Get Off My Lawn Podcast #90 | I went on an involuntary road trip with two Harry Potter fans
About 15 years ago, all the flights from Boston to NYC were canceled and all the rental cars were booked. I managed to hitch a ride with two incredibly normal people but they wanted to read Harry Potter aloud the whole time. Why? Why are adults so into children’s books and Star Wars and video games and Comicons? It’s the same with all this Nazi-hunting crap. We are all playing one big Live Action Role Playing game and that’s for kids.
I went on an involuntary road trip with two boomer Harry Potter fans, and it changed my life forever.
I was in Boston.
I had a flight.
What did you drive?
It's four hours, dude.
So and I didn't pay for the flight.
It was a business thing.
And, uh, someone wanted to meet about a thing, and then I flew over there.
It was a stupid thing.
Came back, and it was ice, and there was some sort of problem with rain.
I can't remember exactly what, but there was zero flights.
And so I go, alright, well, I'll go rent a car.
You win, people who say you should drive.
I'll rent a car.
It's about the same.
DC, Boston, flying, or train, or car, it's all about the same.
But you don't have to worry about traffic with a plane.
Anyway, that's boring.
So, I say to the old cop, I wait in line, and everyone came up with this idea.
So all the rentals are done.
And so I say to this couple who's already got one of the last cars, I go, hey, how about we split it, and I'll go with you guys.
You're going to New York, right?
Yeah, we're going to Long Island or something, or Westchester, I can't remember what, a suburb.
And I go, Well, I'll pay half your car.
And they're nerds, but not nerds in the nice way, like our kind of classic nerd with the pocket protector and the glasses, Revenge of the Nerds nerd.
I like those kind of nerds.
I mean normies, as my kids would say.
What do they call me?
A peasant normie?
That's the new insult that the kids are giving their parents today.
So they're peasant normies and they go, hmm, and then they, they, I think they might've been Jewish and they go, they're sort of like a Fred Armisen character.
You know that Fred Armisen character where he has the curly hair and he's really into like free range chicken and Carrie plays another sort of a boring vegan boomer type.
So they were like those two.
And he goes, hmm.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more perfect that example is.
Fred Armisen with glasses on and curly hair.
Remember he wants to see where the free-range chicken was raised and they go out to the farm and they meet this cult.
It's that kind of guy.
So he goes, ah, hold on a sec, hold on a sec.
Then he walks about 10 feet away.
I'm already annoyed.
I'm already thinking, you know what, I'll just go back to my friend's house and I'll take the next flight.
And he goes, hold on a sec.
He's intrigued.
And I know I look a little weird, like a killer, but I had a suit on and stuff, so it's not like I was wearing a leather jacket with studs on it.
And he confers.
And then he comes back, and they've made their mind, you know, I think she had a turtleneck on.
And, uh, he goes, okay, I'm just, I hope you don't mind, I want to check your bag.
He checks my fucking bag.
It was only like a one-day, two-day trip, so I only have a little tiny bag with me.
And he checks my bag.
It's a Jeremy Scott for Longchamp, by the way.
Telephones on it and stuff.
He checks it, sees my dirty underwear and everything, and lo and behold, no knife.
He goes, I just had to make sure you didn't have a weapon.
He was checking for a weapon.
Like I was gonna slit their throats or something?
Dude, life is not Netflix.
Chill the fuck out.
You know that I was on my way to getting a plane, right?
So I couldn't have caught the knife past security.
Where was the knife?
Did I hide it in a garbage?
Like under a thing?
Under an ATM?
On the off chance that my flight is cancelled?
And then I can retrieve it and go to the rental place.
Go with you guys and slit your throats, but you caught me.
You caught me by checking the bag.
What would he have done if he found a knife?
And he's like, well, well, well, what do we have here?
Nice try.
One of the scariest psychotic murderers of all time.
Even scarier than that, uh, what's his name?
Monster?
When that chick, that South African chick dressed up as an ugly lesbian and shot men in the head.
Even scarier than that!
And I caught you.
Dude, if you search someone's bag at an airport and you are about to go on a trip with them and they have a knife, run.
You are with a complete homicidal maniac.
What if it was just a Leatherman?
Like, I've brought my Leatherman on a- uh, not on a plane, they always catch me, but I've accidentally packed my Leatherman a million times.
And then you have to put it in a little envelope and then they check it as luggage.
Uh, what if it was a Leatherman?
What would he have said then?
You have a Leatherman.
You can't come with us.
Maybe he would have said, OK, this is dangerous.
I'll put it in my pocket and then I'll give it to you when we arrive, just like the airport does.
But then you are considering the possibility that I'm a murderer and you're still getting in a car with me.
Dude, if I'm a murderer, I'm going to get that knife.
Actually, if I'm a murderer, I don't need a knife.
You'll be driving.
I'll just start punching the face and I'll bite off your wife's nose and stuff.
It was a really bizarre little Czech thing.
You know what it was, I'm realizing now?
It's one of these suburbanites that never really lived in a city, and so their danger zone, stranger danger, is based on movies and stuff.
So maybe he did see Charlize Theron in Monster and was like, just gotta make sure we're not dealing with the Charlize.
So anyway, I pass the knife test, and we get in the car, and uh, everything's cordial, and I'm obviously being super agreeable, right?
But um, I'm a conversation guy.
And if we're gonna be in the road for four hours, we can have a lot of fun.
What's the worst fight you ever had with your sister?
Is a nice one I like to start with.
I actually do a- did a podcast called Can I Ask You a Question?
And I asked Fred Armisen that.
He didn't have anything.
He always got along really well with his sister.
I think he had a fight over, uh, you know that phone that has wheels that makes a funny little sound?
I think, uh, I think he wanted it and she had it.
That's seriously as bad as it gets.
And then you talk to other couples, other kids, and they're like, I guess, I talked to this black chick on the same podcast, and she goes, I guess the worst fight we ever had was when he tried to kill me.
Speaking of knives, she locked herself in the bathroom, and they had those cheap, you know those doors that Canadians punch through all the time?
It's like Melba toast, and then wavy cardboard, and then Melba toast.
So it's not really a door.
It's, it's almost like the door of an SNL set that you're about to just sort of move to another room for when they need it in the next sketch.
It's not a real door.
It probably weighs a hundred ounces.
So, um, he's, she has one of those doors in her house.
She locks it and then he starts plunging the knife and it's going chink, just like right out of The Shining.
It's going zink, zink, zink, zink coming out of the door.
Hell of a dichotomy.
That's a really good podcast.
It's on my YouTube channel.
It's called, Can I Ask You a Question?
And it didn't do very well for some reason.
I thought it was good.
I asked about 12 celebrities the same 10 questions and then edited it.
It cost me three grand with an editor.
Edited it into 13 celebrities per one question, right?
So we could have gone into that.
What does your dad do?
Where are your parents from?
What's it like growing up?
Oh, you grew up there?
Like, what's the demographics there?
Was it mostly Jewish?
Mostly WASP-y?
Was there tension?
Blah, blah, blah.
I mean, we were all old.
We were all in our, probably, I was probably 38 and they were probably, like, early 40s.
So we're all the same age.
We could talk about the 70s.
Jesus, we could talk about a million things.
So we get in the car.
And they're pulling, we're pulling out and we get sort of calibrated.
We're on the highway.
I think it's just basically one big road the whole way there.
And, uh, is it the 95?
And, uh, so we're headed to New York City.
Things are looking good.
And I'm sort of sitting in the back and I'm, I'm, I'm polite and I got my little L'Enchant bag and I don't have my headphones on.
And, uh, they, the wife says, uh, we do this thing and she has this tone.
I've noticed this with suburbanites.
She has this tone where I'm gonna like her stupid gay thing.
And she goes... My husband and I do this thing where I read him Harry Potter.
We're sort of Harry Potter heads, whatever the fuck they're called.
Rowlers.
We're kind of rowlers.
And what we do on these long drives is I'll read him the story.
And, you know, it's sort of like a book on tape.
Are we in Portlandia?
Who the fuck are you?
First of all, if you're reading the coolest book in the world, if you're reading Mark Levin or, you know, some really heady Dostoevsky or Love and War and Peace or something, that would be okay, I guess.
But if you're gonna do that, by the way, why wouldn't you just have the book on tape itself?
Like with my book on tape, Shameless Plug, Death of Cool, there's sound effects in there and when there's a- I'm talking about my old punk bands, I have tapes of the old punk bands and you can hear the live shows and I have actors.
In fact, get this!
The black girl I just told you about who has the knife going through the wall, I think she plays a prostitute who robs me.
Yeah, she's in the book too.
But to hear your wife read you a book, could you be a bigger peasant noob?
I was shocked.
You know, one of my least favorite words in the English language, and it's so overused, is atrocious.
But I think this might be one of the few times where it would be okay to say, it was atrocious.
So she gets out there and she goes, uh, and by the way, you're going to be, are you, are you a Potterhead?
Are you a Rowler?
And I politely say no, because I'm fucking 38 and not 12.
That's a children's book.
That's the Hardy Boys you're reading.
I don't, it's like, what's his name?
So it was a guest on Kumia's show, I'm drawing a blank, but they were talking about Star Wars and they go, you gonna watch the new Star Wars?
And he goes, no.
And they go, oh, why not?
And he goes, because I'm not a fucking kid.
Florentine?
Florentine.
He's got a 14-year-old son, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
He eats ketchup too.
He's like, why am I going to put ketchup on French fries?
What am I, five years old?
Just eat the French fries.
Yeah, why do they got to be covered in sugary tomatoes?
It's sugar sauce.
Angry at ketchup.
It's over.
Yeah, I understand that.
Well, the only thing worse than going to see Star Wars is being super into it and talking about it.
And, you know, sometimes I look at these millennial Twitter feeds and there's all these anime pictures.
And if you look at comics now, and I'm not talking about Batman and Superman, but the more sort of, we used to call them alternative comics back in the day.
And in my day, alternative comics would be like, um, I think it was called Peep Show?
Dennis?
Hershorn?
Dennis Heitman?
Ah, fuck, I'm useless at remembering anything at this age.
But he would- he was this big, fat, sort of jock guy who had a crazy life, and he worked on the oil rigs and stuff, and he'd have different people animate his stuff.
Or, you know, you had, uh, uh, um, you had Chester Brown, you had Seth, they were pretty- pretty middle-of-the-road, but you had, like, uh, the other guy in that trio, Matt Peepshow.
That- he did Peepshow.
What the hell was it called?
He did a- Fairweather Friends was another book he did.
But anyway, his was like his addiction to porn and breaking up with a girl and how he couldn't get it up for this girl.
Like there was some masculinity or some danger in it, you know?
Some puking and stuff.
But these comics today, they all have this same sort of vibe.
And it's this sad, big-headed person looking down and like going back to bed and snuggling a cat.
And saying I'm useless.
There's a real like, I'm a loser.
That's not what I'm talking about, Ryan.
But you like, I'm a loser and I'm so lazy and I just want to sit here with my cat and eat Cheetos and just like, I think I guess what I'm looking at is really fat, lonely people drawing skinny people, but maintaining the personality of the sad fatty.
So I hate that culture.
I hate that sort of I'm a baby thing.
And these peasant noobs were taking that to the boomer age.
Wait a minute.
They were 40s.
They were Gen X. They just had adopted boomer tendencies.
I guess I shouldn't have called them boomers.
Technically, they're my generation.
They may have even been younger than me, for all I know.
Boomer's a state of mind, man.
It's like punk.
You gotta, actually, punk, let's just settle it right now.
Yes, punk is a state of mind.
From the age of 13 till 21-ish?
You cannot be a 22-year-old punk.
Sorry.
If you're going on tour with, if you're Fat Mike, and you're on tour with a Mohawk, I mean, unless you're rancid and you're getting paid a million dollars, you are fucking ridiculous.
Age gracefully.
You can still wear Dr. Martens.
You can still wear short pants.
You can wear a Harrington and a Fred Perry.
You can even maybe wear suspenders, possibly?
But, like, blue hair and fucking neck tattoos and Rings?
With a corrosion of conformity thing?
Or even calling yourself a punk?
Punk till I die, man!
And going to punk shows?
That's not what it was about.
It was about, hope I die before I get old.
It was about live fast, die young.
Some people like, Die Snow took it a little too literally, but um...
Yeah, it was a youth culture movement.
The important word there being youth.
Anyway, sorry, I'm stretching that out.
That's not Harry Potter.
Harry Potter is for babies.
He's a wizard.
You know why J.K.
Rowling wrote that book?
Because her life sucked because she was a single mother who was broke.
I believe she was staying in a shelter.
And she felt bad because she clearly was negligent if she's living in a place like Scotland, especially Edinburgh, which is drowning in welfare.
So you already blew it by being a single mom, but you blew it again by not taking advantage of all their insane programs where they basically give you a house if you're on welfare and ending up in a shelter.
Maybe she was a fucking drug addict.
Oh my god!
Come to think of it, that book Has some intense creativity in it.
The kind of creativity you often get from a little thing called heroin.
Is it possible J.K.
Rowling wrote that book, which is basically Alice in Wonderland, which was written on opioids?
Is it possible she wrote that book high?
Are you allowed to ask that question?
J.K.
Rowling, the junkie mom of Britain.
Thanks, J.K.
So anyway, we're reading this junkie book.
But no, so she wrote that as a way for her son, whose life clearly sucked, she's in a cafe, I think I was at the cafe, not because I was a fucking Rowler, and I made up that word, Rowler, by the way, but because I was in Edinburgh at the time and it was just there and then on the wall I go, this is where she wrote the fucking book on heroin.
It is a thing, but it's not for J.K.
Rowling fans.
Oh.
Yeah.
You're only half listening, dude.
So you're slowing the pace of the show.
This is not exactly Joe Rogan's guy.
Joe Rogan's guy is paying attention.
Now, either pay attention 100% or 0%.
You're gonna fucking show me what a Rowler is?
Thank you.
What is a Rowler?
Now I have to know.
The word Rowler characterizes an individual with a frisky attitude.
Yada yada yada.
What?
That's a very gay word.
Look at the rowler giving the waitress a tough time.
That sounds like an 80-year-old being controversial.
We walked in there, and I'm gonna be frank with you, there was a couple of rowlers there.
You don't say!
Yeah, and I'm not adverse to a little bit of rowling once in a while.
So, She wrote that book as a way to say to him, I know this sucks, but here, go into this wonderful Neverland where you're actually secretly magic and you have to hide it.
And all these people around you at this cafe, they're muggles and they're normal people and you don't like them.
It's weird that these normies reading me the book are the enemies of Harry Potter in the story, right?
He's a magic guy who goes to a magic place where he goes to a magic school.
I guess he was also trying to make school seem fun.
And school was probably the nicest place he goes to, her son.
Now he's probably a cokehead lunatic with a Ferrari.
That'd be funny if you check in on J.K.
Rowling, son.
He's a total Chad douche with a blonde crew cut and gold chains.
He hangs out with Russian oligarchs and just only fucks trannies.
Anyway, um, so that's what the book was written for, and I resent adults living in children's fantasies.
It bores the shit out of me.
Like, you go to see Spider-Man, which, by the way, has also been ruined by affirmative action, and it has to be about political correctness, and in the last one they don't go into the Washington Monument because it was built by slaves.
What?
Why are you guys adding slavery to a Spider-Man story?
And I was at that movie, by the way, because I have kids, not because I was on my way to check out Spidey, not because my Spidey senses were tingling.
And Spider-Man was clearly made for seven-year-old nerds who get the crap beat out of them and feel like shit, and they want to pretend, just like Harry Potter, that they actually are secretly badasses who could kick the shit out of anyone they wanted to.
That's what's really going on here.
You go ahead and bully me.
Go ahead and break my glasses.
I could spin a web around you, turn you into a papoose, and then send you hurling against those bricks right through the wall and you'd all be dead.
Maybe that's what Columbine is.
They didn't read enough superhero comics.
Um, so yeah, it's for kids to fantasize.
Loser nerds to fantasize.
And I think that's very healthy.
You know, give these kids an out.
You're getting bullied and you don't want to talk to your parents about it?
Yeah, pretend you're Superman.
Awesome.
Love it.
But I'm an old guy now.
And if someone's beating me up, I'm either gonna beat them up or try to get some friends to help me beat this guy up who keeps beating me up.
Or call the police.
Not go home and pretend that I have a super suit.
Anyway, so we're in this car, in this child's, this single junkie mom's, and please don't sue me, JK Rowling, it's all conjecture, this is comedy, in this junkie single mom's fantasy world for a loser kid who lives in a shithole.
Doesn't interest me at all, but it gets worse.
So as she's reading this story about how, and you get up to the wall and you can't say the name and the way that the palace school is hidden is when you get near the wall you suddenly forget what you're doing and you turn around and like Dr. Seuss shit!
Not even cool fiction, like Lord of the Rings.
It's just little riddles, and oh, there's Voldemort, and Gribblegob, and oh, hi, Boggan, I'm Chibbles, oh, hello!
Like, they sound like breakfast cereals.
And as she's telling me the story, she goes, now you're probably going to get lost if you're not a Rowler, but my husband here will fill you in on some of the more complex details.
So she's reading and reading.
And by the way, here's the problem.
They lived, I think, in Westchester, which is, the way the suburbs works in New York is there's basically two.
There's Long Island, Which I think tends to be more blue-collar, Italian, Jewish, and then there's Westchester, which is also Jewish, but slightly more upper-middle class, and that's Protestants, and then you get more Connecticut, then you get more sort of William F. Buckley, Ann Coulter-y, kind of up the Westchester coast, Connecticut ways.
So, that's still pretty far out.
Of New York City, and I'm trying to get back to the city.
So I'm trying to ingratiate myself with them because they had implied that if things go well, they may dip down to the city.
So... I gotta kiss some ass.
So I go, alright, let's... let's go on the Potter train!
Yeah!
So they're telling the story, and then Harry walks into a room full of muggle warts.
And then the dad, they sort of close their eyes, smiling like, oh my god, this must sound so crazy to someone who's not familiar with muggle warts.
And so he sort of sighs, almost like it's him that's kooky.
Like if he was playing the guitar really awesomely, like Jimi Hendrix, he'd go...
Sorry, I kinda have been playing guitar my entire life, so yeah, I can kinda shred.
That's what I do.
I'm a shredder.
Don't put all important documents up my ass and I'll play the guitar and they'll get shredded.
That's how I roll.
That's how he's, that's his tone.
So he sort of smiles and he goes, muggle warts are things, and then I forget what it was, it's like things you can't see unless you're in a bad mood and then they fly up your nose and fart and then a giant orange tangerine lands in your hands which you got to eat and then you can fly for two days unless you fart and then you have to land again and apologize to a black crow with a human face.
Okay, got it.
That's a muggle wart.
Let's keep going with the story.
And I've got like books on tape and this is back before I had kids so I was into music and I got a million things I could be listening to.
I don't want to listen to you.
And of course it's just like sort of like when you have to go pee but you're feeling really lazy and you manage to put it off and put it off and put it off and the need to pee starts creeping up to the level of lazy.
And then once it exceeds X and Y becomes 3.7, well then you get up and you go pee, because it's easier.
So the lazy person would prefer to pee than to sit there and suffer in pain.
And I was suffering in pain.
So eventually I put on my headphones and I listened to whatever it was, and the way I said it was I go...
Um, I am, this book's great, and I'm not a huge Harry Potter guy though, and I'd hate you to take offense to this, but I really want to listen to something I've been listening to, podcast or whatever it was at the time.
So I was wondering if I could just sort of maybe put my headphones, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't, I don't, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine, that's fine.
That was an error.
Because I had said to them, you're peasant noobs.
And, uh, you're fucking gay.
In the 8th grade sense of the word.
I don't give a fuck what a mug award is.
I think you're both losers.
I think you have nothing to offer the world.
I'm totally disappointed that you're unable to hold a normal conversation.
Um...
You know, you go on a road trip with Tommy Robinson, you're stopping to get beers every four miles.
Could we get some beers in us?
Driver doesn't have to drink.
No, that's a- We could be pissing out the window.
We have to pee too bad.
I'm not asking for that much.
But this could have been so much.
And yeah, I don't care that you're a loser.
Like a nerd who's never done drugs or anything.
That's interesting too!
I mean, you probably have an aunt who got into trouble.
Tell me about that!
Or maybe you could interrogate me.
I got stories out the fucking wazoo!
Traveled all over the world, lived all over the world.
You want to hear about it?
I don't want to hear about muggle warts.
That's going backwards.
I actually hate fiction.
Because you're in someone else's brain.
That's like saying your imagination isn't good enough.
What?
You just made that up.
I'm not gleaning anything from that.
Like, if it was a true story, I'd go, yeah, I heard about this couple.
One day, John turned to her and he said, "Let's stop this lie.
I love you." What?
You just made that up.
I'm not gleaning anything from that.
Like if it was a true story, I'd go, "Yeah, I heard about this couple.
I mean, how can you be friends with someone that you're sexually attracted to and not try to close a deal at least once?
Oh, I actually knew someone like this, John.
Went to med school.
Really?
There must be something else going on there, though.
Maybe he's gay?
Like, there'd be... Like, the whole thing about humanity is memes.
And no, I don't mean a picture of Pepe the Frog with, uh, I'd like to rock below it.
That was a terrible meme I just invented.
I'm talking about the literal dictionary definition of the word meme, and that means to convey stories, and I've said this a million times, but bear with me.
If a lion eats a monkey, the monkey can't do anything about it when it- like, say a mon- oh, sorry.
Say a lion bites a monkey's foot off.
The monkey comes back to the tribe, the pack, and he points to his foot and screams and they go, oh, that seems- they express sympathy.
Maybe if they're super advanced they have some way to cauterize it with sap or something, I don't know.
And ideally the monkey lives, doesn't get infected.
They're probably a pretty good immune system to live out there in the jungle with all those bugs.
And no one learns anything.
If a human who has speech, which is basically all of humanity, I don't know how long we didn't have speech for, probably like three days.
If a human doesn't have a, gets his foot bitten off by a lion, he comes back and he goes, okay, guys.
You know those giant cats with the huge teeth?
Not friendly.
They may look cuddly, not friendly.
If we're gonna kill them, we have to do it from far away and have a really good escape plan that's in a tree or something.
Maybe drop a rock on their head, I don't know.
But even trees I think they can climb pretty good.
Alright, got it.
Now I have your experience.
Now I have been bitten by a tiger or a lion, and I know that.
And now, we have the printing press, you write that down, print it out five million times, now five million people know, be wary of tigers, be wary of giant cats, they're dangerous.
Stranger danger.
And that's why humans are better than everyone else.
That's why I'm a species supremacist.
Because we can have, like, infinite lifetimes in our one lifetime.
The more you read, the more stories you hear, the more experienced you are.
You could have lived all over the world if you talked to someone.
You get a bunch of different insights.
If you interviewed a hundred people who had lived in China, different parts in China, like white or, you know, Western people who spoke English perfectly and understood Western culture, and they could tell you, here's the thing about the Chinese.
They want to save face.
So, they say they fall off a scooter and they hit their knee and their knee's bleeding like crazy.
They won't go, AHHHHH!
OW!
MY FUCKING KNEE!
HELP!
They'll just stand there, stoic, suffering, waiting for the ambulance.
So you'll just be walking down the streets in Taipei.
This is me telling you a true story, by the way.
And you'll just see this 30-year-old woman there, holding her knee with blood pouring down her leg.
Just looking like she's just waiting for a bus, and she's waiting for an ambulance.
And I hated that, by the way, living in Taipei.
I'm Scottish, so I need to know what's going on.
Do you hate me?
I actually am happy to hang out if you hate me.
But I need to know that.
It doesn't hurt my feelings.
I have friends who don't like me.
Jay Johnson, in L.A.
Not a fan of the G. I'm a fan of the J.
He's funny.
But, like, say you're at a thing and people don't want you to be there, I'll just leave.
I don't care.
I don't want to waste my time, though, with, like, fake smiling and stuff.
That's a total and utter waste of time.
It's sort of like sex, too.
You'd be trying to seduce a woman, and there's that weird zone where they want you to try really hard, even though they're pretending they don't, but you also don't want to get charged with rape or anything Me Too.
Now, this is back in the early 2000s when I was single, so there wasn't this sort of, I didn't like it two years later kind of stuff.
So you'd push it and push it, and then you'd realize, alright, this is a no.
But I didn't like that game.
I'm just like, do you want to do it or not?
I mean, I'll pretend that, you know, I'm really pushing it, but I'd rather just, you know, snotted right now.
And if you don't want to, good, I don't want to fuck someone who doesn't want to fuck me.
That's not, that's why I could never get prostitutes.
Because it's someone who is so repulsed by you and your penis, she has to put a latex thing on it to put it in her mouth.
That's like it's a dare, and it's a frozen piece of poo.
I don't want my, my dick's not a frozen piece of poo.
I want you to be crying you want it so bad.
Anyway, in China, you never know how people feel.
So if you, like I taught English there for a while and I'd get fired and they just leave a note on the door saying, Ching Sau has gone to Hong Kong to be, do secretarial work.
Thank you.
We will not need your services.
Oh, okay.
Does that mean I'm fired?
Should I come back next week?
And then they had- I got paid in these little coupons that you take back to the head office.
So there was like two weeks of coupons stuck to the door.
Alright, I guess I'm fired?
Now I found out later I was fired because I was gossiping with her and talking about sexual things.
Now allow me to elaborate before you freak out.
Um...
She'd never talked, and she had pretty good English.
A lot of the English teaching there, and if you get really established, you get to these kind of clients, and it's easiest clients.
They speak 97% perfect English, but they want to learn things like swear words, they want to learn things like, you say it's 10 after, you say it's 20 after, but then you don't say it's 30 after, you say it's 12-30, and then you say it's 10-2, but you never say it's 42, right?
Those kind of things?
Or, you know, a bird in the hand, colloquialisms and all that.
So it was that kind of class.
But she was still really quiet.
And I don't know how we got here, but she started talking about the housewives and what they do, and a lot of them have, like, Louis Vuitton purses, but we're all secretaries and stuff, we don't really make money, and how do you get that?
And she said, well, some of these women are prostitutes.
Like, they will sleep with someone else's husband, and they'll get money.
And I'm like, what?! !
Totally thrilled to hear that.
I'm a big gossip fan.
That's a Scottish thing.
How you doing?
You alright?
Nosey as ever!
So I'm getting this crazy gossip that there's just these exchanges.
It's kind of like the 80s with the boomers, but it's a financial transaction.
Hello, I would like to make love to you.
I've noticed you're at work.
Oh, that sounds reasonable.
I'm not attracted to you.
I'm attracted, actually not even attracted to my husband, but if I was to make love to someone, it would be him.
I understand.
How about a monetary compensation for that?
Like, for example, a Louis Vuitton purse if I was allowed to put my penis in your body.
Yes.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
You can make love to me.
Alright.
And then there's a purse.
What the fuck?
That's the craziest thing I've ever heard.
What are you, people?
Robots?
Yes, kinda.
So we had a great sesh.
She was jabbering away.
And by the way, I was still at work the whole time.
So correcting her every time she says something wrong and it's pronounced Louis Vuitton and it's called anal, you know, no, it never got to that, but I'm correcting her.
So we're still at work.
So I thought it was a great sesh.
And I was kind of naive.
I was probably 20 at the time.
And, um, The husband must have overheard.
That's not appropriate behavior.
Which I'm realizing now that I'm 48.
Yeah, I agree with you, Dad.
I agree with you.
I don't want some guy in my house talking to my wife about women who have sex for money.
Yeah, you're not coming back.
I'm realizing now a quarter century later that, yeah, that's not fucking cool, Gav.
But just tell me.
Just go, that was really fucking inappropriate, dude.
You're in a man's house talking about women who have sex with other guys for money.
Get the fuck out of here.
And I'd go, oh shit, yeah, sorry, I never thought of that.
What am I doing?
So, uh, Uh, yeah.
I just like everything on the line.
But with them, with these two peasant noobs, with the Harry Potter stuff, I had to pretend I cared about them and their book.
And I just, just like having to go pee on the couch, I had to get up from the couch.
I'm sorry, I just can't take it anymore.
And they were pissed I'd insulted them.
And maybe I had brought to the forefront of their minds the possibility that what they're doing is really fucking lame.
I mean, I was scintillating at the beginning, and very nice and stuff, and I'm sure they must have respected my opinion a little bit.
It's not like I came in there chewing gum going, Hey, what's the biggest tits you ever seen in your life?
Like, not in a magazine or on a computer, I mean real life.
It's not like I was that guy.
So they sort of kept reading and I hope, you know what, I hope it occurred to them that their Harry Potter book was ridiculous and at the very least listen to a book on tape and at the very least listen to a book on tape that's of your demographic, of your age group, and at the very least make it a nonfiction book.
Jesus Christ, you guys could be, it's four hours we're in here.
I was probably listening to something very educational So we get there and they drop me off in Westchester.
I think I split the... I think it was 400 bucks for the car.
You know, last-minute stuff.
And a drop-off was more expensive, so I gave them 200.
And then they drop me off in the middle of fucking Westchester, and I have to take a taxi home, and that's a hundred bucks.
So 300 bucks.
I was pissed, and I was new to New York, so I didn't realize the suburbs are still a hundred dollars away from the city.
And I guess one of the reasons I don't really tell this story that much is because the ending doesn't exist.
They just pull over and they say, thank you, goodbye.
They're still pissed, by the way.
Just like those Chinese people that I talk sexy to.
They were annoyed.
That I didn't like Harry fucking Potter.
What is going on in America where we are so into... This is the two things we're into.
Nazis are everywhere and little kids' culture rules.
And of course they conflate with, I think, two Star Wars ago where one of the writers said, in case he tweets out, in case there's any doubt, the Death Star is white supremacy.
And the fucking Jedis, whatever they're called, are the resistance.
It's like what Jim Goetz says, how brave.
How brave you are to be against Nazis.
What else are you, against pain and Mondays?
I hate divorce.
I hate cancer.
I hate leukemia.
I hate when kids get cancer.
I want to resist that.
Actually, they do do that.
They say, fuck cancer.
Oooh.
Cancer's shit in a brick, dude.
I have some bad news for you guys on that front.
Cancer is a well-funded... It's doing great.
As far as the money, it's a multi-trillion dollar industry, and no one wants cancer.
Everyone is freaking the fuck out about it.
So it is replete with funding.
It's doing great.
Prostate cancer could probably do better.
Breast cancer is sort of the winner as far as income goes.
But it's trillions and trillions of dollars.
They are drowning in cash.
They have state-of-the-art labs.
Their labs look like that, like CSI Miami, where they have those rooms where they can reenact the blood splatters.
And then they have another room where they can trace the paper of the wine bottle where it was manufactured.
Whenever I watch that show, I'm like, maybe these taxpayers don't quite need to be spending billions of dollars on the local Miami police lab.
It is a little too elaborate.
I don't need to know the paper of the wine.
You know what?
Let the killer go.
If it saves us two billion, let the guy with the wine paper go and we'll just catch the guy who still has the gun in his hand.
That's probably 99.9% of criminals anyway.
So when you have a marathon for your friends, and you have fuck cancer on your shirt, and I'm glad it brings you all together, but it is a totally meaningless gesture, and I feel mean saying this, but when you raise a thousand dollars, and then all your friends together manages to raise three, and the whole marathon Which probably cost about $40,000, manages to raise $70,000.
Well, your net is $30,000.
And $30,000 is a grain of sand on the income of the cancer industry.
Yeah, the budget for the cancer industry.
Now, I'm not saying that's bad.
Good.
I don't want cancer.
Have a bunch of sand.
If there's one thing I want people are spending my money on, It's cancer research.
Go bananas.
I'm not saying that they're rich and they drive limos.
I'm just saying you donating to that is like you, if you, if you like Trump and you send him 20 bucks, thanks.
Don't give any money to the government, Trump or otherwise.
You're throwing money in a paper shredder.
Remember Obama with Iraq?
I think he lost a pallet of, look that up, Ryan.
Obama, it was in Iraq or something, and there was just a giant pallet, I think it had... I always screw this up, 300 million, 3 billion?
It was 3 billion.
Just a pallet of cash!
Just left on some dumb Iraqi road.
Yeah, that was it, 3... 3 billion!
So you're like, I'm going to help out.
Oh, my son mowed a bunch of lawns and he's got the money.
He's going to send it to Trump.
Trump, Obama, the government doesn't know what they're doing with their money.
And they always do this too.
They go, you know, the schools need money.
If we could all pitch in.
It doesn't work like that.
It's like Indian tribes.
The money just stays at the top in the administration.
It never makes it to the actual reservation.
If you give a school money, it doesn't go to a kid getting a new calculator.
It goes to some bullshit administration.
Some of these principals and administrators are making hundreds of thousands of dollars.
School chancellors or whatever the fuck they're called.
Burn the whole thing to the ground.
It should be all charter schools.
Privatize the whole thing.
So yeah.
The reason I brought up this couple is not just because they were annoying, but because it's a general trend.
We're infantilized.
We're a bunch of wrinkled teenagers stuck in the past playing video games, grown men playing Fortnite, reading Harry Potter.
It's kind of the same as bitching about Nazis.
Bitching about Nazis is like teenager stuff.
I did it.
We used to fight Nazi skinheads.
The Nazis weren't... You know what it really was?
The punk kids fighting the Nazis?
It was middle-class kids fighting blue-collar kids.
The Nazi skinheads that were in my town were basically orphans, single moms, neglected.
They didn't have... They didn't read Mein Kampf.
And have this big agenda.
They just wanted to be shocking and mean and they kind of wanted revenge on society.
And we were rich kids who I think felt guilty that, you know, rich middle class.
We were middle class kids that felt guilty that our parents grew up blue collar and were tough and had a hardscrabble life and we'd have nothing but luxury and a swimming pool and a waterbed.
So we wanted some grit in our lives.
I think that's the same with Antifa today.
They feel bad about their middle class upbringing and they want to get punched in the face.
They want some culture.
And so it was almost like an S&M relationship because we would go to these Nazis and we would get beat up.
So they would give us the culture we needed and they would get the revenge we needed.
It was almost like a symbiotic relationship.
Supply and demand.
I need abuse because my life's been too good.
You need revenge because your life has sucked too much.
I had the childhood that you always wanted.
I had two loving parents that were always there for me and I was never for want of anything I needed.
Although I was, for want of a lot of shit, I wanted like a fucking bionic man and my mom got me Oscar Goldman and his fucking boss.
So my toys sucked, by the way.
That's the problem with being middle class when your parents grew up poor.
You get, for Christmas, you get like a soccer ball.
That's it.
My friend Tom Williams, he got a bag of chips.
One of his presents was a large bag of ketchup chips.
Wrapped!
So you do a tiny bit of suffering when you're the middle class parents of poor people.
I mean the middle class children of poor parents.
But it's not quite being a Nazi orphan.
So they, we would, they would get their, their, you know, anger out on us.
It kind of worked out in the end.
It was totally frivolous and had nothing to do with politics.
It was about as political as the Mods and the Rockers fighting in Brighton Beach in the sixties.
It was apolitical.
It was Ottawa, Canada.
There was no immigrants or Jews or anyone to be racist to.
It's all like Scotch-Irish immigrants.
Few American, I was going to say a few American Indians, few natives.
So yeah, please just grow up.
Goodbye.
It's hard to imagine, but right here in our community, there are families living out of their cars, parents skipping meals so their kids will have enough to eat, and folks who can't afford electricity.
But you can help them win these battles against poverty by giving to The Salvation Army, where your donations give struggling families the support they need to stay afloat.
Want to join this fight for good?
Please visit SalvationArmy.ListenAndGive.org to make a donation.
