Brain Droppings (5 page)

GEORGE CARLIN
and uncomplicated life. And that’s when the phone rings. It’s a lawyer. It seems your aunt has died .. . and left you all her stuff. Oh no! Now whaddya do? Right. You do the only thing you can do. The honorable thing. You tell the lawyer to stuff it.

Think of how much information, in the form of radio energy, there is flying through the air, all around us, all over the world, right now and all the time. AM, FM, UHF, VHF, shortwave radio, television, CB radio, walkie-talkies, cell phones, cordless phones, telephone satellites, microwave relays, faxes, pagers, taxi calls, police, sheriff, hospitals, fire departments, telemetry, navigation, radar, the military, government, Financial, legal, medical, the media, etc., etc., etc. Trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of separate little bits of electronic information flying all around the world through the air at all times. Think of that. Think of how busy the air is. Now realize this: A hundred years ago there was none. None. Silence.
HEnTAl BRAIH TH0U6HTS

These are the things I think about when I’m sitting home alone and the power goes out:

If something in the future is canceled, what is canceled? What has
really happened? Something that didn’t occur yet is now never going
to occur at all. Does that qualify as an event? ;i

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i

There’s a place you’ve never seen, but for many years you’ve pictured it in your mind. Then you finally see it. After you leave, do you continue to picture it the old way?

Imagine a place called Moravia; a nonexistent country. See it in your mind. See a few details. OK, now Moravia ceases to exist. Is your picture of the original, nonexistent country different from what it looks like now that it ceases to exist? Why? They’re both nonexistent.

OK, picture Moravia again, the original way. Now Moravia is invaded by a neighboring country, Boronia. Picture Boronia. It’s completely different from Moravia. Different geography, different ethnic stock, beliefs, way of life, government, everything. See it? Anyway, Boronia invades Moravia and occupies it, and begins to make some changes. Now picture Moravia again. Does it look different? Isn’t that weird? It looks a little like Boronia.

Here’s another one. You’ve never been to your friend’s place of work, but you’ve pictured it. Then he changes jobs, but it’s a similar job. Do you bother to change your mental picture of where he works? By how much?

Or your friend works at one Wendy’s and gets transferred to a different Wendy’s. Do you picture a whole new Wendy’s? Or do you get lazy and say, “They’re all pretty much the same, so I’ll just go with the old one.”

If a radio station changes its call letters, moves its studio across town, hires all new disk jockeys, and changes the style of music it plays, but keeps the same frequency, is it still the same radio station? Suppose they change only the music?

On a given day, Flight 23 goes from New York to Los Angeles. The following month, Flight 23 goes from New York to Los Angeles again,

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I R C E CARL

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droppings

IHE EVER WRDR THIS SEHTEHCE BEFORE
in the Feast of St. Stephen, I was driving my hearse to the whole-iverwurst outlet when suddenly a hermaphrodite in a piano truck sd out of a crackhouse driveway, and, as my shoes caught fire, I letted across Boris Karloff Boulevard, slapping the truckdriver six > in the loins with a Chattanooga road map, even though he was ming “The Pussycat Song.”
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3eople say, “I’m going to sleep now,” as if it were nothing. But it’s y a bizarre activity. “For the next several hours, while the sun is ;, I’m going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command ? everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will me my life.”
[f you didn’t know what sleep was, and you had only seen it in a nee fiction movie, you would think it was weird and tell all your ids about the movie you’d seen.
“They had these people, you know? And they would walk around lay and be OK? And then, once a day, usually after dark, they ild lie down on these special platforms and become unconscious. y would stop functioning almost completely, except deep in their ds they would have adventures and experiences that were comely impossible in real life. As they lay there, completely vulnera-to their enemies, their only movements were to occasionally shift n one position to another; or, if one of the ‘mind adventures’ got

too real, they would sit up and scream and be glad they weren’t unconscious anymore. Then they would drink a lot of coffee.”

So, next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you’re in a science fiction movie. And whisper, “The creature is regenerating itself.”
FUCK THE FARnER8

Can someone please tell me why farmers are always whining and looking for a handout? If it isn’t a drought or a flood, it’s their bad loans. I was always told farmers were strong, independent people who were too proud to accept help. But sure enough as soon as something goes wrong, they’re looking for the government to bail them out. And they’re the first ones to complain about city people who live on welfare. Fuck the farmers. They’re worrying about losing their land? It wasn’t their land to begin with, they stole it from the Indians. Let ‘em find out what it feels like to have your land taken away by some square-headed cocksucker who just came over on a boat. They wiped out the bears, the wolves, and the mountain lions; they spoiled the land, poisoned the water table, and they produce tasteless food. Why is it in this capitalist society all businesses are expected to succeed or fail on their own except farming? Why is that?
SnOKE IF YA GOT ‘EH

Even though I don’t smoke, I’m not one of those fanatics you run into. In fact, I love watching cigarette smokers in their sad little sealed-off areas, sucking away, deep lines in their faces, precancerous lesions taking hold, the posture and body language of petty criminals. You know what you do with these people? Give ‘em free cigarettes. Let ‘em smoke. Offer them a light! And you hope each one of them

EORCE CARLIN
ts a small, painful tumor right in the middle of his body so it can ow in six different directions at once. And you pray they get a doc-r who doesn’t believe in painkillers, and their insurance runs out. I ink people should be allowed to enjoy themselves.
LAHE IT On THE BOSSA nOVA

They try to blame movies and TV for violence in this country, hat a load of shit. Long before there were movies and television, mericans killed millions of Indians, enslaved millions of blacks, aughtered 700,000 of each other in a family feud, and attained the ghest murder rate in history. Don’t blame Sylvester Stallone. We ?ought these horrifying genes with us from Europe, and then we ive them our own special twist. American know-how!

Violent American movies like Die Hard, Terminator, and Lethal leapon do very well in places like Canada, Japan, and Europe. Very well. et these countries do not have nearly the violence of the United States. 11989, in all of Japan, with a population of 150 million, there were 754 mrders. In New York City that year, with a population of only 7.5 mil-on, there were 2,300. It’s bred in the bone. Movies and television don’t lake you violent; all they do is channel the violence more creatively.

Americans even manage to turn positive experiences into vio->nce. Like sports championships. In Detroit, in 1990, the Pistons won le NBA championship: eight people dead. The Chicago Bulls, 1993: ine shot, 1,000 arrested. Montreal, the Canadiens, 1993: 170 injured, 7 police cars vandalized, and $10 million in damages. I’m glad it’s Lappened in a place like Montreal, so these bigoted shit stains who all in on sports-talk shows can’t blame it all on the blacks.

brain droppings

I could mention plenty of things that contribute to violence. One . simply the condition of being violent; the predisposition. Everyone knows this is a cranky species. It’s especially well known among the other species. And most people can see that the particular strain of critter found in America is especially prone to graceless outbursts, being, as we are, a collection of all the strange and restless castoffs and rolling stones who proved such an ill fit back home. God bless them all, and give them all the guns they want.

Two other things that contribute to violence are religion and government, because they seek to repress and regulate natural impulses like sex and self-gratification. Of course, the two of them will always try to scapegoat movies and television. The truth is, no one knows enough or cares enough to stop the real violence, so their answer is to tone down the pretend violence. It’s superstition: “Maybe if we tone down the pretend violence, the real violence will go away. Or not seem so bad.”

And maybe the father who forbids his son to watch violent television will not beat the shit out of him when he disobeys.
Maybe.
I”

A man is seated in a football stadium with a small TV set tuned to the game. The sideline camera takes his picture, and his image travels through the lens, out of the camera, to the truck, to the satellite, to a ground station several miles away, back into the air, and to the man’s TV set.

He sees himself on the screen. The image travels from his eyes to his brain. His brain sends a signal to his arm to start waving. The image travels to the camera, through the lens, to the truck, to the satellite, to another ground station a thousand miles away where it is

EORGE CARLIN
:ransmitted into the air and picked up by a cable company that nds it to the man’s parents’ TV set.

The image travels from the screen to his mother’s eyes, along the >tic nerve to her brain, where it references her memory and recog-tion takes place. Her brain then sends a series of signals to her ngs, throat, lips, and tongue, and she says, “Look, it’s Mike!”
Baseball is different from any other sport; very different.

For instance, in most sports you score points or goals; in baseball you score runs.

In most sports the ball, or object, is put in play by the offensive team; in baseball the defensive team puts the ball in play, and only the defense is allowed to touch the ball. In fact, in baseball if an offensive player touches the ball inten- tionally, he’s out; sometimes unintentionally, he’s out.

Also: In football, basketball, soccer, volleyball, and all sports played with a ball, you score with the ball, and without the ball you can’t score. In baseball the ball prevents you
from scoring.

In most sports the team is run by a coach; in baseball the team is run by a manager; and only in baseball does the manager (or coach) wear the same clothing the players do. If you had ever seen John Madden in his Oakland Raiders football uniform, you would know the reason for this custom.
Now, I’ve mentioned football. Baseball and football arel
K the two most popular spectator sports in this country. And,r
as such, it seems they ought to be able to tell us something)

brain droppings
about ourselves and our values. And maybe how those values have changed over the last 150 years. For those reasons, I enjoy comparing baseball and football:
Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game. Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.

Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. The baseball park!

Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.
Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall, when everything is dying.
In football you wear a helmet. In baseball you wear a cap.
Football is concerned with downs. “What down is it?” Baseball is concerned with ups. “Who’s up? Are you up? I’m not up! He’s up!”
In football you receive a penalty. In baseball you make an error.
In football the specialist comes in to kick.
In baseball the specialist comes in to relieve somebody.
Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting, and unnecessary roughness. Baseball has the sacrifice.

GEORGE C A R L I N

Football is played in any kind of weather: Rain, snow, 6 sleet, hail, fog … can’t see the game, don’t know if there is a game going on; mud on the field . .. can’t read the uniforms, can’t read the yard markers, the struggle will continue!

In baseball if it rains, we don’t go out to play. “I can’t go ^ out! It’s raining out!”
Baseball has the seventh-inning stretch. Football has the two-minute warning.
Baseball has no time limit: “We don’t know when it’s
gonna end!”
Football is rigidly timed, and it will end “even if we have
to go to sudden death.”
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In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there’s a kind of picnic feeling. Emotions may run high or low, but there’s not that much unpleasantness.

In football, during the game in the stands, you can be . sure that at least twenty-seven times you were perfectly capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.

And finally, the objectives of the two games are completely different:
i In football the object is for the quarterback, otherwise
known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aer-

brain droppings