In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy PDF
Preview In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy
Copyright © 2010 by Lotzi, Inc. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request. eISBN: 978-0-307-71739-9 v3.1 This is dedicated to everyone who paid retail for this book. CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Get It On A Little Bit About the Author Kids These Days Where Have All the Fellas Gone? We’ve Built a Minimum-Wage Gilded Cage Airport 2010 That’s Entertainment? Motherfucking Nature Bathroom Doos and Don’ts Women, Hear Me Roar A Message to the Fat Cats in Washington God, Religious Tolerance, and Other Shit That Doesn’t Exist Foods I Have a Beef With This Chapter Is Not a Hate Crime I Want My Future Back Do Yourself a Favor Time to Call It a Life Conclusion Acknowledgments GET IT ON For far too long I’ve stood idly by and watched a problem in this country get worse and worse. I’m talking about the pussification of America. We’ve become self-entitled, thin-skinned, hyperallergic, gender-neutral, View-viewing little girls. What we used to settle with common sense or a fist we now settle with hand sanitizer and lawyers. Masculinity by any definition is disappearing. My fear is that in fifty years we’ll all be chicks. I’ve written this in hopes of a course correction. If just one person reads this book and demands a salad with a hard-boiled egg and without goat cheese; if just one person reads this book and decides to change his own oil; if just one person reads this book, slips in a supermarket, and doesn’t call an attorney, then I’ve done a horrible job and my family is going to starve. I need to sell a shitload of these things. A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THE AUTHOR I grew up in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley in the seventies. I was a product of separation. I would have been a product of divorce, but divorce involves filling out paperwork and paying a county clerk sixty bucks to file it. And since there were no assets to divide, and no dog to argue over, that just left me and my sister. And the chances of my parents having a custody battle over us are about the same as two vegetarians having a custody battle over a pork chop. The reason it took so long to write this book is that in an earlier part of my life I was a jock and a builder that lived a very blue-collar existence, not the kind that would inspire a book. I was always funny and had interesting ideas, but between the Los Angeles Unified School District and the un-unified Carolla family, I never heard the words “That’s funny, you should write that down.” In class my jokes and wisecracks just earned me the label of “disruptive,” and at home my jokes fell on depressed, distracted ears. My only salvation was football. I finally found something I was good at. I started playing at age seven. Football for me was an island of camaraderie and discipline in a world of depression and chaos. My family was a devastating combination of cheap and poor. When you’re cheap, poor is a great excuse. It’s like if a guy is really lazy and in a wheelchair. He wouldn’t have helped you move even if he was able-bodied. I was splitting time between the dilapidated shack that my mom was squatting in (it was her mother’s second house, which she bought for ten thousand dollars in 1951) and my dad’s one-bedroom apartment in a crappier part of North Hollywood. We were on food stamps and welfare. My mother was severely depressed and unable to keep up the house. Thus it was always a source of embarrassment for me. I slept in a converted service porch that was a little smaller than a prison cell and that housed the water heater, the washing machine (no dryer), and the electric meter. We were the only house in the Valley where the meter reader did his job from inside the house. It was very Green Acres. The house was a hundred years old with one bathroom, no air-conditioning, a lawn that was dead, and a roof that was sliding off. The final insult came in ’71 when the earthquake took the chimney down into the neighbor’s yard and never was replaced. The house didn’t even have a garage to hide my mom’s pile-of-shit car. To compound my embarrassment, I couldn’t read or write. As a child of the seventies, I spent first through fourth grade attending an “alternative” school. It offered a practical alternative to learning. It was pretty much one long ceramics class with a little acoustic guitar and some face painting mixed in. By the time I entered the L.A. Unified School system, even though I was entering the fifth grade, my reading level was at zygote. This was a great source of shame for me. It was a secret I kept like a survivor of incest. Except I was raped by a potter’s wheel. Happily, my dirty little secret dovetailed nicely with L.A. Unified’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. My only salvation was sports and a sense of humor. By my senior year at North Hollywood High, I’d managed to make the All Valley football team and was offered a number of scholarships to midsize colleges. Why didn’t I just take the SATs, fill out the paperwork, and take the free ride to a good university? As I mentioned above, reading and writing was not my strong suit and to be fair to my parents, I’m not sure if they knew about the scholarship offers. Cal Poly Pomona no longer has a football program. The next five years were a montage of carpet cleaning, crappy apartments, and ditch digging. One night, sometime in my early twenties, I decided to honestly assess myself. I came to the conclusion that I was good with my hands and had a good sense of humor. Since I was working with my hands at the time and miserable, I decided to pursue the latter. I decided I’d give myself until my thirtieth birthday to make something happen. The first time I tried stand-up comedy was at an open-mic night at the Comedy Store. I won’t tell you how it went, I’ll just tell you the story of what happened a couple hours after my first time onstage. After the show, I went back
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