The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass (5 page)

SENIOR, BITE US

 

New Rule:
When a woman over sixty has a baby, it’s not a miracle from God. It’s a miracle from genetic engineers, fertility experts, and the good people at Merck. Here in California, a sixty-two-year-old woman, with eleven children, twenty grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren, gave birth. Again. To a forty-year-old man who walked out. At an age when most women are content to putter around the garden or perform the opening number at the Grammys, Janice Wulf, age sixty-two, told the press at a news conference, “Age is a number. Every time you revolutionize something, there’s going to be naysayers.” To which the reporters replied, “We’re over here.”

And lady, you’re not a revolutionary. You’re a vagina with no off switch. Twelve kids? Lemme guess: You’re either a Catholic or a hamster.

Look, I don’t want to be the one to say that this lady is too old and she’s already had enough children, but this lady is too old and she’s already had enough children! Hey, when you’re sixty-two and you want children, you have two choices: (a) in vitro fertilization, or (b) luring them into a house made out of candy.

I wouldn’t make such a big thing out of it, but it turns out Mrs. Wulf is not the first over-sixty-year-old to have a baby in the last decade—there is a virtual epidemic of granny sluts who insist on squeezing out children who, when they get a little older, will face many uncomfortable moments, like when it’s parents’ day at school and the kid shows up with an urn.

Why is creating life, under any conditions whatsoever, so applauded when there are already millions of unwanted kids around the world? And Angelina Jolie can’t save them all. In fact, someone’s gotta tell Angie that sometimes when you go to a foreign country—it’s okay just to bring home a T-shirt.

 

 

 

—February 24, 2006

 

HYPE-OCHONDRIA

 

New Rule:
Drug companies have to stop making up diseases. I don’t know what the terrorists are planning next for America, but if I had every problem they talk about in medicine commercials—breathing, lifting, walking, sitting, sleeping, crapping, not crapping, getting a boner, and male pattern menopause—I’d welcome death. Bring it on. Deadly nerve gas? Please, I’ve got seasonal allergies!

It seems like every time I turn on the TV these days I see some ad for some drug I never heard of to treat some disease I never heard of. That’s not a stomachache you have from eating the chili-cheese fries at Johnny Rockets, it’s irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS. Or, as I call it, BS. Which would also apply to the dreaded social anxiety disorder, or, as we used to call it, shyness—and we treated it with an old home remedy: scotch and water.

Your wife doesn’t get turned on? It couldn’t be because you’re a snowman-shaped sausage casing so full of beer you sweat hops. It’s because she has female sexual dysfunction. And before they came up with restless leg syndrome, did it even exist? Did you ever hear someone say, “Sorry I couldn’t make the party, Bill, the old restless leg was acting up”?

I’m waiting for the ad that tells me my morning hard-on is actually superfluous rigidity syndrome, or SRS, and has a cartoon bunny who says, “Are you bothered by morning stiffness? Try Flaccidix. Flaccidix is specially formulated to make your penis shiny and more manageable. Side effects? You bleed from your pores, then explode and die. And/or dry mouth.”

 

 

—April 28, 2006