by Leon Black
Trust me, pigs and boars may look a little alike, but they are very different. Picture a little pig in a laboratory: he’s got his little lab coat on, test tubes everywhere; that little pig is doing some kind of pig experiments. At some point that pig takes a sip of some blue or green liquid from one of those test tubes, and all of a sudden that pig starts gasping and squealing and shit, and then takes his hooves and knocks over all the test tubes. For a second that pig disappears under the table, and when he pops back up, he’s got tusks, coarse ass whiskers, and he’s wearing a top hat and a cape . . . that motherfucka is a wild boar. A pig is Dr. Jekyll and a wild boar is Mr. Hyde. You may enjoy a nice, tender Jekyll chop, but trust me, you will choke to death on some Mr. Hyde ribs.
My point is dark, heavy meats will cause an old person to choke, and if you’re old and alone, that could be a death sentence. If you do end up old and alone and feel like you have to have some meat, focus on safe meats like Spam, deviled ham, Vienna sausages—pretty much all the potted meats (shit that looks like someone ate it already, then regurgitated it into a small can, like a bird). By the way, I bet a lot of you don’t even know what the fuck a Vienna sausage is. That’s because it’s what sausages do; a sausage comes around and people are all into it but then another sausage comes up behind it and takes its place. It’s just like immigrants—how the Germans came here, then the Polish, then the Italians; each ethnicity had their time. Coincidentally, each one of those is a sausage, and that’s my point. See, no one remembers when the Viennans came to America, but trust me, they came and brought their little ass sausages with them. Now while they were good as hors d’ oeuvres, they overstepped when they tried to grab the pigs in a blanket market and the mini hot dog shut them down. Also, their bigger problems were they were too mushy and too damn small; you try to put them on the grill and they just fall right through the grate.
Take note: Having someone around when you’re old doesn’t guarantee you’re gonna survive a choking. There are skills involved. That person needs to be able to form a fist (arthritis and gout could make that difficult), and they must be able to take that fist and pound the shit out of your back to dislodge that dark ass meat. Fucking Heimlich maneuver is bullshit. The only thing that works is the pound on the back maneuver. But just like how Vaseline beat the shit out of all other petroleum jellies, marketing is the key. The Heimlich maneuver, invented in 1974 by Dr. Henry Heimlich, was able to get its damn informative instructional diagrams in every restaurant there is, while the pound on the back maneuver’s diagram was shunned by most establishments because the sign just looked like one guy was beating the shit out of another guy. Plus, on top of everything there would also be a concern about the possibility of lawsuits. By the way, if you are ever taken to court for breaking some old man’s back while trying to save him, I suggest you try the “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength” defense. Many people don’t know their own strength. Actually, this is a universal defense. Like when you’re helping some random chick you hooked up with at the Frozen Yogurt Hut back into her dress and you break that little damn zipper. Seems specific but it happens a lot, trust me. It’s always much easier to help a lady out of her clothes than to help her back in . . . physically, that is; mentally it’s the other way around. I know this one got a little off track, but basically to sum up, if you’re old, eat soft shit, cut it up into small pieces, have someone chew it for you, preferably a grandchild—they are young and would probably get a kick out of spitting a wad of meat onto your plate. Bottom line is don’t eat shit you can’t swallow, you old fucks. Too much?
SINGLE-SERVING SENIORS
Old muthafuckas get moldy. Just like bread. When I see an old muthafucka buying a big ass loaf of bread, I want to tell him to let me buy that loaf ’cause his old ass isn’t gonna live long enough to eat that whole loaf. But if I said that I would be wrong. Not to be mean, but in general old people should only buy small portions. And don’t buy a pack of razors; open that pack up and take one out. Trust me, the salesperson wouldn’t say a thing. Every time I see an old person at Costco, I wanna be like, “What the fuck are you doing here? You don’t need to buy your shit in bulk. What are you, eighty-five? Don’t waste your goddamn money at Costco.” I want to say shit like that, but I know if I did say it—the truth, mind you—I would be wrong, so I don’t say a word.
Instead, though, I’ll follow an old man like that around just to see what kind of other excessive shit he’s gonna buy. As I do, I’m quietly hoping this old man is not gonna pick up one of those giant cartons of 144 eggs. Fuck around and bring all those damn eggs home and have them there so long those damn things hatch. Think they won’t? When you were in elementary school, did you ever have to help out with one of those incubators that they use to hatch an egg? All you really had to do was shine that hot ass lightbulb on it, and that damn chicken would pop out of that egg. Now, if a lightbulb can hatch one adorable baby chick, then how many baby chicks would an old person’s hot ass house bring into this world?!? There’d be 144 damn adorable chicks running around the house. And you know how old people are with shit. You would be like, “Pop, there are baby chicks running around the house!” And Pop would say something simple, like “What chicks?” And trust me, that exchange will stay the same for a while, ’cause Pop will never see those damn baby chicks. A baby chick’s feet move too fast, and old man Pop’s eyes move too slow.
Of course, two weeks later, after he’s dead and his grandkids are cleaning out his house, going through his fridge and the freezer and what not, they will wonder why the fuck Pop had thirty-six loaves of bread, four hundred rolls of toilet paper, a barrel of mustard, an eight-month supply of Efferdent, and a bunch of nasty ass chickens running around. See, by that time, those adorable ass chicks have turned into nasty ass chickens, and let me tell you something, chickens will fuck up a house in a heartbeat.
JIFFY LUBE FOR SENIORS
Think of life as like a NASCAR race: Every now and then you need to pull your ass in for a pit stop and get your shit checked out. Check your mechanics, check your tires, but most important, check your damn fluids! Do you know how much can be learned about you from your damn pee? You learn the most from your pee!
Peeing is an art that we take for granted. I don’t recommend this, but as I mentioned in the Flu Dick section, I wash my hands before I pee so I can eat a sandwich while I’m peeing . . . but I don’t know where your hands or, for that matter, your Johnson has been so I can’t speak for you. Men don’t have to think when we pee, we pee as we go. Honestly, all you need is a ten- to twenty-second window and you can literally relieve yourself anywhere. I used to pee in cups, but now I pee in Gatorade bottles all the time.
The capacity of my bladder exactly matches that of an eight-ounce Gatorade bottle, but that took years of experimentation to know. Before the Gatorade bottle I tried shit like Big Gulps, a Red Bull can, a baby bottle (don’t ask), and a rain boot. Starbucks cups were helpful—I tried the Tall, the Venti, and the Grande—and one time at a luau I peed in a gutted-out pineapple. Don’t judge me, I’ve been in a lot of desperate pee situations. A weak bladder and no shame will do that to you. Doctors tell you that to strengthen your bladder you should practice stopping your pee flow three or four times while urinating, but that shit is impossible. Once I start peeing I can’t stop, and trust me, that can be a problem, especially when you are in your car trying to pee into a sixteen-ounce Mountain Dew bottle, which by the way is an art in itself! Do you understand how accurate you have to be to get your pee into that little opening—especially while you’re driving?!
Let me tell you something, I’m a goddamn sharpshooter. After all of my experiments were done, I had discovered all I needed to know about my accuracy and my capacity. That’s some important shit. ’Cause the last thing you wanna find out while you’re driving is that your pee capacity is way more than eight or sixteen ounces and you pee all over your car seat upholstery, especially if you try to sell that car one day. I’m telling you, no matter how
much you shampoo that interior, that car will always have a hint of dirty aquarium water smell . . . well, maybe just mine.
KAPUT
I was torn as to what I was gonna call this section. See, this chapter is about funerals, but I figured if you knew that right away, you would skip on ahead to the next chapter. Several titles ran through my head—“Death,” “Funeral”—and I was really leaning toward “My Friend, You Out This Bitch,” but I went with “Kaput” because I knew most of you wouldn’t know what the fuck “Kaput” meant.
Look here, you can’t avoid funerals; sooner or later we’re all gonna have one. Unless of course you’re some kind of mob informant who they tied to a cinder block and tossed into Lake Deep as Fuck. Even then, if you have loved ones, you’ll probably still have a funeral, only your body just won’t be there. There will just be some dumb ass photo of you in the casket. If you ask me, they should put a mannequin in there with your picture taped to the face.
And that’s my point—funerals are too damn sad, and something needs to be done about it. A funeral should have a best man. Unlike the wedding situation, a best man is fine in this situation because you’re already dead, so there is no chance to be upstaged. There is the slight danger that he could flirt with your grieving widow. Which is fucked up, but whatchu gonna do about it?
Have your best man or lady set up the funeral, set up the whole thing, and make it fun. Make it like an Easter egg hunt. Have them paint you in some bright colors and hide your ass somewhere. Offer prizes for the folks who find you. The prizes could be shit that while you were alive they wanted to borrow but you always said no. A little fucked up? Maybe, but again, whatchu gonna do? Anyway, make the hunt a challenge. Give clues and shit. Make it fun! Just don’t make it too hard to find you, ’cause if they don’t—just like one of them eggs—you will start stinking.
These days I only go to the destination funerals, where I can get over my depression with some sunbathing or interesting sight-seeing. Someone die in NJ? Fuck that, but a funeral in Sedona or Napa Valley? Where they’ve got them wine tastings with all them delicious wines like Cabs and Zinfandels and Pinot Grigios? I’m a bit of a connoisseur—I love me some wine! I just don’t like wineglasses—that’s why I drink it straight out of the box.
After I’m gone, though, I don’t want a bunch of people coming up there to say shit about me. I don’t care what anyone else has to say about me, I care what I have to say about me. I want people to quote me and say shit like “If I may draw from The Book of Leon” or “In the immortal words of Leon Black.” See, that shit there sets you apart from just about everyone. It puts you in an exclusive group, muthafuckas like Plato, Socrates. I would never draw from Confucius, though. He just sounds confused. It’s right there in his goddamn name! To be honest, I bet his real name was Stuart.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
There are three things that supposedly good parents tell their kids. One, parents are programmed to tell their kids that they are beautiful. Now that may seem like a good thing, but in all actuality that parent is just setting that damn kid up. Most likely that kid is ugly, statistically speaking, so the only chance that little muthafucka has is that whole “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” shit. The problem with that is the fucked up–looking kid will have to spend his life looking for the beholder while the rest of the world beholds his ugly ass. Now if you have a pretty child I’m not speaking to you, but if you have an ugly child, which you probably do, by telling that little mongrel muthafucka he’s handsome you are sending him down a long, lonely road.
The second thing these irresponsible ass parents do is tell their kids they’re “special.” Now while some shit like that is damaging, it’s not as bad as the first one, because over the years “special” has lost some of its glamour. I mean, you can order the Two for Tuesday—two eggs, two sausages, two bacon, two pancakes, to-go “special.” Hell, I knew a kid in school who was “special,” and that muthafucka used to misspell his damn name constantly . . . and his fucking name was Ed. Now you might think it, but I can’t blame that shit on the teacher—that’s some parenting shit.
All that being said by far the worst thing your parent could ever do to you is tell you that you can do anything as long as you put your mind to it, ’cause that is some bullshit! In life there will always be stuff that is out of reach. You think when I’m sitting on Larry’s couch I’m worrying about shit I can’t do? I’m really thinking about shit I can do. Stuff like: go in his refrigerator and eat the chicken salad that he took the time to label “Larry,” use his dumb electric car and use up all the damn charge, or fuck some bitches in his king-size bed and not change the sheets, or urinate in all his bathrooms—hell, Larry’s got like five different bathrooms. Trust me, there are days that I make sure to consume enough liquids to pee in every one of them. Realize in life there are things that you just can’t do—it’s the circle of life . . . if I may quote one of my favorite ass Disney films The Lion King. To be honest, now that I think about it, I might have used that quote in the wrong context. It probably really has more to do with an impala or a gazelle being eaten by a lion, or like a spider eating a fly or some shit, but no matter what, I think you still get my point. My advice: Don’t think too hard out about your shortcomings, because if you do, you will spend the rest of your life stressed out about the shit you can’t do! Let it go! For example, if you have arachnophobia, you can’t be Spider-Man. How you gonna be scared of yourself and save the fucking world? Another example: You are not gonna be a ballerina if you’ve got fat feet. Note that I did not say fat people couldn’t be ballerinas, I said fat-footed people couldn’t. There are plenty of skinny people with fat feet, just like there are a lot of fat people with skinny feet. In any event, none of those muthafuckas could be ballerinas. And until the Association for Disproportionately Footed People makes a big deal about my stance, I stand by what the fuck I just said, so come and get me. I’ll be right here waiting. And you’re lucky I’ll be waiting, because if I ran, there’s no way in hell you disproportionately footed muthafuckas could ever catch me! Like I said, some things in life are impossible. Shall I continue?
FOUR-LEGGED RACE
You see a guy like me and a guy like Larry riding by on a tandem bike, the first thing you might think to yourself is, What the fuck are those two dudes doing riding one of those bikes together?
But I tell you, the question you should be asking is how do you turn that bitch? Trust me, a tandem bike? That shit ain’t easy to ride. That shit requires teamwork and trust. The two of you need to be joined at the hip like Siamese twins. Scientifically speaking, your body displacement needs to be in sync. To be honest, it’s easier to ride a tandem bike by yourself—the second person just usually throws you off, they are more of a nuisance than anything else. See, that’s why me and Larry make a great team. Despite how we look or sound, we work well together and we could definitely ride the fuck out of one of those bikes, that is, as long as I sit up front. Fuck that, I ain’t gonna let no man ride me around, I ain’t no punk. Plus, I wouldn’t trust Larry to steer—if you’ve ever seen Larry’s glasses, you know he’s blind as fuck.
The world has gotten so divided these days. The messed-up thing is that people use race and religion to group people up, but I’m here to tell you we are all more alike than you know. Really, there are only two types of people: the fuckers who have the time to parasail on a random Tuesday afternoon, and the fuckers who don’t. If you are the kind of person who sometimes searches for some shit to do on a Tuesday and parasailing comes into the equation, you are clearly living a good ass life! You must have some dummy money, a shitload of properties, and a ton of other shit except problems. Then there’s the other group. I don’t have to describe the other group, ’cause you know what the fuck I’m talking about.
See what I did there? I broke the world down into two types of people with no mention of race. Although, to be fair, most times when you see one of those Tuesday parasailors, they’re super white. But t
hat is not to say that you could never see a black person up there! I would just say that if you do, take a quick look at the ground below him, ’cause you just might see the white girl he’s fucking driving the speedboat. No disrespect!
BUFFETARIAN
Every religion has its legitimate parts and its crazy ass parts, but I don’t judge, ’cause the crazy parts help people take in the legitimate parts. I’m a religious buffetarian. I take a little bit of everything from everybody, because at the end of the day, religion is supposed to help people. Leonism is a religion, and a damn good one. But you don’t see me plastering myself on walls of buildings or stained-glass windows. Because I’m humble.
And I believe my disciples should have their own face as their God, ’cause believing in yourself is what makes you powerful. It’s what allows you to bring the ruckus. So you can adopt my tenets and my beliefs and make them your own.
Sure, I’ve gone through phases where I said, “Leon, make yourself some fucking bumper stickers, or make a bunch of cookies with your face on them, sneak into Nabisco or some shit and mix your cookies into a box of that Keebler Elves’ shit so that people around the world can find your image in their Keebler Elf cookie box. All you need is one in each box, but you have to put your shit into a lot of boxes, because most people will just wind up eating your cookie and never seeing your face. Trust me, that kind of publicity works! People see religious images in everything—toast, burnt pancake, Cheetos, tater tots, pizza, Cinnabons, cappuccino . . . not just food, though: clouds, trees, the knots on the back of someone’s head—trust me, if people are looking for religious images, they will find them everywhere. So spread your gospel, and get credit for it.