by Adam Carolla
There’s nothing that makes you look stupider than walking into a spiderweb. When you step out of the house and get one in the face, your neighbors think you’re having a seizure because they don’t see what you hit. They just see a crazed maniac throwing punches in the air. And it comes out of the spider’s ass. If it came out of a seagull, you’d have to take a shower.
DUNG BEETLES This is a bad draw in the animal kingdom. This is your whole life—you roll around a pile of shit until a hawk eats you, which is a sweet relief. The dung beetle would be one of those insects other insects couldn’t complain in front of. Like when you tell a guy how miserable you were at Boy Scout camp and he tells you he did three tours in Nam. A pill bug couldn’t be like, “Oh, man. I have to live under a rock,” or a moth couldn’t go, “Goddamn. Every time someone turns on a porch light, I have to go flying at it,” because a dung beetle would be like, “Cry me a river. I have to roll around a ball of elephant shit that’s three times my height.” Could you imagine how low the self-esteem of a dung beetle must be? If I get a zit I won’t even leave the house. This is worse than Sisyphus: At least he was pushing granite, and not rhino flop.
ALLIGATORS Every time I turn on the TV there’s some jack-off in khaki shorts diving off a boat onto an alligator or wrestling one at an amusement park in Florida. This has to be really confusing for the alligators. Five million years of people being scared shitless of you, but in the last five years every asshole with a fan boat and a roll of duct tape is jumping on your back. I’d love to be a fly on the wall at the next alligator convention: “What the fuck? I used to just slide up on the shore, yawn, and scare the bejesus out of any native within a hundred miles. Now every yahoo with a video camera and a Red Bull wants to throw down. What the hell? Does anyone know what the fuck’s going on? Why aren’t these goddamn people scared of us anymore? One of your guys in Florida is gonna have to eat a toddler. Get these assholes back in line.” I bet when Steve Irwin died, they were pissed that a stingray got him. “It should have been one of us, man.”
FISH I love the hypocrisy of the people who for “moral reasons” won’t eat beef or poultry, but when you press them on it admit they eat fish. To me a swordfish is much more majestic than a chicken or a cow. And the way you catch and kill them is usually less humane than what a cow gets. A cow will get a bolt to the head, quick and easy. A swordfish gets a hook through its mouth, is dragged out of the water, and essentially drowns on the deck of the boat while guys with beards hit it with those weird small boat bats. If it’s lucky, it gets its head cut off first. Either way, it was alive and now it’s dead, and someone served it up to you with a side of mashed potatoes. So what’s the difference? Get a fucking steak, you pussy.
Recently I was thinking about fishing and I realized why I don’t like it. It’s because you use little fish for bait. Fish are essentially cannibals. They eat smaller versions of themselves. This would be like me saying, “I’m hungry. Somebody get me a midget.”
DOLPHINS It’s too bad dolphins can’t get laid by humans. There isn’t a hot chick alive who doesn’t love dolphins. Dolphins are the only thing that lives in the sea that women would actually have sex with. If there are any single guys reading this and you’re trying to get laid when you’re on the first date and the chick asks you, “What do you do for a living?” say, “I work with special-needs dolphins.” They are the only creatures that live in the ocean that make us brag, “They’re smarter than us, you know. If you’re ever out and there are sharks around, they’ll ward them off. They’re family oriented and highly intelligent.” They’re very curious and we love that. It’s funny because when dolphins or otters or something that’s cute are curious, it’s adorable. When it’s rats, roaches, or fat chicks, we want to put them down.
WHALES Every year or so, a whale gets lost and ends up in a river or a bay and the news covers it 24-7. Why is it that whales used to be lantern oil, but now if one goes astray the whole world shuts down? And when a whale tries to beach itself we all go apeshit? Big whoop. It’s decided for some reason it does not want to continue to live. Can’t we respect that? Imagine if one day you decided you were just too tired to go on living but a bunch of guys in bandannas and Birkenstocks dragged you out of your house and forced you to get a job and start dating? Why can’t we just let whales kill themselves? Why do we have to have whale interventions? “You have too much to live for. There is so much krill left to eat. Think about your pod.”
BEAVERS I think it’s cool that beavers live in lodges. Gophers live in holes, beavers live in lodges. It sounds as if they’re in there smoking pipes, watching sports, and bitching about their beaver wives.
DOGS I have a sad relationship with dogs. I wanted one my entire life. All I wanted was a German shepherd. But my cheap parents didn’t even want to feed me, never mind a dog. And maybe they were too liberal: German shepherds are the most racist dogs. Watch one episode of Cops with the K-9 unit and you’ll know what I’m talking about. My parents were divorced and my dad was living in an apartment. I bugged him and bugged him and bugged him. He said one day when we moved to a house, he would get me a German shepherd. My father never made promises he didn’t keep. Not because he was a man of honor, but because he never made a promise. We moved into a house in North Hollywood that cost my father fifteen thousand dollars. Now to be fair, those were 1975 dollars, but still, the average house was going for between sixty-five and eighty-five thousand. So you can only imagine what that piece of shit looked like. I woke up every morning and ran downstairs. Actually it was only one story. But I’d go into the living room with the indoor-outdoor carpet praying to see a German shepherd puppy with a bow on it. The dog never showed up. Eventually my dad remarried and moved into a house with one and a half bathrooms and I let go of the dream of ever getting a German shepherd puppy.
Twenty years later when I was living in my first house in the shadow of the Hollywood sign, working on Loveline and The Man Show and making a good living, I thought, “What ever happened to that German shepherd puppy I wanted so many years ago?” I decided to go out and rescue one by giving six hundred dollars to a bull dyke in Arleta who ran a puppy mill. I named her Lotzi after my beloved Hungarian step grandfather who died a few months earlier. And a love affair began. She was beautiful and rambunctious and had one ear that wouldn’t stay up. When she turned six months old, I dropped her off at the vet to be spayed, was due to pick her up that afternoon, and got a call from the vet saying that she was dead. Some sort of liver problem. I never got to the bottom of it. I was now in my early thirties. I’d had one dog in my life for a total of two months. It’s a sad tale, but I tell it in case there are any kids reading this book. The message is: never follow a dream.
Lotzi
After Lotzi died I swore I’d never love again. Unfortunately for my wife, I expanded that proclamation outside of the canine realm. Almost ten years later, after moving into another house, a package showed up at the door. It was a car cover I’d ordered online. But just behind it was a blond Lab named Molly. She was shipped out from Chicago: A combination of neglect from my wife’s nieces and nephews and their mom getting new furniture meant a one-way ticket to Hollywood for Molly girl. We immediately bonded and a love affair soon began. Sweet, energetic, and loves to play. My wife, whose biological clock was ticking so loudly that it was more of a tell-tale heart than a clock, poured all her maternal energy into Molly as well.
Molly
One summer about five years ago after a particularly rousing episode of Oprah, she walked into the den and announced, “We’ve got to get Molly rattlesnake training.” I said, “For what?” She said, “We’re in rattlesnake country and it’s summertime.” I pointed out, “We’re also in earthquake country and this is earthquake weather. Should we also be training her to work one of those wind-up flashlight-radios?” She replied, “There are rattlesnakes all over these hills. If one bite’s good enough to take down a horse, that’s plenty good to take down Molly girl.” I said I would b
e goddamned if I was going to pay some guy in desert boots with his ponytail pulled through the back of his cap to come over here and shake a rubber snake in front of my dog. She came back one more time with a “What about Molly girl?” and I gave her the speech she’s probably memorized like the Pledge of Allegiance by now: “Just because we live in Hollywood doesn’t mean we’re going Hollywood. All that nonsense is for paranoid Whitey who’s got too much money and too much time on his hands. We don’t need to buy into Oprah’s scare-of-the-month club.” I put my foot down, into a pile of Molly’s shit, and that was it.
Two days later we were sitting in the den watching Entertainment Tonight when Molly came into the room and plopped down in front of the TV set. She seemed lethargic. Even though it was dark and the room was only illuminated by the television set, my wife noticed some swelling on the left side of Molly’s snout. (You probably know where this is going.) Then she noticed two bloody red dots about an inch apart on her nose. It didn’t take that guy who was eaten by grizzly bears to know those were puncture wounds. She’d been struck by a rattlesnake. Lynette immediately sprang into action by screaming at me. Then she jumped up to grab Molly girl, obscuring my view of a shirtless Matthew McConaughey sea kayaking. She yelled, “I told you! This is your fault!” and threw Molly into the car and sped off into the night. Four thousand dollars and zero blow jobs later, Molly was saved. Once again she cheated death. She’s known around the neighborhood as the Osama bin Laden of blond Labs. The vet explained that if it had happened during the morning or afternoon when we weren’t home, Molly would have just curled up in a ball and died. This didn’t help my case. And between the antivenom serum and the multiple trips to the vet for follow-up, the guy with the magnetic sign on the Vanagon that said SNAKE WHISPERER would have been a real money saver.
I love Molly, but I do have a complaint. She sleeps everywhere except in the two-hundred-dollar bed we bought for her. I would love this ability—I’m envious. It usually takes a good fifteen beers before I could fall asleep on a bathroom floor. She’ll sleep on the cold tile floor right next to her super-expensive suede bed lined with angora and stuffed with camel hair, I assume to mock me. I’ll say, “Why don’t you sleep in your bed, Molly?” And she’ll look up like, “Nah, I’m good here on your sweatpants.” I end up getting angry: “Get in the fucking bed, we paid for it and it’s too small for the kids. Listen, you goddamn dog, you’re going to be comfortable if I have to use my boot to mash you into that bed.” If Molly had balls she’d just rest them on the edge of the bed to fuck with me. Why not sleep on the comfortable thing that’s built for you? I’ve never gone to a hotel, seen the bed, and thought, “Hey, look at that. Goose-down comforter, California King mattress, soft pillows. Wow … Okay, I’m gonna go sack out next to the toilet.”
I like a big dog. But then there are the people that are into Great Danes. Is a golden retriever not big enough for you? Who needs a dog the size of a donkey? I’m not going to hook it up to a plow. I need companionship, not something to pull my car out of a ditch. I don’t want a dog that’s so big that if it decides to have sex with me, there’s nothing I can do about it. And if a week of the dog’s fecal matter weighs more than you, you shouldn’t be allowed to own it.
CATS While we’re on a fecal tangent, let’s not forget about cats. People, especially guys, don’t like cats. But let’s give credit where credit is due: Cats bury their own crap. A cat, with quiet dignity, lets himself out of the home, goes in the yard, drops a deuce, and then covers his tracks. If I were a publicist for cats, that’s all I’d be screaming about. Humans are so horribly insecure. If the pet doesn’t run up to us when we get home and literally start kissing our ass, like a dog, even if it just wants to get food from us, we can’t handle it. We’re like, “I don’t like her. Why isn’t she worshipping me?” Pets aren’t here to make you feel better about yourself and your shitty life. That’s what drugs are for. But cats bury their dook. Does anything say “I love you” better than that? Let’s give them their props.
SQUIRRELS I’ve seen two hundred million squirrels in my life but I’ve never seen one take a shit. I walk my dog and she shits every nine feet. (I’ll share my thoughts on bird shit shortly.) But I don’t even know what squirrel shit looks like. There are as many squirrels running around the trees on my property as birds. Shouldn’t I come out to my car in the morning and say, “Fuck, I just had it detailed and now it’s covered in squirrel shit”?
BIRDS Okay, one last shit-related thought. I hate birds because they hate us. It’s clear they hate us because there is more crap on cars than there is on the ground. To me this is evidence that they’re aiming. They’re acting with malicious intent. There’s constantly bird shit all over my car. And if you own a restaurant by the ocean, you might as well just paint your roof white. They should just call those restaurants Bird Shit by the Sea. I love when the plastic owl they put on the roof to scare off seagulls is covered in bird shit. The seagull is saying, “Hey tough guy. I’m on to your ruse. Hold on, I ate Mexican last night.”
Let’s be honest—if you could fly, you’d shit on things too. You’d be like, “Hey, there’s the mayor’s motorcade,” or, “My ex-girlfriend is walking in the park with her new man. It’s about time for an aerial deuce dropping.” Imagine the damage you could do. If birds were as big as medium-sized dogs, we’d all be dead.
Let’s talk about Pegasus for a moment. I know mythical flying horses don’t really exist, but it is an animal, after all. Have you ever seen a pile of horse shit? Imagine that coming down on you from two thousand feet. I have this fantasy of getting a Pegasus and flying it over the cars and homes of my enemies. I’d spend a week feeding it lunch-truck breakfast burritos and Dodger Dogs. Then I’d steer it toward my neighbor’s house, the one who called the cops about the noise from my place at nine on New Year’s Eve, and drop a bunker buster. When he came over the next day to complain, “Hey man, your Pegasus shit a hole in my roof,” I’d be like, “Wasn’t my Pegasus.”
PANDAS Pandas hate us. All we want them to do is mate, and they won’t. They are the only species on the planet that refuses to screw. Every other species loves fucking so much it has become a problem. We have to spay and neuter dogs, thin the deer population, and beef up the border, all because we can’t stop the screwing. (I didn’t say which border, so that makes you the racist for thinking Mexico.) All but the pandas. We actually have to show them panda porn to try to get them to mate. This is more than just erratic mating habits; they’re openly mocking us. I witnessed it firsthand.
I went with some zoologists to a panda-bear habitat and had the rare privilege to observe two pandas mating. The male panda mounted the female panda from behind, and after about ten minutes he looked up, made a grimacing face, pulled out, and came on her back. Later in the day I witnessed the same panda being blown while he wiped his ass with the American flag.
We should breed them with dogs. Dogs never stop fucking. We need to invent a pan-dog.
I also don’t like that we can only lease them from China. They won’t give them to us, they’ll only let us borrow them. Why are they so stingy with their bears? Not only do they eventually want them back, they come with a list of sanctioned names, and Todd’s not on the list. We have to give them names like Ling-Ling and Ching-Ching. Fuck China. If we gave them a buffalo and they named it Pan-Pan, we wouldn’t give a shit. We get their panda and we have to name it Mitsook or some other stupid Chinese name. Let’s give China a bald eagle and force them to name it Gary.
LLAMAS My only problem with llamas is I don’t know if we can ride them or not.
BULLS I envy bulls. Not because of their power or strength, but their psyche. Let’s face it, we’re all miserable because we got dumped by our prom date, or our Little League coach benched us, or our folks didn’t pay enough attention to us when we were growing up. We just can’t get over our shitty past. Bulls don’t cling to their past. They are locked up in that stall and there’s a guy on top of them tugging a r
ope that’s wrapped around their balls. They’re thinking to themselves, “When that guy opens the gate, I am going to buck this asshole off of me, and once that hundred-and-forty-pound shit kicker hits the ground, he’s gonna feel two thousand pounds of bull horn going right through his sternum.” Then the bell sounds and the gate opens, and for eight seconds all the bull can think about is, “I am going to kill this motherfucker for humiliating me. Once I get this guy on the ground, he’s dead.” And then he bucks him off, sees him lying on the ground helpless in front of him, and thinks, “Now I am going to kill you for what you’ve put me through.” He lowers his head and prepares to finish him off, but at the last second a guy wearing Wrangler shants, rainbow suspenders, and clown makeup jumps in front of him and the bull thinks, “Huh. Maybe I should kill this guy instead.” In a split second all is forgiven, and the bull’s entire focus is on killing a guy whose only crime was stealing Robin Williams’s suspenders. While we’re all punishing ourselves for our past, the self-actualized bull looks toward the future.
A quick tangent on rodeo clowns. Is there a more dangerous job that doesn’t translate into an ounce of poontang? Chicks love firemen and there’s danger involved, but not every day. With rodeo clowning, every day your job is to dress up like you’re in a Telemundo skit and jump in front of a pissed-off one-ton murder machine. But at the end of the night you go home, alone, to a trailer and remove the makeup with your own tears.
BATHROOM