Текст книги "Daddy, Stop Talking! And Other Things My Kids Want but Won't Be Getting"

Автор книги: Adam Carolla

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

There’s no science to where the stuff ends up, either. Once in a blue moon, when you take a piss it goes forked and hits the seat, but it’s not like when you take a shit it circles around and hits you in the back of your head. Male ejaculate is just too unpredictable. And it makes double-teaming a chick with a buddy really dangerous. If you get your load on the other guy, your friendship ain’t coming back from that. In fact, it will probably lead to a Hatfield and McCoy – style generational dispute. You know what the Bible says: “An eye for an eye, a spooge for a spooge.”

Before this gets any creepier than it already is, and before your mother rips her eyes out from the images I’m putting in her head, I’ll wrap up with, as promised, my sacred rules for the Art of Spunk Shui.

One of my great accomplishments in life is having this defined by the Urban Dictionary:

Spunk Shui: Coined by Adam Carolla: The philosophy of setting up a room or area of the house for masturbation with the intent of not getting inadvertently caught by friends or loved ones.

I realized this spiritual calling one day when I was at Bill Simmons’s house and he was explaining how he was going to set up his guest house/office. He said, “Ace, I’m going to put a wall of TV monitors here and I’ll put my computer there.” Bill had ignored the first sacred rule of Spunk Shui: never turn your back to the door. I said, “Bill, you’re going to tell your wife you’ve got a column to put to bed but you’re really going to be burning the midnight Jergen’s because you came down with a bad case of writer’s cock. Then the wife will decide to show her support and bring you a cup of tea. The way you have this room currently configured she’s looking at your back and the monitors’ front, which has the back of some chick in her barely legal debut.”

There is both an art and a science to not getting caught beating off. This has happened to me and I don’t want it to happen to you, my boy.

When I was eighteen and living in my dad’s garage in North Hollywood, I was having a spirited session. Of course, I didn’t have any materials at the time. There was no VCR in that garage. There wasn’t even a wall. The wall was simply the closed garage door and a little Henry’s Roofing Sealer along the bottom. So, as Willy Wonka said, I was entering a world of pure imagination. I was Willy Wank-a. In a masterpiece of bad timing, my buddy John decided at that moment to pop in for a visit. And I mean literally pop in. He was an energetic guy and decided he was going to kick open the side door and do a John Belushi “Ha!” entrance. He didn’t know at the time what I was doing with my dong; he was just trying to startle me. Well, boy did I have a surprise for him. He, unintentionally, timed it perfectly. I was right at the moment of completion, past the point of no return. His “Ha!” went straight into “Ahhh!” I’m sure it haunts him to this very day. And it definitely traumatized me. I didn’t beat off again for a good four hours.

Here are the remaining Seven Sacred Rules of Spunk Shui (as read by Morgan Freeman):

Sacred Rule #2: Location, location, location. It’s always wise to place your spankatorium at the end of a long hallway, preferably with a raised foundation and wood flooring. Carpets on slabs can turn a three-hundred-pound mother-in-law in heels into a ninja.

Sacred Rule #3: Lose the lube. This stuff seems like a great idea when you’re living at home and your stepmom has a tub of it the size of a ketchup dispenser at Fenway. But wait until you’re out on your own and your roommate has cleaned out the last drop of Udder Balm. Any man who experienced the heart and cock-ache of the any-port-in-a-storm, “Fuck it, I’ll use Prell” jack knows all too well the slippery slope that is the slippery cock. It’s like the alcoholic who can’t afford booze and is drinking Sterno. Sonny, I don’t want you to “chase the lube dragon.” Once you get on that you’ll have to go to a rehab or prison to get off of it. It will be calling you like heroin calls a junkie. If I’m already too late, quit now! Just white knuckle it. Pun intended.

Sacred Rule #4: Don’t get married to the sound. Either you will have the volume up so loud you won’t hear the front door opening or worse, when the old lady’s asleep you’ll resort to plugging headphones into your computer and you’ll end up like Sara Connor’s roommate from the first Terminator. Whether it’s the Blu-ray edition of Taboo II or staring at some high-def vids on a 24-inch Mac monitor, if you can’t jack in silence it’s time to turn in your gui.

Sacred Rule #5: Don’t get married to the position. You never know when, or where, your next spank-ortunity will be. Even if you’ve followed all the other rules of Spunk Shui there are going to be times when you’re traveling. It’s like teams that play well in domes but suck in cold weather stadiums. You need to be flexible. Literally. And God forbid you have a near death experience. You need to be able to snap one off at thirty-thousand feet in a plane doing a nose-dive or while being chased by a Kodiak bear. You don’t want the last thought on your deathbed to be “I wish I had jerked off more.” That’s bad karma.

Sacred Rule #6: Be into what your wife or girlfriend looks like. This one is more for when you do get caught if you don’t adhere to the principles above. Assuming you will eventually get caught, it’s best to be watching a chick who looks enough like your wife or girlfriend that she won’t be completely offended, but enough like someone new that you can still get wood. I have a friend who’s into the MILF thing so it’s cool with his forty-year-old wife that he’s looking at forty-five-year-old women. But she wouldn’t be as cool if he were into busty Latinas in their twenties. So find a site with the same types as your lady, or as I call them, fuck-similes.

Sacred Rule #7: Settle. One way to get caught is to spend too long looking for the perfect thing. You can waste hours upon hours looking at Internet porn. It’s like walking down an endless aisle in a virtual porn store the size of Antarctica. But the truth is, you can find something to facilitate the sacred act in a few minutes if you keep your mind as open as your pants.

I have two inventions to nip this in the bud. The first is an app to connect your laptop, that is, your mobile porn device, to a treadmill or elliptical machine. You’ll have to run for the amount of time you want to watch porn. Not while you’re actually watching porn. That could lead to a lot of slip-and-fall lawsuits. I mean you have to earn that beat-off time with some exercise. Imagine how fit we’d all be. Well, all men. Though if you’re anything like me this would just mean a trip to the Home Depot parking lot to hire some day laborers to hit the treadmill and raise the total time.

My other idea is a little more practical. It’s simply a software fix. Single guys should have a lock-out timer for the porn-jack session. You set the time you think you need to complete the task. It then locks you out for four times that period if you go past your limit. If you give yourself thirty minutes and go thirty-one minutes you’ll be locked out for two hours. Imagine how productive our society would be with this app. We’d be off foreign oil, there’d be no cancer and we’d all probably be living on Mars. I’ve even got a tag line for the ads, “Your cock is on the clock.”

I hope that answers all your questions about puberty, Sonny. With the wuss that your grandfather was it’s important to me that I teach you about all aspects of becoming a man. It’s a confusing and scary process that you’re not entirely in control of. Just do your best, and know that you’ll be laughing at yourself and how awkward it was for you later in life.

And sorry if it was a little too focused on masturbating, but it’s clearly a topic I’m passionate about and upon which I have a lot of wisdom to impart. You’re my boy, my heir, and you have some big shoes to fill. I don’t want to say I’ve taken masturbating to the next level but before I started doing it they called it amateur-bating.

CHAPTER 10
iPads and iPods Are Fucking Up How iParent

I CANNOT BEGIN to express the envy that I feel when I see what the entertainment world has to offer my kids in contrast to what I had. Whether it’s television, movies, toys or even commercials, what my kids get to enjoy far exceeds the entertainment I got when I was a lad. It’s not that we didn’t have a television, it’s just that growing up my television was deeper than it was wide. It was a thirteen-inch black-and-white Zenith and got three channels. Let me be more specific. It got all three channels. That’s all we had.

Now my kids have a 70-inch plasma television with so many channels they could watch one a day and not run out for three years. And that’s not to mention the Netflix, Hulu, Amazon streaming possibilities.

My kids watch a television that is bigger than they are. If you lay my kids diagonally across the screen, their toes and scalp wouldn’t make it to the corners. And if you took the television off the wall and set it on the floor it’s bigger than the service porch I called a room growing up.

Yet this ginormous television goes, like all things in their life, wildly unappreciated. They, like all kids now, are completely obsessed with their mobile devices.

I woke up one summer morning last year (I know it was summer because the kids were out of school) and walked by Natalia on the way to make some coffee. She was perched on the sectional sofa in front of Jerry Jones’s Jumbotron with whatever iCarly or Dog with a Blog bullshit Disney Channel was pushing out at the time. But as I passed, I had to do a double take and a double back, because I noticed that she wasn’t watching the gigantic show in front of her. She had her nose buried in her iPhone. There was a wall-sized show ten feet from her but she was watching the wallet-sized screen ten inches from her face.

Somehow the kids of today got so spoiled on big that the pendulum swung in the opposite direction and now small is cool. (If only this were true for penises.) I had a tiny television when I was growing up because that was the technology at the time but believe me I would have gladly stepped up to the nineteen inches and basked in the glory of a Barney Miller episode. It would have blown my mind to see eight inches of Abe Vigoda.

I think this change is a bad sign for the future. How’s it going to pan out? When Natalia’s thirteen will she be at an IMAX theater with one eye closed to look at the postage stamp – sized contact lens implant television called iLid?

I’m not joking when I say that Natalia and Sonny are totally obsessed with their mobile devices. One afternoon, we were leaving for some event and I walked into Natalia’s room and saw her bedroom window was open. So I told her to shut her screen. She said, “I did.” I replied, “I’m looking right at it, and it’s wide open. I don’t want flies to get in.” She then held up her iPad and angrily said, “I did. Look, I shut the screen.”

We almost had a very 2014 version of “Who’s on First?” going on. No wonder old people are confused by technology. We don’t give anything new names. Think about it: window, screen, tweet, bookmark, cookie and spam are all words that used to mean something else. Hell, tablet is simultaneously the oldest and newest means of communication on the planet. We have the same word for the thing Moses carved the Ten Commandments into and what my daughter is Instagramming and selfie-ing from.

If it’s not on a tablet and in 3-D and costs at least three hundred fifty dollars, my kids don’t give a shit. As I write this, I’m looking out my window at an air hockey table that is being used as a regular table to set junk on because my kids used it once on December 26 and then never again because they’re so sucked into the virtual world. Think about the toys and games we old farts had and what our kids would think of them.

Ant Farms: Do you remember ant farms? Ask your parents or grandparents if you don’t. (Actually, just Google it. Why have a conversation with those old fucks?) The ant farm was two pieces of plastic half an inch apart with a bunch of dirt in the middle and you’d just stare at it and watch ants dig tunnels. This was the height of entertainment for us. (My generation, not the actual Carollas. That was too costly an item for us. I had to go to my kitchen to look at ants.)

First off, what did you expect the ants to do? They’re digging a tunnel. That’s what ants do. Big fucking deal. Whose idea was this? Finally, a reason to bring ants into the house. Don’t we spend most of our time trying to keep them out? If you want to see ants, just leave food out on the counter.

But the point is this. If I gave Sonny an ant farm, he’d drug me, put me on my back, take a Lincoln Log, put it in my ass and use the ant farm to hammer it in like he was driving the golden spike.

Venus Fly Trap: We never had one of these at our house, but there was one at the counter of the gardening store up the street. We’d go there just to put our finger in it and watch it slowly close. Could you imagine a kid nowadays being entertained, nay, amazed by this like I was as a youth? No fucking chance.

Shadow Puppets: Yes, back in the day we used to think shadow puppets were entertaining. Someone would hang a sheet, take the shade off the lamp and make something that looked approximately like an ostrich head. That’s what we had to fill our sad days. If I attempted to entertain my kids by folding my hands to make a shadow puppet of a bird, they’d flip me the bird.

Fake Rocket or Horse in Front of the Supermarket: When I was a kid, this is what made the trip to the grocery store worthwhile. Not that there were a lot of Carolla family trips to the supermarket. My mom would hit the Full o’ Life health food store for some sprouted wheat bread and jicama, while the rest of you readers over thirty-five were riding the fake horsie in front of the Ralph’s or Stop & Shop. That thing cost a quarter, and would sort-of vibrate or slowly rock for a minute, yet it was the height of entertainment. If it was the rocket version you held on to a metal disk of a steering wheel that either didn’t turn at all or spun in perpetuity.

Every now and again you see these around, but you never see kids on them. They’re like the appendix. They used to serve a purpose, but now they’re just taking up space. Kids today wouldn’t put up with that shit. And more importantly, they’d have no idea how to operate them. I don’t think my son or daughter have any idea what a quarter looks like. They’d be trying to swipe Mommy’s debit card in the horse’s ass.

Vibrating Electric Football Game: This is yet another game I wanted, but never had. This one broke two cardinal rules of the Carolla household – it plugged in and it brought joy. Anything that used electricity, either in the form of household current or batteries, was a no go. More importantly, this went on a tabletop. Anything that required space could never enter our abode. There was no place in my house to set up a game. My room was literally a converted service porch with a water meter still in it, so it wasn’t like I could even have friends over and set up a game of Clue on the floor.

This game was basically a vibrator that got flattened. You’d put little plastic football players on and they’d spin in a circle. But it was the opposite of football. Random vibrations would make the guys go in various directions bumping into each other. There was no strategy. If they were playing electric football, Kate Upton would win three out of five against Bill Belichick. The little foam football would invariably get lost and one guy would always fall over and just spin in a circle on the ground like Curly from The Three Stooges. Sonny would never have any interest in playing electric football, or as I now call it, Madden 1973.

Rock Tumblers: I also wanted a rock tumbler when I was a kid, but we couldn’t afford it. So I was told, and this is completely true, to put rocks in a jar, add some water and shake it incessantly. For days, I just held a Mason jar full of rocks and shook it. At some point, the bottom of the glass jar broke free and fell out in a perfect circle without shattering. The rocks still looked exactly the same, but I was able to remove the bottom of that jar like the world’s worst jewel thief. That was the end of my rock-tumbling days. Except later, when I used Rock Tumbler as my gay porn name. That’s how pathetic I was and how spoiled my kids are. I had to make a DIY version of something they would never take out of the box.

The Viewmaster: Another pathetic toy memory from my childhood. This was the world’s worst pair of binoculars. You’d hold them up to your eyes and look at shit you didn’t care about. “Here’s what the Grand Canyon looks like from the south side.” Amazing. If they had photos of Lynda Carter with her top off I’d have been all eyes, but instead you got to see the construction of EPCOT Center. It was a portable version of school slide projector. And as entertaining.

Slinky: This toy is like an accordion that doesn’t produce sound and is made of scrap metal. Literally. It’s a by-product. It was originally a spring made by a naval engineer to stabilize equipment on ships, but somewhere along the way a genius marketing guy decided it would make for a fun, cheap toy. This is one we could actually afford in my family. And it didn’t require batteries or parental involvement. Yet it was still a rip-off. The commercials show it going down stairs, right? Never in the now-seventy-year history of this lame toy has this happened. Definitely not when a young Adam Carolla tried it. Like all things in my home, including my parents, it just sat there.

I think the thing only got popular because of their jingle, though it certainly wouldn’t fly today. There’d be a lawsuit by GLAAD. “It’s good for a girl or a boy” would become “It is fun for a girl or a boy, or a transgender, or a pansexual or an asexual, gender-neutral human.”

The Guinness Book of World Records: I loved this book when I was a kid. I could have never imagined ending up included in the book as the record holder for Most Downloaded Podcast. Portable music players didn’t exist until I was a teen and even then a Walkman was way outside of the Carolla budget. We were so pathetic and our self-esteem was so bad my parents had the little known 7-Track player. But anyway, looking back I can’t believe that this book was actually entertainment to me and my generation. You’d just stare at a picture the size of a postage stamp and think, “Wow, that crab has really long legs.” There weren’t even that many pictures. But we all remember the classic ones: the lady with long nails from India, the world’s tallest man, the world’s longest neck, and the greatest of all being the world’s fattest twins on the trail bikes. Sadly, my kids will never know the pleasure of gawking at the world’s fattest twins in the Guinness Book, for two reasons: They don’t read books that aren’t in tablet form, and those fat twins are now your average Wal-Mart shoppers.

Boo-ray for Hollywood

My kids, and all modern kids, are spoiled when it comes to the movies. They will never know the pathetic majesty that was the drive-in. These went the way of the dodo when I was in my twenties. The harbinger of doom for these American institutions was when they started having swap meets on the grounds during the daylight hours. Frankly, I’m surprised they hung on as long as they did. It’s a crazy business model. You need acres and acres of real estate, tons of concrete, lots of equipment – all for a business that can only operate after sundown. But there was something beautiful about a night at the drive-in. It was always a thrill going from the car to the snack shack, weaving through the cars in the dark, waving at friends. When you’re in a movie theater now, going from your seat to the snack bar is a pain in the ass, stepping into someone’s spilled soda and pretty much giving the person in the seat next to you a lap dance as you attempt to exit the row. You get in that argument with your wife, “Come on. You go get the Goobers, I got them last time.” “Why do I have to do everything?” Yet the drive-in snack shack was about four miles away, but you had no complaints at all about making that trip. Maybe because there was stuff to see, especially people making out in the back of cars.

I think if we’re realistic, we can just admit the whole business model was based on backseat boning. Did people not have places to have sex in the ’60s and ’70s? I guess kids still had the decorum to lie to their parents back then and pretend they weren’t having sex. Teenagers had to steal away to the drive-in to finger-blast their best gal while Rebel Without a Cause played a hundred yards away, especially if they didn’t have a basement. I’m sure when Sonny is sixteen he’s just gonna be like, “Hey, Dad, could you clear out? Here’s a five. Go down to the liquor store, get yourself a six-pack of Mickey’s and drink it in the parking lot. I’ll be nailing my girlfriend on your bed.”

When I was growing up, our family went to the drive-in once or twice but it was typically a disaster. We were always caught off guard, “Who’s got a blanket? The car’s parked sideways, Dad. We can’t see.” But I distinctly remember seeing the cagey veterans of the drive-in, the folks super-committed to this family night out. They had folding chairs, hammocks, quilts and their own popcorn machine. It was like the parking lot at a Jimmy Buffett concert.

Nowadays, taking the kids to a film is a festival of annoyance. I’ll start with the aforementioned snack bar.

I’m not one of those guys who complain about the price of movies. Having made two of them, I know how much effort they are to produce and I think the idea of sinking thirteen bucks into something an army of people put a hundred million into isn’t that tall an order. But the price of the snacks is a different story. That I can complain about. I’d be fine with the inflated cost of theater popcorn if it were satisfying. But I resent paying thirteen-fifty for a small popcorn. That dollar to calorie ratio is horrible. Weight wise, it’s more expensive than cocaine.

More importantly, you never know what you’re going to get. Movie popcorn has too much range. It goes from so super salty I can’t eat it, to so right that I can’t stop myself, to so dry that I’m going to bring it home and use it as blown insulation.

Plus, I don’t like when you pay as much for the popcorn as the movie ticket and the girl at the snack counter already has it set aside. I want a fresh scoop of popcorn from the bottom where it’s still warm, salty and soaking in coagulated butter. I want to see you digging for gold, baby.

By the way, do yourself a favor and skip the fake butter. Here’s how you know the shit is cancerous and horrible for you – it’s self-serve. You can top yourself off. If it was real, actual food it would be expensive and they’d dispense it themselves. Plus, anything self-serve is a very ugly American thing. Imagine telling someone in the Third World that all of us have access to unlimited fake butter, as much as we can consume. We could sit under that tap and just squirt it forever like a golden butter bukakke and no one could stop us.

And that fake greasy butter really ruins the movie experience if you’re seeing something in 3-D. Every other movie that comes out now is in 3-D, so those silly goggles are ubiquitous. When the kids put them on they smear them with greasy popcorn fingers, so what they’re seeing looks like the White Diamonds commercial circa 1987. Everything is in soft focus, like a Barbara Walters interview.

Here’s my solution to this smudgy 3-D glasses problem, and it actually involves a solution. Since that artificial butter is completely chemical anyway, why not throw a little glass cleaner in there? That way while your kids are smearing their fingers on the glasses they’re actually cleaning them. We’ll call it “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Windex.”

And my kids have no idea what a feast the movies are for them. When Lynette takes the kids to the movies they hit the snack counter and walk into the theater with a popcorn, a kosher hot dog, a twenty-ounce soda and an order of curly fries – each. They eat a meal, not a snack. The idea of going to the movies when I was a kid and even slowing down at the snack counter was unimaginable. The Carolla plan was to stop at the liquor store, grab a Three Musketeers and keister it. You had to sneak the snacks.

And with kids and the cost of movies it’s not just the tickets and snacks, it’s the merchandise. If I go to see a movie with Lynette it costs me fifty dollars by the time we’re done with parking, popcorn and drinks. When I take the kids to the movies, not only does it break into triple digits for that night out, the spending doesn’t stop even after the credits have. When Frozen came out, my bank account got frostbite. I had to buy the soundtrack, ten different Barbie versions of Elsa, a Lego version and thirteen princess outfits for Natalia to dress up in. There was this one-upmanship happening with her friends. Natalia only had the doll and the outfit with the crown, meanwhile her friend Cami had the scale replica of the village and the kid-sized sleigh. So I was considered a worse father than Papa John Phillips because my credit card, and thus Natalia, couldn’t keep up. Disney does to my wallet what the Indians do to the buffalo. No part gets wasted. When they’re done, there’s nothing left.

All I’m saying is this. You parents reading this know raising kids in today’s society is hard enough as is without Hollywood and Silicon Valley making it worse. So please, take a stand with me and limit your kids downloading and streaming to my podcasts and independent films only. Thank you.