Our faithful readers are sending in letters by the truckload asking questions on a variety of summer-related topics, such as “What’s the best way to keep cool this summer?” and “What’s this year’s hottest trend in beachwear?” and “How would you like it if I tore your arms off and stuffed you into a mailbox?”
Yes, I’m afraid that Team Last Call has also been the recipient of some good, old-fashioned hate mail. At first, Team Last Call was very upset. For the life of Team Last Call, we just couldn’t figure out what we were doing wrong. But eventually, we realized that virtually all of the hostile letters were coming from a single source, a small constituency of readers known as “Hummer owners.”
This neat group of people has been writing little love notes to Team Last Call ever since we published our annual column on Hummers last March. We’re not sure if it was because we called them bed-wetters or compared their vehicles to a four-ton Viagra pill on wheels, but something definitely seems to have struck a nerve.
We at Team Last Call are taken aback by the Hummer owners’ angry response. We certainly meant no offense in our columns. Team Last Call would never deliberately ridicule Hummer drivers or the various insecurities that compel them to drive a truck the size of a river barge. Like tiny genitalia, for example. We would never make fun of that. Or impotence. Again, not funny.
The last thing we want to do is make the area’s Hummer drivers feel bad about themselves or their ethically retarded vehicles. Yet, despite our best efforts at remaining neutral, Hummer drivers all across the midstate have made Team Last Call the focus of their unstable rage. Regardless of the fact that we had literally nothing to do with their being born with only one testicle.
It’s like you can’t even characterize a group of people as greedy, wasteful, obnoxious, environment-hating pig-dogs without them getting all huffy.
Actually, huffy would have been OK. We could have lived with huffy. Huffy would have been a vacation compared to the reaction we’ve been getting, which falls somewhere between “totally freaking crazy” and “Courtney Love.”
One Hummer driver called us Nazis. Another compared our persecution of Hummer drivers to the persecution of black slaves by white slave owners. Others psychoanalyzed our columns and determined that we are all, in fact, a bunch of raging homosexuals, which is going to break my wife’s heart. One particularly upset Hummer driver said that we were hate incarnate, which up until that point we had always assumed was Bill O’Reilly.
But what’s really been creeping us out are the threatening letters. Some of them talk about what the Hummer owners would do to us if they ever caught us walking alone in an alley on a dark night. Others list various things they would like us to do to ourselves, most of which would require us to be double-jointed. Almost all of them end with some variation of, “Your a awful riter.”
Many of the threats have come from a certain Harrisburg-area bar where evidently a lot of Hummer owners congregate. I guess it’s like a Hummer club. They probably sit around all day just talking about Hummers, washing and waxing their Hummers – maybe even trading Hummers. Yep, they probably sit around all day just swapping Hummers back and forth. First one guy will give the guy beside him a Hummer, and then that guy will give a Hummer to the guy beside him. It’s a very tightly knit community.
We admit that all of the attention we’ve been getting lately is flattering, even if it is in the form of grammatically questionable threats. But it’s not really the kind of recognition Team Last Call was hoping for when we started our column. We were imagining something more along the lines of internet fan sites and television interviews, as opposed to e-mails telling us to “take a long walk off a short pier,” which is only a clever threat if you’re trying to make us die of boredom.
Despite their lack of creativity, the threats have actually been kind of scary. In the words of Toby Keith, it seems that we’ve “rattled the big dog’s cage,” and now the Hummer drivers want to “put their boot up our ass,” because “it’s the American way.” Of all the ways a person could die, we never thought ours would involve getting run over by a four-ton automobile with Yosemite Sam mudflaps and a sticker in the back window that says “Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.” If the actual vehicle doesn’t kill us, its tackiness surely will.
And so, in an effort to not be murdered, we at Team Last Call are ready to call a truce. We solemnly swear to do our best not to talk about your comically small genitalia, as long as you do your best not to overcompensate for it by driving a vehicle with the gas mileage of Mount Rushmore.
Obviously, we can’t promise that the occasional joke won’t slip through the cracks. Like, “How many Hummer owners does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None: they’re too busy ‘off-roading’ their way to a gas station to fill up their 8-mile-per-gallon tanks.” For example.
But seriously, Hummer drivers, as far as Team Last Call is concerned, this is the last column we will ever write about you and your turd-mobiles. We’ve said what we needed to say, and the ball is in your morally bankrupt court. If you choose to continue driving your Hummers around, therefore condemning yourselves to purgatory where you will spend the rest of eternity questioning what it was that made you want to drive a vehicle so obnoxious and mind-bogglingly illogical that it made everybody on heaven and earth hate you, then that’s your decision, and we respect it. We’re not here to judge.
There she was, a spoon in one hand, a bowl in the other, whizzing through our neighborhood at 40 mph with the steering wheel pinched between her knees.
She was obviously crazy. Not the harmless kind of crazy that makes people buy Toby Keith albums or get excited about watching cars race around in circles. I’m talking about the kind of crazy that leads to people biting off other people’s ears during boxing matches or trying to privatize social security.
I decided that I couldn’t keep quiet about it. No matter what the consequences, I had to let this woman know that her behavior was simply unacceptable.
So I turned to her and said, “Honey, can you please not eat cereal while you’re driving!”
But my wife wouldn’t listen.
Remember how in Driver’s Ed. class your teacher always instructed you to drive defensively? It’s because he knew that one day you’d be sharing the road with my wife.
Whether she’s putting on her stockings or trying to balance her checkbook, you can be sure that at any given point while she’s driving, my wife is performing at least one other task that requires the use of both hands and usually a foot or two. I’m pretty sure I once caught her in the middle of a yoga pose while she was driving us to the mall, although I couldn’t prove it.
You know how when people are bowling they do that little dance to help steer their ball away from the gutter? That’s me whenever I see my wife driving down the street, only in my case, the gutter is the oncoming lane of traffic and the pins are the neighbor kids. She is to a highway what a tornado is to a house of cards. If she were a professional wrestler, they’d call her “Royer the Destroyer.”
Riding passenger in my wife’s car always makes for a rather transcendent experience. Watching kitties bounce off your windshield really has a way of putting the rest of your problems into perspective. The fact that I have no clean underwear for work tomorrow, for example, seems like much less of a crisis as my wife and I are plowing through our neighbors’ trashcans or taking out a rhododendron bush.
Whether we’re speeding the wrong way down a one-way street, turning a curve on two wheels at 70 mph or ripping off our bumper as we back into the garage, I can just sit back and relax as what I thought were my biggest problems simply melt away.
There is one small problem that won’t go away, though, and that is the fact that, thanks to my wife’s rather relaxed approach to driving, our car looks worse than Michael Moore in a pair of Daisy Dukes. From the scrapes running the entire length of the car to the ominous poodle-shaped dents on the hood, this vehicle is in sad, sad shape. Any day now, I expect it to follow Vin Diesel’s acting career right into the Cosmic Crapper.
On a good day, the car moves with all the enthusiasm of a fat kid who just got picked for the skins team in gym class, which is a subject I know a thing or two about. It’s really a minor miracle that it even starts at all. Although, once you get that car rolling downhill, it’s a force to be reckoned with. Just ask our neighbors’ cats.
The only thing that looks worse than our car’s exterior is our car’s interior. I’m not sure what happened in there, but it wasn’t good. If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say that at some point a grizzly bear and a mountain cat must have broken into the car and had a wrestling match in the front seat in a vat of pudding. I mean, there are actual chocolate stains on the ceiling. But I guess that’s what happens when you take a speedbump at 70 mph with a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles in your hand.
So basically, we need a new car. The problem is, I have a hard time justifying going even deeper into debt just so my wife can have a new, more luxurious vehicle with which to terrorize our neighbors’ mailboxes. Although, for as much time as she spends in her car waiting for the cops to fill out accident reports, she might as well have reliable heating and air conditioning.
When the subject comes up – which is only as often as my wife hits something with her car, by which I mean daily – my wife swears that things would be different with a new car. She’d be careful, more responsible. No more backing into our garage when the door is closed. No more sideswiping old ladies walking down the street. She even promises to steer with her actual hands. Which is comforting, if not entirely believable.
I don’t know. Maybe I should be more trusting and just get the new car. Then again, her current car was new when we got it, and now it looks like it’s been trampled by elephants. If we get another car, how do I know that she won’t just get bored with it three weeks later and start using it to knock coconuts out of trees or something?
It’s a real conundrum. Until I get it all sorted out, all I can say is, watch your back. My wife is on the move, and the Wheaties are missing from the cupboard.
His name is John. He’s a boxer, a drug addict and a Vietnam Vet.
Her name is Caroline. She’s a poor white trash girl living a dead-end life.
The two meet at a state fair, fall in love and run off together in search of a happier life. Then they get stuck in a dark gambling town. Then John has a drug relapse. Then their relationship falls apart. And the story just goes downhillfrom there.
Downhill is a familiar direction for Aimee Mann. Often cited as one of the finest songwriters of her generation, Mann has a knack for picking her way into the middle of a tragic story and finding the little bulb of humanity that makes it tick. Her new concept album, The Forgotten Arm, which details the adventures of John and Caroline in a dozen technicolor tracks, is no exception.
“I’m more into the in-depth profile than the short vignette,” Mann says with a wink from her studio in California. She sounds animated, a little mischievous, and overall nothing like the gloomy girl she’s made out to be. In fact, for someone who’s given nicknames like “Ms. Misery,” Mann sounds downright chipper.
“Truly, most of my friends are comedians who think I’m kind of funny. I mean, somebody of my circle of friends has got to think that I’m a reasonably entertaining person to be around,” she protests. “But I don’t know. I always hate when people go, ‘No, no, I’m really funny! Trust me!’”
In all fairness, The Forgotten Arm is much more than just a mood-crushing story. It’s a masterful, sweet, slow-rocking album that offers redemption in its own weird way. It’s also her most intriguing release since the 1999 soundtrack for “Magnolia,” another fine tale of misery and salvation.
The majority of The Forgotten Arm was recorded live in the span of about a week, which gives it a more open, more summery feel than most of Mann’s recent work. “The themes on this record can be kind of tough themes, and I wanted the sound of the record and the vibe of it to be kind of a bright and fresh and sort of spontaneous feeling, like a more optimistic feeling,” she explains.
One of the main themes concerns that longing everyone gets from time to time to throw everything he owns into the trunk of his car, hit the open highway and start a new life somewhere where the grass is greener. It’s a great American storyline, something for which Mann has a real weakness.
“I really see the pathos in that idea, that people have a life that they’re unhappy with, and they have a desperate hope that by changing their location, that they can change their life somehow. And of course it never works,” she laughs. “I totally know it can’t work. But still, when I think about it, I’m like, ‘Aw, really? Can’t it? C’mon! Mexico, totally different country – surely that would make a difference! Sombreros and margaritas! It’s gotta be paradise!’”
It’s the kind of daydream that sounds very romantic until you’re actually out on that highway, broke and hungry and running on fumes. “Until you have an upset stomach and a flat tire and the two of you are fighting in the front seat about whose turn it is to drive!” Mann giggles.
You’re doomed to fail, but you try anyway, because failing is better than doing nothing at all: there’s the crux of The Forgotten Arm. Not exactly feel-good material. But Mann throws in a surprise at the end by actually giving the story a kind of resolution, if not a happy ending. The sun is poking through the clouds, and you can almost hear Mann squinting in the light.
“I tried to write a happy ending. I don’t think it’s a sad story,” she admits.
“But who’s really cheerful anyway? Who really writes cheerful, happy songs?” she whines, betraying herself with another giggle. “Besides that song ‘Walking on Sunshine’ by Katrina and The Waves. That was my peer group when I was in ’Til Tuesday! I remember she was beating us on the charts!”
These days, the only beatings going on in Mann’s life take place in a regulation boxing ring. The petite songstress recently started sparring as hobby, which sounds cute until she lands a right hook on your face. As it turns out, Mann has a natural gift for boxing, and it’s become her favorite off-stage activity. So go ahead, call her “Ms. Misery” one more time to her face.
“I had met somebody that I became very good friends with, and he was a boxer, and he kind of gave me a casual boxing lesson. And he was very encouraging. He was like, ‘You’re a natural!’ So I had enough encouragement to actually start taking lessons for real,” she explains. “I sort of based some of the character of John on him, because he’s also a drug addict, and he had relapsed, so I was kind of trying to deal with that a little bit.”
The Forgotten Arm (named after a boxing move), like all of Mann’s albums, was released through her own label, SuperEgo Records. Because of that, it will sell only a fraction of what it potentially could on a major label – but the fact that she gets to maintain complete creative control, plus the fact that she makes a ton more money than she would with a major-label deal, makes it a pretty good tradeoff.
“I think if I was on a major label and getting a gigantic promotional push, to me that kind of pressure makes you sort of uncomfortable,” she says. “There are certain artists that to me are almost like athletes. It’s very sporty almost. Like Britney Spears, she’s like a sports figure almost. She gets out there and she dances and she sells it and she does a million tours. She appears everywhere and she’s all dressed up. It’s very sporty. It takes a lot of muscular energy that I just don’t have.”
Even after all of the boxing lessons?
“Well, the boxing is like, all I want to do is fight,” she says guiltily. “I never do all the conditioning stuff that they tell you to do. I don’t do any of the rope work. All I want to do is spar. It’s terrible. I just want to get to the good part!”
Once you’re done throwing up, listen to this: It appears that the young man’s nose-skewering technique just might become a trend. People all across the nation have started jumping on the “pierced eyeglasses” bandwagon. Apparently, the fact that they need to have an extra hole drilled into their heads with a power tool isn’t much of a deterrent. Let’s just hope these people never have a problem with their pants sagging.
The development of pierced eyeglasses is a major breakthrough in the world of body piercing. Suddenly, not only can your piercings be fashionable, but they can be functional too. Just think of the possibilities!
Are you tired of walking out of the house without your wallet? Why not attach it to a big chain, and then connect that big chain to a big ring, and then put that big ring right through your tongue! That way, it would alwayth be thwinging right in front of your fathe. It’d be nearly impothible to forget.
Are you constantly spilling coffee on your shirt during the morning commute? Why not just pierce your nipples and mount a little cup holder onto the studs! We can call it the Nip & Sip.
Are you always embarrassing yourself by leaving your baby behind at places like the laundromat and grocery store? I’m calling the cops.
I myself used to have a few body piercings, although that was back in the olden days when they were just for looks. Like mink coats, or Jessica Simpson.
One day when I was 18, I decided that I simply couldn’t go on living without having my own bellybutton ring. That decision now ranks up there with the day I tried to stuff 20 marshmallows in my mouth and the day I tried to snort a line of salt, which were the same day.
I’m all for being frugal, and I agree that there are some things that you definitely should go price-shopping for, such as cars, groceries, or, in Donald Trump’s case, wives. But if there’s one area where you really don’t want to be cutting corners, it’s body piercing. Trust me. I mean, if you look long enough, you can always find some dude who’s willing to pierce any part of your body in the back of a van for $5 and a sandwich, but that’s not always the best solution.
When it comes to piercings, I like to live by this simple rule:
If it’s in an office, pierce that orifice.
If it’s in the back of a van, get a medical plan.
And here’s another rule: If the guy’s name is Luke, run.
I found Luke in a Harrisburg phone book after calling about a dozen other places. It took him about 10 rings to answer the phone, and another two minutes to catch his breath, and then another two minutes to remember that he had placed an ad in the yellow pages about body piercing. But the fact that he was the only piercer who could schedule me that same day – and the fact that he was about $20 cheaper than every other place I had called – made him my go-to guy.
All I could think about was how proud it would make my parents that I was being so responsible with my money.
One hour later, I was on my back in a sticky leather recliner while Luke, sweating profusely through his yellowed undershirt, chain-smoked and searched around in a drawer for a clean needle.
Once things were all set, he drew a purple dot on my belly with a marker and got out the “needle,” which was actually a hollow metal tube approximately the same size around as Michael Moore.
Then Luke looked at me and said, “Grip my thigh.”
“Grip what now?” I said, sliding back in the chair.
“Grip my thigh,” he repeated.
I didn’t get it. “Why do I need to grip his thigh?” I wondered. “What’s the big deal? I’m just going to lie here and relax, and he’s going to numb my belly and pierce it and holy crap that’s a huge needle and why hasn’t he used any anesthesia aaaaah!”
And just like that, Luke plunged the needle right into my belly. I looked down at the giant tube jutting through my skin. Then I threw up. Then I passed out. I should have gripped his thigh.
When I woke up, in addition to a splitting headache, I had a brand-new ring running through my belly. And probably several communicable diseases.
I was awfully proud of that ring and kept it around for several years, showing it off like a battle scar to everyone I met. Until the day I looked in the mirror sideways.
Apparently, my belly didn’t get the memo that the rest of my body had decided to stop growing. In the six or so years since I had gotten my piercing, my belly had expanded from a normal, boy-sized tummy to a bulbous mound of jiggly, wiggly pudge. Suddenly my bellybutton ring was less like a cute little accessory and more like a giant flashing beacon perched on top of Mount McPlumpy.
No matter how many layers I wore, you could still see the ring parading around under my shirt like a mouse under a rug. It was like having a tiny circus barker strolling around on my belly with a megaphone, calling one and all to witness the freakishness poking out over my belt. “Step right up,” it said, “and behold the pudge!”
Further complicating things was the fact that my piercing had more infections than a Kid Rock groupie. Every other week, my bellybutton would swell up like a ripe tomato. It looked like I was constantly trying to smuggle a poodle around under my shirt.
And so, with great sadness, I had to say goodbye to my precious bellybutton ring. All I have left to show for it now are two little holes. Which, now that I think of it, would be an excellent place to mount that cup holder …
If you’ve ever said to yourself, “I simply cannot go on living another day without seeing an eight-foot colon,” then I’ve got some really good news for you.
Life is full of surprises. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you flip on the TV and discover that the king of pop is on trial for child molestation, the queen of homemaking is in jail, and the Austrian prince of “pumping you up” is running California.
When you break it down, there really are only a handful of certainties in this life, like how the earth will always revolve around the sun, or how Paris Hilton will always have the intellect of a pair of underpants.
Throughout my life, I’ve held tight to three such universal truths that have helped me put the rest of the world into perspective.
One, there’s the certainty that someday I’m going to die, which sounds morbid, but can be comforting when I think about how there will come a day when I won’t ever have to hear “Who Let the Dogs Out?” again.
Two, there’s the certainty that I will never be drafted into the NBA, unless they suddenly create some new position like fart-guard or power-nerd.
And finally, and probably most obviously, there’s the certainty that I will never, ever find myself standing face-to-face with an eight-foot colon.
But that last one, as it turns out, is not a certainty at all.
Neither, in case you were wondering, is the popular belief that you can go your entire life without ever running into a 70-year-old woman with a six-inch horn protruding from her forehead.
I was confronted by both of these disturbing sights one fateful day when my wife and I took a trip to the Mütter Museum, Philadelphia’s famous museum of medical curiosities, for a delightful afternoon of sightseeing that also included a few hundred skulls, countless body parts floating in jars and thousands of other exhibits containing everything from distended fetuses to the brains of notorious murderers to a woman whose body was turned into a big bar of soap. It wasn’t really the most romantic thing we’ve done together.
I might be in the minority here, but I think that looking at a wax casting demonstrating the effects of syphilis on the male genitalia is gross. I’m the type of person who gets creeped out for days just from hearing a story about how a friend of a friend of a friend got a paper cut five years ago in Mobile, Alabama. I have a weaker stomach than Michael Moore at a pro-Bush rally on a boat in a hurricane after eating his weight in bratwurst.
So you’re probably wondering how it was that I ended up spending an entire day surrounded by things like “the preserved thorax of John Wilkes Booth” and “the secret tumor of Grover Cleveland.” Well, it was for the same reason that I now include “meat substitutes” in my diet and have made it a habit to change my underwear at least twice a week: my wife.
After some of the other sacrifices I have made for my wife, making an excursion to a museum didn’t sound too bad. I’ve eaten a tofurkey. I’ve gone out in a snowstorm to buy tampons. I saw the Spice Girls movie in the theater. The worst, I figured, was behind me.
“I mean, really, how bad could a museum be?” I asked myself as we climbed into the car.
“Oh, this bad,” I responded a few hours later while staring into the eyeless sockets of a man who had a second face growing out of his neck.
Ew. Icky. Blech. I was thoroughly grossed out. Yet somehow, no matter how revolting each of the museum’s 20,000 artifacts was, the next one always managed to be a little worse.
But even more disturbing than the exhibit containing sliced-up sections of a real human head, for example, was the fact that my wife really seemed to be enjoying herself.
I watched my dainty little wife “ooh” and “ah” over the Eye Wall of Shame, ogling each exploded eyeball with something that approached genuine delight. Here was the woman I married, a girl with a teapot collection who likes puppies and bunnies and nearly bursts into tears if I say the word “zombie” too loudly, beaming with enthusiasm at a dissected monkey brain like it was a newborn baby. Something just didn’t seem right.
And that’s when I remembered.
Maybe it was the way she lingered joyfully by the elephantiasis exhibit, or the way she excitedly picked her way through the display of 2,000 foreign objects extracted from the human body. Or maybe it was the way she gazed longingly at the lady with the horn in her forehead.
I’m not sure exactly what triggered it, but my brain was suddenly flooded with a series of gruesome memories that I had obviously been trying to repress. No, I realized with a shudder, this was not the first time my wife had shown her dark side.
There was the time when I caught her looking in a medical journal at photos of rare skin diseases. Then there was the day she was on the internet reading up on intestinal parasites. And, of course, there were the countless occasions when I would come home from work to find my delicate little wife sitting on the couch with a bowl of popcorn, craning her neck at the TV as the doctors carefully removed a tumor/bullet/pound of fat from the man/woman/cat lying on the operating table.
The truth was undeniable: my wife was a gross-out junkie. A lover of the macabre. A sicko.
I was horrified. How could I, a person who routinely passed out during the childbirth videos in health class, be married to someone whose idea of a good time involves internal organs floating in a jar?
Then I looked at my wife. Intelligent. Artistic. Beautiful. Attracted to struggling writers with pot-bellies.
And that’s when I realized that our love was so much bigger than all of this: bigger than President Cleveland’s tumor; bigger than the horn growing out of that lady’s head; indeed, even bigger than the eight-foot colon.
I walked over to my wife, put my arm around her shoulders and glanced up at a picture of a man with a parasitic twin growing out of his stomach.
“C’mon on, honey,” I said lovingly. “Let’s go check out the shrunken heads.”
A year ago I wrote a column about Hummers and the people who drive them – a group that scientific studies have shown is comprised of irritable, rich white men who are about as blessed below the belt as Kermit the Frog.
Over time, I’ve realized that the article didn’t quite have the global impact I was hoping for. It seems like more and more of these weenie-mobiles are popping up each week, clogging up our streets, polluting our environment and otherwise serving as a constant reminder of why the rest of the world thinks that America is the devil.
In fact, the Hummer company is currently gearing up for the debut of the H3 this spring, meaning that Hummer lovers the world over will soon have yet another vehicle in which to boldly display their giant protruding brows.
Apparently, my primary message – that Hummers are obnoxious and dangerous and make much more of a statement about what’s in your pants than what’s in your wallet – didn’t really sink in.
But maybe the fault is mine. Maybe I should have taken a more diplomatic approach to my first Hummer article. Perhaps I should have spent a little more time on the bigger issues and less time making references to Hummer owners’ teensy little genitalia. Because it’s not their fault that they’re like a Ken Doll from the waist down.
So I’m giving it another shot, but this time around I’m going to be much more open-minded about it. This time, I’ll try putting myself into the Hummer owners’ shoes. I mean, if I were rich and unfulfilled and self-obsessed and very, very impotent, I’d probably want to buy a Hummer too, and I’m sure I wouldn’t appreciate it when some snot-nosed journalist tried to make suggestions about how I could have put that $120,000 to better use. It’s my money, and I can spend it any way I choose. If the tsunami victims need money so badly, let them go out and do an honest day’s work for once and stop waiting around for handouts from hard-working Americans like me.
Yep, this time around I’m determined to take a much more balanced approach. You won’t see me making any rash statements like, “Nine out of 10 Hummer owners are bed-wetters,” no matter how true they may be. Nope, this time I’m going to keep it clean. I’m calling it quits on the silly generalizations, like, “All Hummer drivers are addicted to Viagra.” So just know that you’re not going to be seeing any more immature commentary from this writer. Like, “Statistics show that Hummer drivers like to prance around in their wives’ underwear when no one’s around” -– that’s another example of something you won’t see here.
In the spirit of fairness, we’re going to weigh the arguments for and against Hummers with complete objectivity, so that you, the reader, can judge for yourself who is right and who is a selfish, stupid Hummer driver.
Let’s begin with a look at the top reasons why someone should go out and buy a Hummer.
1. Because you never know when the local supermarket might decide to replace its speed bumps with six-foot dirt piles
2. Because your “What Would Satan Do?” bracelet tells you to
3. Because you’ll be in the company of several top celebrities who endorse Hummers, including Mike Tyson and MC Hammer!
4. Because under Bush’s Economic Stimulus Plan, business owners who purchase vehicles weighing over 6,000 pounds receive a $100,000 tax break. No Hummer left behind!
5. Because you’re a rugged individualist who will use your Hummer to navigate lots of challenging off-road courses just as soon as you drop the kids off at soccer practice, diversify your stock portfolio, get porcelain veneers and play a quick nine at the country club
6. Because if there’s one thing you hate, it’s the environment
7. Because you’re helping to teach poor people everywhere a valuable lesson about how good life can be if you’re hard-working and ambitious and white and have rich parents
8. Because they make you terrorism-proof!
9. Because you always survive car crashes, and the people in the other car were going to die someday anyway
10. Because you are the freaking devil
Now, let’s examine some of the reasons why someone might not want to drive a Hummer.
1. Because everyone hates people who drive Hummers
2. Because it’s a lot easier to just tape a sign on your back that says, “My winkie is very, very small.”
3. Because of that whole “war in Iraq” thing
4. Because of their massive size, Hummers are exempt from meeting any emission standards, and consequently emit over three times more carbon dioxide than the average car. Oops!
5. Because it’s a lot cheaper to just stuff some socks down your pants
6. Because you could take the $120,000 you spent on your Hummer – plus all of the money you dump into your 8-mile-per-gallon tank – and give it to an orphanage. Unless you hate orphans or something.
7. Because we’re all laughing at you, and our stomachs hurt
8. Because one day we might run out of wildlife reserves to plunder for oil
9. Because I’ll never stop carving “butthead” into your paint
10. Because people who drive Hummers can’t get into heaven
Thus concludes our objective study on the pros and cons of purchasing a Hummer. I’d like to take this time to thank the many research assistants, fact-checkers and proofreaders on “Team Last Call,” without whom I never would have been able to produce an article of such integrity, uncompromised vision and absolute factual accuracy.
As for you, the reader, the gauntlet has been thrown. You have been equipped with the facts, and now you must decide for yourself which path you will walk – the way of truth and light, or the way that leads to me lighting a bag of dog poop on fire on your front porch. Good luck.
See, I sort of forgot to show up for my last six-month checkup. Actually, I missed about 10 of them in a row. Which is really no big deal, unless you’re into that whole keeping-your-original-teeth thing.
For the past five years, my teeth and I have been a pair of free spirits, cruising down the river of life on a raft called freedom, racing across the deserts of time like Thelma and Louise, treating the world as if it were our own personal playground, like Paris Hilton, but without all the internet sex tapes and Chihuahuas. Well, without the Chihuahuas.
But our holiday came to an abrupt halt when my wife took it upon herself to schedule a dentist appointment for me. It was the worst case of betrayal since that episode of “The OC” where Summer totally breaks up with Seth and then gets together with that creep Zach even though everyone knows that Seth is the one true love of Summer’s life. Or so I’m told.
“There’s no way I’m going to the dentist,” I assured my wife. “I’m sorry to have to do this, but I’m putting my foot down. It’s going down as we speak. I’m the man in this relationship, and I’m telling you right now that I’m simply not going to the dentist. The foot is down now.”
As I pulled into the dentist’s parking lot, I was more nervous than Billy Joel at a sobriety checkpoint. But then I started thinking about how completely overrated the whole going-to-the-dentist thing really is. I mean, all dentists really do is poke around at your teeth for a few minutes and then hand you a free toothbrush. Then they hand you a bill with more zeros on it than a bus full of high school mathletes.
It’s not like anyone’s ever died from not going to the dentist. Really, what’s the worst that can happen?
Apparently, the worst thing that can happen is your teeth will start to decay faster than Britney Spears’ career. And unfortunately, unlike Britney’s career, you can’t fix your teeth by putting on hot pants and flashing your boobies. Not that I didn’t try.
Evidently, I had spent the past five years cultivating the perfect storm of cavities, a magnificent black mass in the back of my mouth just a little smaller than a Ford Explorer. Which explained the throbbing pain I’d been feeling in my molar for the past four months that hurt so bad it just made me want to die.
I was sort of in love with my cavity at first, in the way that kidnap victims can come to sympathize with their captors. The idea that I’d been walking around with this disgusting thing rotting away inside my mouth was kind of hypnotizing. It was like meeting a little brother I never knew I had, except my little brother lived in my mouth and gave me headaches when I ate something cold. I named him Barry.
“It appears,” said the dentist, “that you have a cavity the size of Rhode Island.”
“That’s Barry,” I said.
“Well, I’m afraid Barry’s going to need a root canal.”
“Oh, no!” I squealed. “Is that painful?”
“Well, let’s just say it ranks somewhere between falling down an elevator shaft and giving birth to Michael Moore through your nostril. Can I assume you’ve got dental insurance?”
“No!” I whimpered. “How much are we talking?”
A few smelling salts later and I was back on my feet, scheduling my big root canal appointment with the office manager.
I returned the next week for my date with destiny. I climbed up into the dentist’s chair and immediately launched into a little self-defense mechanism I like to call nervous gas. I blamed it on the dental assistant.
Once things were under control, the dentist began the process of anesthesia by stabbing me repeatedly in the gums with what I could only assume was the harpoon they used to catch Anna Nicole Smith. In between stabs – and this is way too weird for me to make up – the dentist thought it would be a good idea to tell me about a horror movie he once saw called “Dentist 2,” in which a crazed dentist ties a woman down and systematically pulls out all of her teeth. I found this to be exceedingly creepy and inappropriate, but forced out a little laugh anyway since he was the one with the harpoon.
Then the dentist reached under the chair and pulled out a drill so devastatingly massive and incomprehensible it could have run for governor of California. “Ya, I am going to drill your sissy teeth into powda until you are begging for the stopping of the drilling. Hasta la vista, cavity!” said the drill. Although that may have been the anesthesia talking. Either way, I was terrified.
And then something miraculous happened. After several minutes of drilling my teeth like I was the last Alaskan Wildlife Reserve on earth, the dentist set down his drill and looked dejectedly out the window. “Know what?” he sighed. “I don’t think you need a root canal after all.”
“Blubbity blap!” I yelled, my numb lips flapping in the wind. “Blat’s bleat!”
I shot out of the chair and raced out the door before he could change his mind. It was the fastest I’d moved since the day the first New Kids on the Block album was released when I was 13. That’s right, I said it.
Anyway, it was a good day, one that I won’t soon forget. Mostly because my tooth now hurts way worse than before I went to the dentist. I haven’t been able to chew on the right side of my mouth for a month. Let’s just be glad that general practitioners don’t take the same approach to healing, or every time someone complained of a headache they’d get smacked in the face with a shovel. Which is only funny if that person is Clay Aiken.
So, thanks, doc, for “fixing my cavity.”
I hope you enjoy my check, which “totally won’t bounce.”
