imagination: dictators, serial killers, schizophrenics, assassins, skinheads, drug lords, violent bikers, devil worshippers. To me, these are the interesting people. To get its edge back, I think what America really needs is more evil. Intense, unalloyed, concentrated evil.
• I was reading a fitness magazine that had an article about cross-training, and I realized this would have been a good idea for Jesus.
• People who see life as anything more than pure entertainment are missing the point.
• The future ain’t what it used to be.
• Wouldn’t it be fun if, all at once, everybody just forgot everything they knew?
• These professional child-worshippers say we should put the needs of children first. Why? Wh
at about the needs of adults? We come second? It’s stupid. If you put the needs of children first, you’re going to wind up with way too many diapers and lollipops and not nearly enough bongs and condoms.
• WHAT HAPPENED? Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Adams, Hamilton. Things were going well. Then Ford, Quayle, Mondale, Agnew, Nixon, Clinton, Dole, Bush I, Bush II. What happened?
• This morning I had a great idea, but it was too late to put it into the book. I just wanted you to know this is where it would have gone.
TRUE FACT: A radio commercial says that a certain diet pill works three times faster than starvation. Question: Are they guessing, or did they really run these tests?
• Here’s something you can’t do by yourself: practice shaking hands.
• Stop in today at Anne Bennington’s Quality Cyst Removal. Regular cysts, five dollars. Really big, difficult cysts, a dollar a pound. Anne Bennington’s: Cyst removal for the discerning.
• THE OPTIMIST: “I have no friends, no family, no money, no food, no job, no credit, no luck, no hope and no future. However, I do have matches, toothpicks, chewing gum, paper clips, rubber bands, shoelaces and Scotch Tape. Maybe things aren’t so bad.”
• Am I the only one who thinks the Muppets weren’t funny?
• If you have twins, a good idea is to sell one of them. What the hell, you’ve got two, why not pick up a few dollars?
• When child abuser Father John Geoghan was killed in prison, he was sixty-eight years old. If a psychic had attended his ordination forty years earlier and told his parents, “When John is sixty-eight, he will be strangled to death in prison while serving time for touching children’s penises,” at the very least there would have been a small commotion.
TRUE FACT: There is now a gay softball World Series.
• A children’s museum sounds like a good idea, but I would imagine it’s not easy to breathe inside those little glass cases.
• Why is it the only time you ever hear the word figment it’s in relation to the imagination? Aren’t there any other kinds of figments?
• If everyone in the world sat quietly at the same time, closed their eyes and concentrated as hard as they could on peace and goodwill, all the killing and cruelty in the world would continue. And probably increase.
• You know what you never see? A Korean guy with freckles and a big hook nose.
• I wonder when we pick up the telephone, does each of us get his own individual dial tone, or is there just one system-wide, master dial tone that each of us jumps on and off when we need it? These things eat at me.
• If a safe is unlocked, is it still a safe?
• Here’s an optical illusion you can try at home. Take a pencil and make a small black dot in the middle of an ordinary piece of paper. Cover your left eye and stare at the dot from a distance of about two inches. You will see the Battle of Chancellorsville. If you don’t, check the paper. Or maybe you made the dot wrong.
• Just because you don’t have a lot of money to spend is no reason you shouldn’t spend what little you have.
• A good promotional idea for a singles bar would be to have “Date-rape Friday.” Drinks half-price, free GHB, free Plan-B pills, free RU-486 morning-after pills, free rape counseling and generous rebate coupons for an abortion clinic. That takes care of attracting the men; I’m still working on how to get some women to show up.
• I had no shoes, and I felt sorry for myself until I met a man with no feet. I took his shoes. Now I feel better.
• You know what would have been a smart thing to do in these developing countries that need electricity? To have tried large-scale experiments with alternative energy sources: solar, wind, geothermal, etc. We could have tested and tried to perfect these technologies on a large scale in places that need it. That would have been smart. That’s why we didn’t do it.
• You know what you never see? A really good-looking homeless couple.
• I’ve always wondered if the Library of Congress provides books in their public toilets to promote reading. I should think they wouldn’t want to pass up a captive audience like that.
• A GENERIC JOKE: A person goes into a place and says something to another person. The second person says something back to the first person, who listens to that and then says something back to the second person. The thing he says back is really funny.
• Stick around. China’s gonna win it all.
TRUE FACT: In Moscow there’s a professional entertainer who is described as a Hitler impersonator. Show biz.
• Get one now! Everybody has one! They’re almost gone! New, super-deluxe, jumbo, handy, portable, lightweight, convenient, collapsible, prewrapped, easy to use, guaranteed, available in all sizes in designer colors. Get one now! Won’t rust, tarnish, blister, crack or peel, but it will cause tumors.
KEEPIN’ IT REAL IN THE AIR
OFF WE GO, INTO THE WILD BLUE YONDER
I think the safety instructions that airline flight attendants deliver before departure could be greatly improved if they were simply a bit more honest and complete. They should include graphic descriptions—accompanied by animated and live-action video—of the devastating physical damage done to the human body during a crash. They should cite examples of various anatomical mutilations. They should also include a detailed description of the damage done to the lungs and skin by fire and smoke inhalation, to demonstrate that surviving the impact of the crash alone is not always sufficient. People deserve the truth.
Then, how about a more relaxed, breezy pre-flight announcement made in the cadences of young people: “Hi. Listen, we’ll be leaving soon? Then we’re gonna fly a while and get there possibly this afternoon? Okay? Later on, we’ll chow down, have some brews and maybe catch a movie? Okay? And hey, try not to ring your bell a lot and wake us up . . . unless something really scary is going on. Okay? Thanks. Oh, and by the way, the captain says do that thing with the belts.”
LEVELING OFF
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re leveling off at our cruising altitude. That means the cockpit crew will soon be lighting up and enjoying a few hits of something really nice we picked up in Hawaii. After about six hits, they’re gonna turn off the autopilot, take their hands off the controls and let the plane do what it wants for a couple of minutes. The captain suggests you keep your seat belts fastened unless you have a strong appetite for blunt trauma.”
“The captain has just turned on the fasten-seat-belt sign. He didn’t mean to, but the joint he was smoking fell in his lap, and when he jumped up, his head hit the switch.”
“The captain has turned off the seat-belt sign. But he cautions you to stay alert, as sometimes these planes don’t work as well as we’d like them to.”
“The captain has just turned the seat-belt sign on again. Of course, he also just stuffed a pound of walnuts up his nose, one by one, so you can decide for yourselves what you want to do about the belts.”
STILL CRUISIN’ ALONG
A socially responsible pilot: “On your right, you will see Las Vegas, where millions of visitors are fleeced out of their hard-earned money each year by huge, impersonal hotels originally built by brutal, criminal syndicates and now owned by brutal, criminal corporations. These large, impersonal hotels have no concern for service or quality, but merely wish to generate more gambling activity, because the advantage is heavily weighted toward the house. Whores and drugs are available at all hours.”
A poetic pilot: “Off to your right you’ll see the Colorado River as it snakes its way carefully through the ancient, multicolored walls of the Grand Canyon, echoing mutely the dreams and disappointments of countless generations of red-skinned people who inhabited the Great Southwest.”
An interesting pilot: “There’s the house where John Gacy lived. If you look carefully, in his backyard you can see the top of the chute where he dropped the bodies of the twenty-six children he killed. Over on the right, we’ll soon be coming up to the gas station where Ted Bundy picked up his
twenty-third victim. Altogether, he is thought to have killed between thirty-six and fifty young women, almost all of whom parted their hair in the middle.”
A political pilot: “Most of the farms you see used to belong to small farmers. But their land has been brutally repossessed by the greedy, grasping bankers, only to be bought up by huge agribusiness corporations who poison the land and produce tasteless food. These corporations receive billions of dollars a year from the taxpayers for no good reason except to enhance their wealth.”
Pilot with the blues: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been feeling kind of depressed lately, and I think you’ll agree, we all share guilt for the world’s suffering and deteriorating condition. Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Is it all worthwhile?’ Quite often, I give up hope completely and try to think of interesting ways of killing myself that would get my name on television.” (Sounds of a struggle in the cockpit)
When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? Page 5