ME
What terrorists and communists and dictators hate most of all is guys like me. Guys who make a living writing the kind of stuff you are reading right now. Humor, comedy, satire—these are the first things to go out the window in any society ruled by an iron fist or organized religion. Remember the uproar in Muslim countries over political cartoons lampooning the prophet Mohammad a couple of years back? Their first response was, of course, abrupt and absolute violence and when that was ridiculed they decided to publish their own Hitler and Bush Jr. cartoons. Which, of course, weren’t funny.
In America, you have the freedom to say/paint/sing/dance or film whatever you want, and within your chosen medium you can satirize/ denigrate/lampoon/cajole or blister any place, person or thing. Except Jesus.
Oh boy—stay away from Jesus.
I still remember years ago when Rudolph Giuliani was mayor of New York, an up-and-coming painter no one had ever heard of had a showing at a gallery in the city that included a piece in which the Virgin Mother was either urinating on Jesus or vice versa. I can’t remember—which probably shows just how lapsed a Lapsed Catholic I truly am. Giuliani held a press conference and announced that such a piece of so-called art would never be displayed while he was the boss of the Big Apple. Much press coverage and many lawsuits ensued. Giuliani’s approval rating shot through the roof. The Catholic Church went crazy. And considering how crazy the Catholic Church is to begin with—well—nuff said. I love an organization that says you can’t paint an abstract portrait of Jesus or His Mom because that would be sacrilegious but hey—if you happen to see the face of Our Lord The Saviour or His Mom in a grilled cheese sandwich or in a bunch of random wood knots on a bathroom door or even in the wet birdshit-ridden bark of a public golf course maple tree—it’s a miracle!
Call CNN! See if we can get Anderson Cooper down here—even though he’s gay and we believe Jesus hates him!
I met Jesus once at a party in Boston sometime during the summer of 1985. He slipped out of a cloud of smoke in the living room—full beard, long hair, flannel shirt, scabby hands, the whole nine yards (I figured the flannel shirt was his way of fitting in a little). He walked up to me and said “Hey—they orderin’ pizza or what?” I was so stunned, I didn’t have the chance to tell him I think so but lemme ask you about the whole hell-fire and damnation thing and whether The Clash will get back together or not because he kinda snarled at my silence and disappeared back into the crowd. My first reaction was shit—he better not hit on Ann (then my girlfriend and now my wife. By the way—I trust my wife now and I trusted her even then but, c’mon—we’re talking about the Son Of God here. Even though she hates beards—who knows what tricks he has up his Holy Sleeve). Later when the pizza came I saw Jesus grabbing a slice and heard someone call him Doug and realized that in fact he wasn’t the Messiah but a stonemason cousin of the guy throwing the party AND I’d had about seventeen beers and eight shots of Jameson’s. So there ya go. Ya see what ya wanna see.
I was raised under the thumb of organized religion—I did twelve years in a Catholic school. The beauty of it was, the nuns and the priests and the monsignors and the bishops pretty much forbade laughter in the classroom and the hallways and in the church itself and all that led to was us laughing and giggling. When they published the list of banned books and records and movies in the church newsletter every Sunday, guess which books and records and movies we immediately sought out.
So—talk about simple math—because of Giuliani’s public outrage and the front cover stories in the New York Post and the fact that it takes weeks to get the legal system lined up—the painter’s little-known show became a sold-out sensation. Yup—it was good old-fashioned American-style capitalism gone wild. No one talked about whether the art was good or bad or even worthy of an admission price. It was all about the Benjamins and that most basic of human itches—curiosity. Not to mention that the people who were the most outraged by the moral fecundity of the art—a guy who was probably already in the process of cheating on his second wife and a church built on the concrete foundation of hiding and transporting pedophiles—were both standing on very soft and unstable moral ground. But he got the attention every politician craves and they—more than likely—saw a spike in the green cabbage their dedicated Sunday churchgoers drop into the basket each week. It was a win / win situation for the mayor AND the pope. Meanwhile—I got a five-minute routine out of it that I performed onstage and as a guest on David Letterman and Jay Leno. See? What a great system.
Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.
Every single album and DVD and television special and book—most likely including this one—that I have ever put on public sale has been banned or scorned or both by the Catholic Church. And—in the nineties—by Tipper Gore. She made them put an explicit lyrics/language sticker on my CDs and DVDs. Guess what happened? The sales quadrupled. So here’s to hoping that—as you read this—the Catholic Church is warning teenagers and kids everywhere NOT to read Why We Suck. And just in case they are somehow not offended by and/or banning it yet—let me make sure they do. Sorry. This’ll just take a couple of lines here:
JESUS WAS A GIANT HOMO!
TIPPER GORE’S A DYKE!
See? That didn’t take too long. I may have just spiked the sales of this book by several thousand copies. I didn’t take time to overtly offend the Muslims because, well, they actually BLOW YOU UP when they get pissed.
That’s why—for all of its faults and fat pets and celebutards and warmongering figureheads—this country is still the best chance humanity has. There may be a lot of noise and news conferences and finger pointing but—in the end—you pretty much get to do or say whatever the fuck you want. Whether you are an idiot or a true sage—it doesn’t really make a difference.
I’ll take five Anna Nicole Smiths for every Martin Luther King. And if Reverend King wants to sleep around while he’s sacrificing his life in the name of a world-altering civil charge—hey, line up the ladies.
Loud, stupid and overeating will suffice as long as we also have the funny, the fierce and the intellectual.
C-SPAN versus pay-per-view porn.
NPR versus Howard Stern.
Monster Truck Races versus the national Scrabble competition.
I want it all and I want it available 24/7.
Let the terrorists have their seventy-two virgins.
I’ll take an actual, experienced hot forty-seven-year-old mom.
And a pizza.
CHAPTER 2
YOUR KIDS ARE NOT CUTE
Yeah yeah—we know. We all know. Your kids are special. They are talented and gifted and smart and gorcial. They are talented and gifted and smart and gorgeous and endlessly cute and full of unbelievable inner light and extraordinary ability. They walked early talked early have expansive and unique motor skills and they should be kid model/stars. They have the most beautiful eyes and the most plump little red cheeks and the tiniest little toes and they are so endlessly fascinating that you just wish you could eat them all up in one big happy bite.
Yeah well—here’s another headline: they also suck.
A lot.
To anyone outside of the precious inner sanctum that includes you, your spouse, the kid’s grandparents and some of the tiny dimwit’s classmates—your kid sucks so bad he or she is a living breathing vacuum of suckitude.
Everyone else hates him/her.
The dog. The cat. The other kids in the family.
The aunts, the uncles—even the godparents.
I am an uncle and godparent. I know of what I speak.
Yes, the kid may sometimes be cute and maybe even—every other odd time—on occasion—even almost bearable.
But most of the time he/she is a whining sniveling selfish thieving angry violent midget who not only makes a baboon look like a major i
ntellectual but also uses his/her small size to advantage full well knowing no matter what evil he/she decides to create—my mommy and daddy will think it’s cute.
Here are the actual facts: your kid is a gimongous germ factory. A walking talking coughing pants-pissing snot-snotting shit-directly-into-whatever-outfit-I-happen-to-be-sporting sniveling crying where’s my mommy noise machine.
They have no sense of the real rules or how to behave or who not to puke on or what not to throw absentmindedly in any given direction that happens to strike their tiny unmanageable pealike brains.
When they want something they want it now. Right now.
And they have no idea what sharing is. Mine mine mine. Me me me. Mine, me, mine, me—me me me me me. What’s mine is mine and what’s not I will steal. Or break. Or hide.
They will defecate happily into their trousers and then walk around acting as if—literally—their shit don’t stink.
As a matter of fact the only reason they shit in their pants is because THEY HAVE PANTS ON—otherwise they would shit directly onto whatever surface they happened to be standing over—the floor, the couch, the sidewalk—you name it.
The only thing separating children from wild jungle monkeys IS pants. Kids have them. Jungle monkeys don’t.
To children—the world is their immediate and utter personal oyster. They do not know that all cookies are not THEIR cookies. That too many cookies can kill you. That cookies—or the elements involved in making them—cost money. That in order to gain cookie money you must have a marketable skill that results in your getting paid cash at the end of the week—thereby allowing you to not only purchase the cookies and/or the items needed to make them—but, in fact, giving you the power to eat all of the cookies bought/made yourself or decide to disseminate them amongst several other humans and animals who are either:
a. Nice to you
b. Listening to you
c. Painting your house/shoveling the snow around your house
d. Somehow related to you and too small to perform the duties required to get the cookie money but have had the rules explained to them and behaved well within the boundaries of those rules—one of which is finishing all of the normal food on their plate on this particular evening before being allowed to have a cookie.
Children are born without knowledge of cookies and playthings. When they first arrive the only sustenance they know of and seek is the milk they find at their mother’s tits. But once they get a taste of the real fun stuff—BAM! Just like junkies—they become bottomless black holes waiting to take advantage and fill themselves up with sugar and chocolate, surround themselves with every single toy imaginable and make themselves king of the hill they happen to live on.
And why wouldn’t they be selfish black holes?
They have lived inside a soft, warm, pouchy round sac in which they were fed endlessly and floated in a near constant sleep state for nine peacefully pain-free months.
Then someone unplugged the juice and yanked them out of dreamland right smack out into a cold hard world. Sometimes with a hard fast slap on the ass.
Why wouldn’t they think of anyone but themselves?
It’s like the old joke about men: you spend nine months waiting to come out of a vagina and the rest of your life trying to get back in.
So this whole theory about children being born as innocent and sinless vessels waiting to be ruined and overcome by the darkness and anger and hatred of an already evil world is a total crock. Kids are born as pure, untempered one-way evil beings. They get that umbilical cord cut and all holy hell breaks loose. First it’s just the tits—which they almost never manage to relinquish. Then once they get a good look around while sucking on those nipples, they instantly become what they are born to be: round mounds of unending, unblinking and eager chaos who will use their newly discovered cuteness to curry favor and gain more access to people and things they wish to eat, gnaw, lick, damage, hurt and break.
They will walk up to other kids—most times their own blood relatives—and violently attack them. Biting, whacking, kicking and screaming.
They will take sharp toys and jab them into the face of the family dog.
They will grab the dog’s tail and try to yank it off.
They will lie about anything and everything all the fucking time—like Richard Nixon on crack. Odds are if you have kids what you hear all day every single day is some version of this: I didn’t break that I didn’t hide those I didn’t shit my pants I didn’t piss in the corner I would never ever, Mom! he’s hitting me again, Dad! she’s looking at me Ow Ow Ow Ow Ow Ow and so on and so forth and blubbedy blubbedy blah blah blah.
At some point in every day that passes, you will also witness many of these lovely and memorable moments:
Amazing little Ashley—dressed in her diminutive Vera Wang dress, accented by her Kenneth Cole kid patent leather shoes and the Paul Labrecque Salon tiny highlights in her hair—will yank the largest snottiest green snot out of her tiny evil nostril and then calmly deposit the pulsing glob of mucus into her angry mini-mouth. And then consider the taste as if she were consuming a dollop of the world’s finest French wine.
Joyous bundle Joshua—such a tough little tot in his tiny Wrangler blue jeans and his lit-at-the-heels Nike King James kicks will offer up his impossibly angelic, heart-melting Hebrew smile mere moments before whacking the new baby kitten across its whiskered fluffy face with a hefty plastic baseball bat. His only regret? That the baseball bat wasn’t made of wood. Or better yet—aluminum.
Cute and yummy Chase—sporting his Baby Gap khakis and his color-coded Baby Gap oxford blue polo—looking so much like his tall, preppy trust fund-encrusted papa—right down to the barely there slivers of comb-over hair—will suddenly stop socializing and stand in the middle of the living room with a strange, fuzzy focus ambling across his cute-as-a-button face. Then—a mere five or seven seconds later—the stench of crap and an acrid plume of urine will fill the room. Yes. He has in fact laid a giant Baby Gap load—along with enough piss to jam a juice box—into his don’t I look like my dad one-hundred-and-fifty-five-dollar pants.
Elusive and oh such a handful Elizabeth—who refuses to keep her clothes on!—runs naked through the house screaming gay little screams and stopping only to roll around the floor so free and unashamed and full of boundless expressive energy—like a newly minted dance member of a jazzercise class she rambles from room to room until she stops to eat a bite of her dinner—look how she uses her fork—just like a grown-up little girl—and everyone is smiling at what a character she is—until she turns to her baby brother and stabs him in the head.
Stabbing screaming puking farting pissing shitting crying complaining whining moaning kicking angry goddam jellyfish.
That’s right. Jellyfish. It may be the most inhumane trick they can pull out of their awful, incredible bag of tricky little tricks: The Jellyfish Move.
Those dirty filthy spineless mini-criminals.
The Jellyfish Move is a gift given only to the very small.
A true super-power that God imbues them with—apparently as a self-defense mechanism to avoid being captured and killed by angry parents and other adults whose patience has been worn down to the very bare barren marrow of their giant bones.
After the stabbing or the spilling or the screaming or the crying or all four combined into one elongated and loud private or public tantrum they run away on their vicious pudgy legs and once you actually corner them and manage to get your hands on them—finally grabbing ahold of their fat-filled midget arms—they become—literally—spine-free.
They squirm and collapse onto the floor or the sidewalk and suddenly—no matter how hard you try—you cannot lift them up. It’s like trying to hug a bucket full of steam. It’s as if you are trying to gather up two armfuls of slimy squiggling eels. No matter how hard you try—how hale you may hug—how gainful the gather—you cannot get a handle on them. They slither and slather and wiggle waggle out of your grasp and leave you c
ursing first under and then above your breath.
Why We Suck Page 5