* * *
I remember a time when people used to kiss ass.
They used to kiss up.
Kiss ass.
They used to say,
“He’s a real ass kisser.”
I guess the kissing’s not getting it done anymore.
“You better blow some smoke up there, buddy…”
* * *
Similarly,
whenever someone has a great number of a certain item,
you will often hear them say,
“Well, I have those coming OUT of my ass.”
“Really?”
“Yes.
I’ve got them up the wazoo…”
“So, you keep them in your ass?
But now you have so many,
they’re just coming out on their own…?”
“That’s right.”
Now obviously,
we don’t actually have these items in our asses.
We just want to make sure we mention our ass in every conversation.
And why not?
“It’s no skin off my ass…
In fact, why don’t you shove it up your ass?
As long as I’ve got them coming out of my ass.
And maybe if you got off your ass…
You wouldn’t need to be riding my ass.”
Some people don’t know how to work it in the conversation.
So they just go,
“My ass.”
Non-Statements
What about the people you’re here with tonight?
You have to get rid of them at some point.
How are you going to do it?
You’ve got to wrap it up somehow, right?
I hate that extra three and a half minutes at the end
where people just tack on all these statements
that have been formulated to be things no one can disagree with, like,
“Well, you never know…
… time will tell…
… we’ll see what happens…
… that’s for sure…”
Yeah, I think we all know that.
We all know,
the Future is not here yet.
A baby that’s five minutes old understands this.
He’s born.
He looks around.
He thinks,
“Well, hopefully my neck will firm up.
My balls will drop down.
I’ll take it from there.
I’ll see what happens…”
* * *
People that have nothing to contribute to the conversation pipe up about that.
“Not to the best of my knowledge.”
“What does that mean?
You don’t know?”
“I didn’t say that.
I said, I have knowledge.
And it’s all not about this.”
* * *
I like when people go,
“What was I saying…? What was I saying…?”
Oh. So, even you’re not paying attention to this?
And I’m supposed to be taking notes?
* * *
My favorite Non-statement is “I want to say.”
“What time is that plane coming in…?”
“I want to say… nine o’clock…?”
“You want to say?
Well, congratulations, I think you said it.
What’s the name of the guy we’re supposed to pick up?”
“I want to say… Karl.”
“So, we have no chance of finding this person?”
“Not to the best of my knowledge.”
“Well, you never know.
Time will tell.
We’ll see what happens.”
Coffee Says
Here’s the mathematical equation of coffee.
You’re a little depressed.
Not in great shape.
And didn’t get a good night’s sleep.
Coffee says,
“I have been training my entire life for this exact moment.”
When you are in trouble coffee is there.
What else can you turn to?
Lemonade?
Tea?
I hate tea.
Hate it.
It acts like it can do something.
Hot. Same cup.
Can’t do a god damned thing.
See through tinted water?
Lemon slices and string?
You have to try and grab that wet, little gross bag as it’s swinging around.
Get out of my face.
We need coffee.
You ever hear anybody say,
“I need some tea”?
No.
Nobody needs it.
Need coffee.
Coffee’s made from dirt.
Grounds.
You can feel the anger when it’s
inside the coffee machine.
Bubbling and hissing in there
like a little volcano.
You look inside, things are spitting out everywhere.
You take one sip, and the coffee’s just,
“That’s it.
I’m running this outfit now.
I want constant talking.
Endless peeing.
Large intestine, I want all of that out of here right now.
I said, ‘Move it.’
Move your bowels.
Shut your mouth.
Drop your pants.
Things are going to be different from now on.
You think I fought my way out of an African jungle,
stowed away on the bottom of a
rusted-out trawler in a burlap
bag to sit in a recycled
paper cup with a
spoon up my ass?
You know what the tattoo on my arm says?
It says, ‘Not tea.’ ”
Coffee Break
The original idea of coffee was a 10-minute break in the middle of eight hours of work.
We’re now drinking eight hours of coffee.
Doing 10 minutes of work.
And I think they’re more proud of the coffee.
People walk down the street with these cups like they’ve won an award.
(walking proudly with arm extended out)
“Excuse me, I believe I have the right of way here.
I’ve got a gigantic coffee…”
Alcoholic Coffee Drinks
Alcoholic coffee is a popular type drink.
How rare is that set of circumstances?
Where you need to be whatever the opposite of tired and sober is?
“I am getting trashed and alert TO-NIGHT, I’ll tell you that.”
“I know my car was all over the road, officer, I saw every second of it.
I know I’ll be filling out papers at the Police Station all night.
Bring it on, I’m sharp as a tack.
I am smashed and focused.
I have never felt better or worse in my life.”
Or the Red Bulls and vodka.
“I’m going to have a bunch of these and then
just split like an amoeba into two completely different people.
A hyperactive drunk and a slurred speech, bipolar manic depressive.
You can talk to either one you want.
They’re both standing right in front of you.”
5-Hour Energy Drink
5-Hour Energy Drink.
You ever see that little bottle by the cash register?
5 hours.
5 hours… is a weird amount of time.
Who’s working 1–6?
What does that even feel like?
To suddenly be in deficit of 5 hours of energy?
“I need 5 hours of energy right now!”
(pant, pant)
If you need 5 hours of energy,
go to bed.
Your day is over.
Pack it in.
Wake up.
Take another run at it tomorrow.
Calm down, dude…
You got more than one day.
“I need 5 hours of energy, but I can’t drink anything
larger than this.
Do you have a drink in this store,
that big… with 5 hours of energy in it?
I can’t drink anything larger…
I don’t have the energy.”
* * *
The workday is 8 hours.
You have an hour for lunch, you’re down to 7.
According to this company…
I only need 2 hours of natural, human energy and one of their
Meth lab–Hawaiian Punch–Jell-O shots
and I’m good to go.
Cold Beer
I like how the coldness thing drives the beer people crazy.
The commercials are always,
“Frost brewed.
Cold filtered.
Ice bottled.
We pack it in a glacier, then put it on a frozen truck driven by a polar bear.”
We’re not transplanting a kidney.
You’re just trying to get drunk.
Relax, it’s going to work.
Orange Juice
Orange juice is never “like fresh squeezed” enough.
I saw on the side of a carton of Tropicana, “now even more like fresh squeezed.”
Used to be “like fresh squeezed.”
Then, “more like fresh squeezed.”
Now, “even more.”
Just squeeze it already!
You want it.
We want it.
The oranges are helpless.
Squeeze them up.
Squeeze their little round orange asses and give it to us.
And squeeze the milk out of those almonds too.
Almond Milk
Who got that assignment?
Who had a can of almonds slammed on their desk,
“And find a way to get some milk out of these god damn things.
Nobody wants nuts.
They want milk.”
How did they even find a stool small enough to slide under the almonds?
To milk it?
You know how hard it must be to manipulate the teats of an almond?
And rice milk?
Even harder.
Even less room.
Pizza Hut
Everyone’s trying to lose a little weight.
Not one person has ever lost one ounce ever.
Do you think one possible explanation might be
that we’re still trying to figure out ways to stuff more cheese into a piece of pizza?
So far, we’ve hollowed out the crust and injection-molded that.
That was like three years ago.
Now, they’re double layering the foundation
with another layer of cheese beneath the main layer.
So now we have a wall of cheese surrounding the pool of cheese.
The whole god damn thing was cheese to begin with.
Pizza Hut has a new thing coming out…
They will actually bake your head right into a block of cheese.
There’s no pizza.
It’s just cheese coming into every orifice of your skull.
Maybe that’ll be enough cheese for us…
Raisin Bran
I see the Raisin Bran people are still caught up in their own personal madness.
Still convinced that we’re not happy yet with the number of raisins in their product.
Every time I go in the supermarket there is a new announcement on the front of the box,
“More scoops.
Bigger scoops.
Deeper scoops.
Longer scoops.
All raisins, one flake.
COME ON!”
And no one cares.
No one cares about the number of raisins in the god damn Raisin Bran.
If you’re eating Raisin Bran, you’ve given up on life anyway.
You hate yourself and everyone else.
99% of all Raisin Bran is eaten by people
who have slept over at somebody else’s house,
and that’s all they had.
No one’s intentionally eating this stuff.
“You got any cereal?”
“We got Raisin Bran.”
“… All right… (sigh)… just give me the Raisin Bran.”
Haggar Slacks
I saw an ad for Haggar Slacks.
They’re making pants now,
where there’s a thing in the front of the pants that you pull,
and the waistband pops open an extra couple of inches,
in the middle of your meal.
That’s where we are at now, my friends.
We can’t wait until tomorrow to put on bigger pants.
“I need a ripcord right now!
BLAM—
Let me see the dessert menu.
I’m going for it.”
Cookies
Different foods affect you at different times of day.
Cookies wait for night.
I’ve never seen a cookie in the morning. I don’t know where they are.
Cookies know in the morning, you are strong, they are weak.
At night you are weak, they are strong.
That’s why most cookies are round, because this is a face-to-face confrontation.
You can almost feel their little chocolate chip eyes on you.
Something happens between 9:00 and 11:30…
You’re talking to someone,
their face turns into a cookie.
You look away, the clock is a cookie. The moon is a cookie.
Cookie companies make cookies seem very innocent,
“It’s just elves living in trees. They make them as a hobby…”
They always put happy clowns and balloons on the box.
The truth is cookies should have names like “Chocolate Sons of Bitches.”
That’s what our real relationship is.
“Those little ‘Vanilla Bastards’ got me again last night.
And I told you to stop buying those ‘Go to Hell Wafers’ with the ‘Screw You Cream’ inside.
I didn’t stand a chance.”
It’s a war.
That’s why the cookies live like military.
Inside boxes in those pre-formed Army barracks housing.
You slide it out, it’s like a D-day beach-landing troop carrier.
All the cookies are lined up waiting to go into combat.
But I prefer the box over the bag of cookies.
Where they’re all just climbing all over each other,
just complete anarchy and chaos.
You get to the end of a row of cookies,
I don’t care how crazy you are,
you stop for a second and go,
“What the hell am I doing here?
I was going to have a couple.
I just mowed down a whole row.
And now I’m thinking about going over the wall.”
You jump that wall,
you’re just a convict running through a cornfield now.
You go back in your kitchen the next morning,
it’s like an intersection where there was a car accident.
Broken glass cookie crumbs.
Chocolate skid marks on the napkin.
The milk carton’s flat, totaled in the bottom of the trash.
“Boy, I was lucky to walk away from those cookies.
Good thing I had my Haggar Safety Pop-Open slacks.”
Gym
I was supposed to go to the gym today.
I did not go.
That’s okay.
I know most of you didn’t go either.
It is not hard to not go to the gym.
I think we can say,
it is probably the easiest thing in the world to not do.
What do you have to do to not go to the gym?
Nothing.
Just let a little time go by and go,
&
nbsp; “Oh well, I can’t go now—
I was going to go.
That’s what I was doing.
But the time. No time.
It’s now not possible for me to go.”
* * *
I have thought,
I should join a gym that’s closer.
So I could go more often.
But I wouldn’t.
I would just wait longer.
To be able to not go to that one.
* * *
I like when people say,
“I want to start going to the gym.”
So, why don’t you go?
“I don’t know.
I just don’t want to go.”
But you want to go?
“Oh yes, I definitely want to go.”
Have you ever gone?
“No. Not one time. Ever.
But I want to.”
So, I think what you’re saying is,
what you want,
is to want to go…?
“YES. I want to want to go.”
So go…
“I don’t want to.”
The Chair
You have an ass.
What do you think that is?
It’s a portable cushioned seating area
that we bring with us at all times.
The ass proves we are slowly
evolving into chairs.
We needed to be comfortable.
And we needed something we could not forget.
“Now, what did I do with my ass?
Oh. I have my ass.
Never mind, I have it.
I found it.
I had my ass with me the whole time.”
That is the brilliance of the ass.
Can’t get lost.
Even if someone says,
“Get your ass out of here.”
You can’t do it.
You have to leave with it.
The Strip
But that “needing news” feeling never leaves you that,
“Something’s going on. What is going on?”
Even though you check every 11 seconds on the phone.
I want to hear the anchor person talk. I like to hear talking.
Even though I have to read the strip on the bottom at the same time.
Which you cannot do.
If I’m listening to the guy, I miss what it says on the strip.
Is This Anything? Page 18