I Hate Everyone...Starting With Me (21 page)

There are a million TV movies and documentaries about thrill seekers who feel the need to climb Mount Everest. I’m not one of those people. I’m the kind of people who needs to
watch
those TV specials, but only to see the climbers either freeze to death or plunge thousands of feet off a cliff. If I ever feel the need to climb a mile-high summit I’ll mount Kevin James.

I’ll cut Sir Edmund Hillary some slack because he wasn’t an adventurer or thrill seeker. Everyone knows he was the first person to reach the summit of Mount Everest. What most people don’t know is that he only did it to get away from his wife, Lady Esther Crooker, the Duchess of Nagging.

I hate Annie Oakley.
Okay, maybe
hate
is too strong a word. I don’t hate her, I resent her. Yes, she was a great markswoman and could shoot a dime out
of midair from ninety feet away. Color me impressed. But what were the practical applications of this ability? Was America under attack by swarms of flying dimes at the time? If Annie wanted to do something useful, why didn’t she learn how to shoot pennies out of the air? Everyone hates pennies. They’re useless.

Aileen Wuornos was an even better shot than Annie Oakley—she could shoot a john in the head from fifty feet while counting her cash
and
putting her stained pants back on
at the same time
. Where’s
her
Broadway show?

I hate nudists,
because the people most likely to waltz around naked are the last people in the world who should ever be waltzing around naked. The only people more disgusting to look at than nudists are swingers. In both cases they’re giving it away for free because nobody wants to buy it. You don’t see men who look like George Clooney flashing their bits on a nude beach; you see men who look like Rosemary Clooney.

I hate the Boy Scouts of America.
Nothing pisses me off more than having some pimple-faced kid offer to help me cross the street. Keep your dirty mitts off me, tent boy, or I’ll hit you with my walker. Boy Scouts are taught totally useless survival skills, like campfire making and whittling. Who whittles anymore? Last I heard, all of that Ozark/hillbilly craftwork had been outsourced to China and now Pappy Foo Yong whittles ashtrays and pipes for eight cents a
day on a porch in Yangtze. The only good thing the Scouts do is teach the boys knot-tying skills, which will come in handy because they’re all probably closet cases. I hope that someday the Boy Scouts of America get on the reality train and start giving out merit badges for fisting and nipple torture.

I hate the wilderness families on television.
Every rustic ranch family is portrayed as hardscrabble workin’ folk, who believe in a day’s work for a day’s pay. I believe in a day’s work for a month’s pay, plus residuals and, if it’s a feature, points. Do you remember
Bonanza
? It was about a widowed father (Lorne Greene) and his three relentlessly unmarried sons (Dan Blocker, Pernell Roberts and Michael Landon) who operated the Cartwright family cattle ranch. There were no womenfolk around, just an Asian servant named Hop Sing whose family died when Dan Blocker sat on them. The Cartwrights worked together, played together and fought together. They were America’s last frontiersmen, carving a new nation out of the unforgiving earth of a vast continent. Oddly enough, Lorne Greene and Michael Landon were Jewish. Jewish cowboys? “Watch it, folks. That murderous sidewinder Tex Blickstein is comin’ to town tonight with his six-shooter and his tax attorney and he’s gonna want to see everybody’s federal return from the past five years!”

Because
Bonanza
was such a hit, Michael Landon went on to do another show called
Little House on the Prairie
about illiterates living in piles of their own
horses’ shit. I hated it! Mom and Pop and all the young’uns roughin’ it in a little town with a church, a barn and a store. That’s right,
store
. Singular. Not stores or malls or outlets—a store. Plus, the church hadn’t even been converted into a gay nightclub yet—the townspeople were still using it for worship services. Who does that?!? If I want to spend time in a little town with only one church and one store I’ll go to East Hampton.
Little House
was on the air for 245 years, and every time the ratings sagged either one of the kids would go blind or Ma Ingalls would shit out another brat with a biblical name. What was really creepy was that they all lived in a one-room cabin, so whenever Ma and Pa got to feeling frisky all the kids in the family had to listen. Ma Ingalls was like the Kate Gosselin of her time, except fewer people hated Ma Ingalls’s guts because they didn’t have Internet back then. The only thing I liked about
Little House
was the relationship the mother had with her daughters, which, on a scale of one-to-Joan Crawford, was an eight.

Since the advent of cable and the Internet there are hundreds of shows about nature and gardening and the outdoors; in fact there are entire networks devoted to useless programming, like the Discovery Channel and the Nature Channel and
OWN
.

The only good thing about nature is that it takes its course, and in that regard human beings could learn a thing or two. When animals get old and sick they go off into the woods to die; they don’t burden their families with private nursing and hospice care. When was
the last time you heard a gray wolf say, “Jimmy, we’re not gong to be able to send you to college because Nana can’t clean her paws by herself anymore, so we’re going to have to use your college tuition money to provide for an assisted living lair.” If dying birds can fly to distant mountaintops to die, then certainly old people can fly in formation a lot farther than Boca Raton.

There are a lot of natural occurrences for which there is no explanation, like the northern lights or migratory birds’ travel patterns. But there are others which, while easily explained, are just not that fucking interesting.

Judy Garland, Kermit the Frog and Jesse Jackson may have loved rainbows for their mystical, magical qualities, but not me. When I think of a rainbow I think of a family of five driving down the highway in a storm when all of sudden the sun comes out and little Susie in the back seat yells, “Hey, everybody, look—a rainbow!” And they all look up at the pretty colors in the sky. And drive under the truck in front of them, killing four and leaving little Susie in critical yet stable condition.

Seismologists say earthquakes occur when giant plates under the sea shift and create a disaster. Similar to what occurs in Las Vegas when the giant plates in Wayne Newton’s mouth shift. Because I spend half my time in California, earthquakes don’t really bother me. In fact, I hope that the next time there’s a quake my house slides into a better neighborhood. And FYI, I hate the assholes who say, “Stand in a doorway during an earthquake; you’ll be safe.” Sure. And I’ll hide in the pantry when they drop a hydrogen bomb.

Niagara Falls bores me; the only people who find it fascinating are honeymooners and the suicidal. If you can get a suicidal honeymooner to go, then it might be worth my making the schlep. For years daredevils used to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel or wearing flotation devices to see if they would survive the fall. The last person to survive a fall over the Horseshoe Falls part of Niagara was a forty-year-old-man named Kirk Jones, of Stupidville, USA. He went over the falls with only the clothes on his back. What a schmuck; they weren’t even waterproofed.

It’s just a giant crack that has thousands of people inside of it every year. Do your own Snooki joke. (Do I have to do everything for you?)

They eat grass and produce milk. Why not challenge these biological marvels? Feed them aluminum and steel and see if they can come up with a Mercedes or a Humvee.

Rain forests are essential to Earth’s ecosystem, but since the only time I spend outdoors is walking from my plastic surgeon’s office to the parking lot, I really don’t give a shit about our global ecosystem. When I hear the words “rain forest” I think of three things: humidity, humidity, humidity. Have you ever been to the Amazon? Frizz central. Every baboon has split ends. Which, coupled with the thumbs on the feet and the purple ass, is not a good look.

Not only is there a broken heart for every light on Broadway, but a broken cherry, too. I know; I “lost” my virginity 163 times. I spent more time on my back than Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel and all I’ve managed to do is fuck my way to the middle and end up with a vaginal canal that seats ten.

I hate that the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences calls itself the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Any institution, organization or body that includes Carrot Top, Gallagher and the guy from the
Jackass
movies in its membership is neither an art nor a science.

I hate that the Academy Awards ceremony calls itself “The night Hollywood honors its own.”
When are these fuckers not honoring their own? These people have more award ceremonies than Mia Farrow has children. Other professions don’t carry on like this. When was the last time you saw a TV awards show for proctologists? “And the winner of best supporting finger is… Dr. Murray Weinstein, for his fine work in Marvin Schissel’s ass.”

I hate the SAG Awards,
even though they were named for my boobs. The show always opens with some of the stars in attendance looking directly into the camera and saying, pretentiously, and with ridiculous amounts of fake gravitas, “I’m Robert De Niro and I’m an
act-or!
I’m Denzel Washington and I’m an
act-or!
I’m Christian Bale and I’m an
act-or!
” Calm the fuck down. You’re actors. You’re not curing cancer or solving the Middle East crisis or buying smiles for those one-toothed cleft palate kids on the back of the
Enquirer
. You pretend you’re Batman. You wear tight pants and a cape and you pretend you’re saving Gotham City from the Penguin. Get a grip.

I hate Christian Bale.
This is nothing personal. I hate all men named Christian.

I hate the Emmy Awards ceremony.
It’s just an evening to honor actors who are too old, short, homely or uninsurable to work in movies anymore. I keep mine on the mantel above my fireplace.

I hate the Tony Awards show.
I can’t get booked anywhere that night because every gay man in the world is at the fucking Tonys.

I hate agents, managers, lawyers and publicists (except mine, of course).
For those of you not familiar with show business, imagine a large, hideous vulture with wet lips and a pinkie ring circling around, picking bones. Now imagine the carcass isn’t dead yet, just between projects or waiting for a green light from the network. In a nutshell, here’s what these showbiz hangers-on do: Your agent is supposed to protect you from unemployment and poverty; your manager is supposed to protect you from your agent; and your lawyer is supposed to protect you from your new cellmate, because jail is where you’ve landed after your agent and manager fucked up. And your publicist is there to make sure that your misfortune is somehow spun properly so that even though your career is done, she’ll be able to benefit from your troubles and move up the PR food chain and get really big clients, like Leonardo DiCaprio or Tom Cruise or the Taco Bell dog.

I hate actors who don’t admit their age.
Goldie Hawn came up to a friend of mine one day and said, “Can you believe I’m a grandmother?” The answer is: Yes! You’re sixty-six fucking years old; you could be a great-grandmother. If you were Puerto Rican you could be a great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.
Laugh-In
was fifty years ago; move on.