by Adam Carolla
From now on there is a time limit. Go at it as long as you want beforehand, but as soon as someone gets on the treadmill next to you, you’ve got twenty-two minutes to wrap it up. You’re free to go back to your hotel room and do lunges, but you need to vacate the gym and quit shaming the people around you who don’t have your commitment, intestinal fortitude, and eating disorder.
A side note: I’m declaring the inverse of this treadmill rule for the urinal. There is nothing worse than when I’m standing at a urinal and the guy sidles up next to me and finishes first. It makes me feel like I either have a prostate issue or have been drinking too much. It makes me self-conscious. I want to turn to him and say, “I only piss like twice a week. It’s Wednesday isn’t it?”
CELEBRITIES AND ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE
We used to trust doctors. We knew they had more education and experience than us. In today’s narcissistic culture we treat medicine as a matter of personal opinion. That’s what I love about carpentry: I get to be an expert. I can tell you the nailing schedule on shear wall, that if you have exterior hinges they have to be NRP (nonremovable pins), and no one is going to question me. Now everyone has shitty medical information from the Internet, celebrities, and their life coaches. They turn to people who failed out of junior college to tell them they can cure their cancer with purified water and good vibes. Oh, and if they align their chakras. For those of you who don’t know, chakras are those things that don’t exist that chicks with too much time and too little IQ believe are in their body, even though you can’t find them on an MRI. Disturbances in these chakras cause every physical, mental, and even financial ailment known to man. So if you have anything wrong—from a headache to getting laid off—it’s time to talk to someone who specializes in fixing your chakras. And guess what? These spiritual healers always find a problem. Something is wrong with your root chakra and God forbid something happens to your crown chakra. That’s really going to fuck up your third eye. It’s like going in for a free brake inspection. They’re going to find a problem. Just like Manny Moe and Jack with the brake pads, these shaman sham artists are never going say that you’re completely in alignment and clear. Nope, you’re gonna need some healing stones and white sage smoke to the tune of eighty dollars an hour. Of course it’s all a big fat placebo disguised as the wisdom of the East.
What happened? Doctors used to be doctors. In the Old West the entire area would have one doctor that everyone trusted to fix what ailed you with a little whiskey and surgery on a kitchen table. It wasn’t like some hippie would show up and say, “Hold on. I have a friend in Dodge City whose aunt was cured by an Oriental who burned a cat whisker.”
The worst offenders when it comes to this bullshit are celebrities. When they’re not pretending to be climatologists, they have a lot of thoughts on “Western medicine” or, as I like to call it, medicine.
The worst of the worst is Jenny McCarthy and her crusade against vaccines. I feel bad that her kid has autism but her quest is a dangerous mix of denial, self-entitlement, and having a megaphone. She can’t handle the idea that some random piece of shitty fate struck her. Not her! That’s for poor people in another part of the world. There must be an answer! A cause. So she hops on the Internet, finds some bullshit, spouts it as fact, and convinces a large segment of mothers—mostly fellow paranoid white ones with too much money and not enough problems—that vaccinations cause autism. Meanwhile a generation of kids will get tuberculosis, measles, meningitis, etc.
Why did anyone listen to her? She won Playmate of the Year, not a Nobel Prize. Could you get any farther away from a lab than the Playboy Mansion? I don’t think there’s a ton of Bunsen burners in there and it’s certainly not sterile. Unless you’re researching syphilis, the Grotto is not exactly the lab at Pfizer.
Speaking of, let me do a quick tangent on Jenny McCarthy in Playboy. She posed in that again a couple of years ago and everyone was like “She still looks good at forty.” Sure. But we were first introduced to her in Playboy when she was nineteen. We still have those pictures. We don’t need to see her at forty. If she were an astronaut, race-car driver, or Senator McCarthy, that’d be one thing; there’d be a novelty to seeing her at forty. But the whole reason we know she exists is because we saw her naked. Do we need to see her now that she has barnacles? No guy looks at a hot nineteen-year-old and thinks, “Man, I can’t wait to see her when she’s forty.” Did we run out of nude twenty-one-year-olds?
Anyway, Dr. Drew has a $500,000 education, years of training and internships, and yet people give more credence to the chick with the fake tits from MTV. Why? Because she’s peddling easy answers while Drew has an obligation to tell the hard, fact-based truths.
That is why I’m naming Dr. Drew Pinsky my Secretary of Health and Human Services. He’s a real doctor. I’ve always described him as an “airplane doctor.” Imagine you’re in coach, halfway through a flight from L.A. to New York. You start feeling some chest pains and get the stewardess. You’re having a heart attack. She starts looking to see if there is a doctor on the flight and heads up to first class. She could come back with Dr. Laura, Dr. Phil, or Dr. Drew. Trust me, the one you want her to have on her arm is Dr. Drew. He could actually save your life. Drew gets incredibly annoyed when people lump him in with all the TV doctors. He’s not a celebrity. He is a medical professional.
A little sidebar directed to Dr. Oz: We get it, you’re a doctor. The word “doctor” is right in your name. You don’t need to wear scrubs everywhere. Every time I see you on TV you’re wearing those blue scrubs. Are you about to do emergency surgery or talk to housewives about their colon health? Joe Namath doesn’t have to wear his Jets uniform everywhere. We know it’s Broadway Joe.
A subsidebar to my scrub sidebar—this is something I will have Drew address as HHS secretary. What was the plan with scrub sleeves? It seems like the guys designing them couldn’t make up their minds. One wanted to go all the way to the wrist and one wanted to go sleeveless and they settled on an unsatisfying one-third of the way down the arm that accomplishes nothing but accentuating how skinny the doctors’ arms are and how fat the nurses’ arms are.
To the pediatric doctors with SpongeBob or panda scrubs, God bless you and your work, but I’ve got to think that your fashion choices are freaking kids out. They’re injured and scared and anesthetized. They don’t need to see some blurry shape covered in pandas coming at them with a rib spreader.
And why that color choice for scrubs? We don’t want to see doctors covered in blood. It’s unsettling. Nothing makes blood pop more than light blue scrubs. It’s like at the end of a boxing match, if the fighter is wearing white trunks, it looks like he’s having a heavy flow day. No one wants to see that. From now on scrubs are to be red for the same reason my underpants are black.
Okay, back to Health and Human Services.
I have always wondered about the percentage of young males who died of alcohol poisoning that came into the morgue with a cock drawn on their forehead in Sharpie. Of the couple thousand sixteen-to-thirty-year-old dudes who choked on their own vomit after a night of binge drinking, how many of them had frat-house buddies who covered them in dick drawings thinking they had just passed out? And what’s the protocol in that situation? Isn’t the right thing to do as the coroner to bust out the Windex and clean that shit off? I imagine the poor parents of the twenty-year-old sophomore at CSUN having to come identify the body. “Yes, that’s Trevor. He didn’t have the dick and balls on his forehead last time he Skyped with us, but that’s him.”
Drew does fall into that Doctors without Decorum category. The best example of this is something I’ve been beating him up for years about. On Celebrity Rehab you’ll always see what I like to call “The Van of Shame.” The group will be going out to an animal rescue as part of their rehab and will all pile into the white van with the giant “Pasadena Recovery Center” logo on the side. I thought part of the recovery from being alcoholic was the anonymous part. Why do you need to humiliate the
people in that van by advertising that they are addicts? I’ve told Drew either just keep it blank, or write AIRPORT SHUTTLE or FOGHAT on the side.
Dr. Drew Pinsky will be a great Health and Human Services secretary because we are completely simpatico on the two greatest health and public safety concerns facing the country—unwanted kids and mental health.
Let’s start with the mental health part. I sat next to Drew for ten years on Loveline trying to cure the kiddies. In that time I picked up a lot from him. One thing I gained is a keen awareness of undiagnosed and untreated mental health problems and how it has an exponential effect on our society. The damage spreads faster than herpes in Paris Hilton’s hot tub.
It’s the guys with undiagnosed or untreated schizophrenia, addiction, PTSD, and bipolar disorder that are defecating in the parks, not paying taxes, filling the emergency rooms, and getting shot by cops. But we’re narcissistic; we can’t imagine the world through other people’s eyes. We have much more awareness and empathy for Sarah McLachlan and her abandoned dogs than we do for the guys sleeping under the freeway overpass. We imagine that guy’s life from our viewpoint and treat it like there was a choice. We can’t imagine being a dog, so we say, “It’s not his fault he’s abandoned.” But we look at the homeless guy like “He’s sleeping in a refrigerator box, what an idiot. He should have Just Said No like Nancy Reagan told us to.” We need to realize that viewing the mentally ill through the filter of our mentally healthy minds is not helping them.
Politicians won’t touch this. It’s not glamorous, they can’t hang their hat on it, but mentally ill people are costing us money. There is a tent city in downtown L.A. full of these guys. Let’s start with that before working on the light rail to Sacramento, okay?
On this note, when it comes to my federal budget, I’m going to peel off a little extra for L.A., for all of our extra nut jobs. I think showbiz attracts them, plus our hobos stick around. They’re crazy, but not so crazy that they’ll go somewhere that has a brutal winter. Maine doesn’t have the issues with psychotic homeless guys that L.A. does, so I’m going to earmark a couple extra million for SoCal.
I’m also going to create an awareness campaign. No offense to the good people involved with the breast-cancer charities, but I think we’re all completely aware of breast cancer. I would just like to take one month off breast-cancer awareness and put it on mental health awareness. Instead of the guy in the NFL wearing pink cleats, I’m going to put him in a Napoleon outfit, and when he breaks out into the open field have some guys in white jumpsuits chase him with butterfly nets. It’ll be great watching him trying to hold the hat on as he’s running. And we’d replace the ball with a jar of change meant for UNICEF that was stolen from the counter of a 7-Eleven.
Why not? We have PSAs for a hundred other things that we don’t even need to be aware of. I saw one the other day imploring everyone to “Be Track Smart.” It features a group of teenage girls in a car. Of course there had to be one of every race, as if the car wouldn’t run if it didn’t have a white chick, an Asian chick, a Hispanic chick, and a black chick.
They are all headed to some multiracial cheerleading camp or something and come up on a railroad crossing. The gates go down, the lights and bells are flashing and dinging, and the white girl behind the wheel says, “I bet we can make it. I’ve got this,” then tries to zigzag through the barriers and of course doesn’t. The ad ends with the girls all screaming as they get cleaned out by a speeding freight train.
No kid is ever going to see this, and if they do they’re just going to laugh at it. I bet this actually encourages more stupid teenagers to attempt beating the train across the tracks.
And even if this ad is 100 percent effective, it saves, what, ten lives a year? And costs how much? At least $100,000 just to make it, never mind the distribution costs of getting it out there. In the time you read that last sentence, our lack of awareness and resources for chronic mental illness cost us over a million in public defenders, cops, and prison guards to deal with the unmedicated whack jobs inhabiting our streets who end up in our jails.
The second major health initiative I will enact is to prevent unwanted pregnancies. My feelings on this topic are well known to anyone who has listened to me for ten minutes. I think unwanted kids are the problem that underlies every other problem in this country. But what do we do about it? I have come up with a genius idea. As detailed earlier, I can’t stand the bullshit Click It or Ticket campaign because every car manufactured after 1968 was required to have seat belts and every car since 1975 has had the warning light and chime when the belt isn’t buckled.
We need to apply this technology to the boudoir. From now on any bed manufactured in my United States, or imported into my United States, will be equipped with a giant orange light-up, beeping, buzzing placard in the headboard. It will look like this:
And it will go off every time you attempt to mount your old lady without a condom. Problem solved.
8
THE DEPARTMENT OF
AGRICULTURE
I don’t give a shit about farming. I know Willie Nelson talks about how important it is, but I don’t look at a head of lettuce and think, “How did that get there?” Somewhere along the line we decided all farmers were noble and that the government or big corporations were out to get them. John Mellencamp is constantly singing about the heartland and blood on the plow, meanwhile he’s in New York and the only plowing he’s doing is a model’s vagina. And we all know the only crop Willie Nelson is interested in. (By the way, can we just pass the hat and get that guy a new guitar? It’s the only thing on the planet that looks more beaten and haggard than him. Maybe that’s why he keeps it.) These guys just glommed onto a topic that gave them some dirt road cred and are riding it for all it’s worth. I’m not afraid to stand up and say, “Screw Old McDonald and his fucking farm.”
Plus, I’d make a terrible farmer. I’d just be looking around at all the open space and thinking, “Can’t we just put some condos here and make some money?” And you know my stance on waste. The idea that every fifth sugar beet you pull out of the ground has a fungus on it and you have to throw it out would drive me insane. I get that we need agriculture, but I just don’t have a lot of strong opinions about it, with the exception of the following ten pages.
VEGETABLES AND VEGETARIANS
ZUCCHINI: I’m sick of zucchini. There, I’ve said it. I don’t care what kind of backlash I get on Twitter. This is an important topic and we need to start a dialogue. I don’t need it anymore. And don’t give me that “what about when it’s deep-fried?” shit. You can deep-fry a golf ball and it would be fine. If you cut off my son’s finger, rolled it in bread crumbs, and deep-fried it, I’d eat it. I’d probably need to dip it in ranch dressing first, but still. “Well, what about zucchini bread?” Fuck off. You can put anything in cake batter, toss in a bunch of sugar and chocolate chips, and it’d be good. It’s like wrapping everything in bacon. It’s a culinary apology.
That’s just it. Zucchini can’t stand on its own. That’s how I judge it. Grating it into something that’s already fantastic doesn’t count. Like sometimes you’ll get zucchini pieces in lasagna. That lasagna would be fine without it. Zucchini brings nothing to the party. It has no flavor. Cucumbers mock zucchini in the flavor department. There are plenty of foods—like the lonely beet—that don’t get their due. But zucchini is just using up space. I hereby ban the use of zucchini for the duration of my term. And should I be reelected, I don’t even want to have to discuss this. It is over for you, zucchini.
Here’s how you know it’s worthless. No dietitian has ever said, “You need more zucchini.” No vitamin commercial ever claims, “It has more vitamin B than zucchini.” What the fuck is a zucchini anyway? I think it’s kind of coasting on a cool name. It’s a combination of “Zeus” and “bikini.” It’s just a green skin that holds flavorless moisture. It has all the taste and nutritional value of a water balloon.
TOMATOES: I enjoy tomatoes like
any decent Italian. I like a Roma tomato and I especially like the beefsteak tomato. That sounds awesome. Beef? Sounds good. Steak? Yes, please. Tomato? Definitely.
But the cherry tomato is just a tough skin full of puss. The fact that I’m supposed to eat the entire vegetable is the worst part. This would be like a lobster that’s all shell. It’s like eating a paintball. You bite into it and it explodes in your mouth in a very homoerotic way. Plus the name is misleading. I like cherries and I like tomatoes but this is the worst of both.
I know I called it a vegetable and right now there are several know-it-alls who are saying, “Technically a tomato is a fruit.” Well, it’s a fruit and you’re an asshole. I’m the fucking president and if I say it’s a vegetable it’s a vegetable.
And while I’m on tomatoes, let me say this about tomato soup. Perhaps Campbell’s has ruined it for me, but this just tastes like ketchup that has been sweetened and heated. Tomato soup is the reggae of soups.
Here’s why. People always qualify reggae when I say it’s a shitty genre. “Well, what about when you’re sitting on the beach drinking a Mojito and getting blown by the Doublemint Twins? Reggae is great then.” Of course. But the sound of your mother being sodomized would be enjoyable while you’re relaxing on a beach drinking a rum-based cocktail out of a pineapple.
It’s the same with tomato soup. Later today, with a friend or coworker, bring up how much tomato soup sucks and set a countdown for how long it takes them to get into the location. It always ends up with, “Yeah, but on a rainy day, when you’re home from school and your mom would make you a grilled cheese . . .” That’s how you know tomato soup sucks. They don’t do that with minestrone or beef and barley. It’s never, “What if we were at a raging bachelor party and a topless chick comes out with some beef and barley soup?” The quality of a soup should not depend on the situation.