Let Me Off at the Top!: My Classy Life and Other Musings (21 page)

In the end I didn’t need forty billion dollars. I gave most of it away. Some of it went to my favorite charities, Candy Canes for the World and Dolphins for Children. I gave about twenty billion to Iceland because I did feel in a way that I ruined their economy, and gosh darn it if that country just doesn’t intrigue the hell out of me. It’s a whole land of ice, where ice people live in ice houses. I’ve never met anyone from Iceland but I would imagine them to be about eight feet tall with long pointy noses and blue skin. I would visit, but no way. I hate the cold.

Today I’m as comfortable as a man of my advanced age
can be. I enjoy cooking and lying out by the pool in the nude. I enjoy that my neighbor Warren Moon and his friends can clearly see me out by the pool in the raw and there’s really nothing he can do about it. Occasionally the old gang gets back together to reminisce, sing show tunes and take in a bum fight. Every Christmas I drive by Wes Mantooth’s house and throw a brick though his window. He returns the favor every Easter … with the same brick! Most mornings Veronica and I can be seen bouncing up and down the coast on our Jet Skis. Most nights we can be seen bouncing up and down by the pool. I still breed labradoodles for anyone who wants them. I’m good friends with Reba McEntire. My long-standing feud with Oscar Mayer meats is over. They were right and I was wrong. My steak knife collection is very famous. I have many honorary degrees but wouldn’t say no to a few more. There’s nothing so bad on God’s green earth that can’t be made good by a tall glass of scotch.

Well, that’s the end. I know I did a lot of bragging in the beginning about the greatness of this book. Those are just the kinds of straight-faced lies we authors tell you people to get you to read a pile of garbage. Frankly I really thought I had a huge pile of garbage on my hands but I’ve just read it over and I have to admit something to myself: I’m a great book writer. Will I get the Nobel Prize for this baby? Probably not—maybe an outside chance if a couple of guys die, but probably not. Is it worthy of a Pulitzer? You bet. It really turned out to be a great book that I’m sure will be required reading in colleges for years to come. Oh sure, somewhere down the road it will lose favor with intellectuals and go through a period of neglect, but then some smart professor will find it again
and resurrect its greatness and there it will sit on the highest throne with the greatest books of all time. I can accept that fate for this little book.

Before I end it though I thought I’d share a final thought. There’s a lot of anger out there. I feel it in the streets. I see it every day on the roadways and in the air. I guess we’re a pretty angry bunch of idiots all around. Why is that? Why does mankind hate his brother? Is it as simple as some people have got stuff that other people want? I don’t know, but I’ve got a lot of stuff—Jet Skis and trampolines and football-shaped phones—and sometimes my anger still gets the best of me. I don’t think it’s just about the stuff. I think, if you really get down to it, we are angry because we are scared. Scared of what? Well, I’m scared of children and elephants. I’m also scared of losing and, heck, I’ll say it, I’m scared of dying. When you think about lying in that mud hole and someone shoveling dirt on you, it makes you angry. You start to think, “I don’t have as much as I want! I’m not doing what I want to do! I’m not being who I want to be!” Well, it takes courage to do what you want and be who you want to be, and it takes courage to admit you’re afraid. I’m afraid all the time. It’s hard to say it but I’m afraid right now, afraid an elephant is going to come crashing into my den and crush me. It’s a very real fear. The way I deal with it is by staying classy. That’s the best medicine of all. If you’re busy going about doing what you want to do and being who you want to be, unafraid of what everyone else thinks, you’ll be classy too. Sure, the other guy has a flying car and a camera in his watch, but you can
have something better. You can have class. Stay classy, America. You know I will.

Ron Burgundy

One other thing: The last time I wore a swimsuit while swimming was June 8, 1976. Had that in my notes and it didn’t fit anywhere in the book, so I just added it on. Stay classy.