You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About (6 page)

This is why the immense popularity of
Fifty Shades of Grey
is actually great news for men. It’s a signal from the female gender—not unlike the one broadcast by Shawna—transmitting an exciting and encouraging message to men everywhere: “We
are
interested in sex! We’re just not interested in sex with
you
unless you’re a superhot billionaire.”

OK, so this is not a
totally
positive message for us men. But we can work with it! We can interpret it to mean that women would like their sex lives to be more interesting. Maybe they wish that we would be more obsessive and stalkerish. Maybe they even secretly fantasize about engaging in unconventional, even “kinky,” sexual activities. There is only one way to find out, men: You need to have an honest, “no holds barred” conversation about sex with the special woman in your life. I did this with my wife, and as difficult as this was for me, I’m glad I did because it was very revealing. Here’s the complete transcript:

Me:
Hey, do you secretly want me to tie you up and flog you?

My wife:
No.

Yes, communication is the key to a successful relationship. That, and not peeing in the shower. That’s pretty much all the advice I have for you men. In
a word:
Be sensitive.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, my inner god needs to turn on the TV and watch huge men knock each other down.

I
hate my mail.

There was a time when I liked getting mail. I’m talking maybe twenty years ago—a simple, primitive time when you could not even shoot and edit high-definition video with your phone. In those days my mail consisted largely of letters from actual human beings who genuinely cared about me. Granted, most of these people were Ed McMahon. Ed wrote at least four times a week with exciting personal news. “Dear David,” Ed would begin because we w Frpeo e pere on a first-name basis. “You may already have won $17 million!”

Mind you, I never actually
won
seventeen million dollars, but the point is that Ed cared enough about me, as a fellow human, to let me know that I already
might
have. I knew he sincerely cared because his letters always had a picture of his jovial face, beaming out at me with an expression that said “It’s ten-thirty a.m. and I’ve already consumed a fifth of scotch!”

I also used to occasionally receive letters from friends and relatives, usually handwritten, which, for you younger readers, is a kind of writing that you do on paper holding a writing thing in your bare hand. But times have changed. Ed went to that Big
Tonight Show
Couch in the Sky, and most of the rest of us don’t send letters anymore. Many younger people have
never
sent a letter. When my son, Rob, was in college, he had to send a letter for some reason that I don’t remember. What I do remember is that he called me to ask some technical questions, such as (I am not making any of these questions up):

 


• Where could he get a stamp?
  

 


• Were there different kinds of stamps?
  

 


• Well then, which one should he buy?
  

 


• How much would it cost?
  

 


• What should he physically do with the letter when it was finally ready to go?
  

 

Rob was quite annoyed that the letter-mailing procedure was so
complicated
. He felt about it pretty much the way I feel about doing my taxes. Which is why Generation Text doesn’t send letters, and, as I say, everyone else has pretty much stopped, too. Which means that all you get in the mail these days is bills and big wads of advertising crap that you immediately throw away. Whenever I read one of those stories about a mail carrier who, instead of delivering the mail, has been putting it in dumpsters, I think:
Why can’t
MY
mail carrier do that?

But it’s not the fact that my mail is basically home-delivery landfill that makes me hate it. What makes me hate it is that it reminds me, over and over, six days a week except on federal holidays, that I am old. “Dear David,” my mail is saying, “You may already be dead!”

For example, I recently received a letter that begins as follows:

We need your help. We are conducting a survey to determine the interest and needs of those in our community who prefer or would like to know about cremation.

The letter—which comes from a concerned cremation provider in my community—goes on to ask my views about cremation, and whether my loved ones know about my views on cremation, and what I would like my loved ones to do with my ashes (which the letter calls my cremated remains) and—prepare to be surprised—whether I would like to receive “free, no obligation” information on cremation services.

Let me start by saying I am all for cremation. We Barrys are a crematin’ clan. Both of my parents, in accordance with their wishes, were cremated. And they weren’t even dead yet! (
Rim shot.
)

But seriously: Cremation always seemed to me to be the best post-death option. It’s definitely better than being embalmed. I have been to a number of funerals where the deceased had been embalmed and the casket was left open for viewing. What you’re
supposed
to think in this situation of course is:
Oh! He or she looks so lifelike!
But the truth is, the deceased never looks lifelike. The deceased always looks like a corpse, which is the last thing you want to see at a funeral.

So I’d rather be a box of ashes, which also has the advantage of being portable. When my dad died, our family—my mom, my sister, my brothers and I—drove his ashes to the cemetery, carried them to the grave and buried them ourselves. We dug the hole, put the ashes in, covered them up, said some stuff, then just stood there for a while, remembering Dad. It was sweet, dignified and unpretentious, like him. As we walked away, my mom was holding on to my arm, both of us weeping. We reached another grave, where Mom stopped and read the name on the gravestone aloud. Then she said: “So
that’s
why we don’t see him around anymore.” Then we walked on, but now we were weeping
and
laughing.

(I mention this so you’ll know that my mom had a dark sense of humor and would not have been offended by the cremation joke I made several paragraphs earlier.)

Another good thing about cremation is you can do a lot of different things with the ashes: keep them on the mantel, drop them out of planes, take them to the movies, use them in pranks, etc. One of the best memorial ceremonies I ever attended was in remembrance of Jeff MacNelly, the great cartoonist, and equally great guy, who died of lymphoma at age fifty-two because (if you want my opinion) there is no God. Jeff’s sense of humor was not unlike my mom’s. I called him up right after he was diagnosed and he said, in his big, booming voice, “People keep telling me, ‘If you have to have cancer, this is the kind to get!’ So I guess I should be thrilled.” In every conversation I had with Jeff, even when things got bad, he made jokes. There was a lot of laughter at his funeral. Also, drinking.

Jeff loved boats, and he loved Key West. So a few months after he died, a bunch of people who loved Jeff boarded a sailboat in Key West and went out into the ocean, where Jeff’s ashes were fired out of a cannon into the sea, after which there was additional drinking. It was great. Jeff would have loved it. The only way he would have loved it more is if the cannon had been aimed at a lawyer.

So ashes give you a lot of post-death options. Whereas in corpse form, you are limited. You can’t fire a corpse out of a cannon, as far as I know. Although I would love to be proved wrong.

So I am all for cremation. My point—which you have completely forgotten, and I don’t blame you—is that I don’t want to get
mail
about it. I don’t want to be nagged by cremation comp
anies to think about my cremation options
right now
. I’d much rather think about my cremation options after I’m dead, when I don’t have to think about them, if you know what I mean.
*

But that’s the kind of mail I get these days. I get mail aimed at old people because I am officially an old person. My mail never lets me forget this. I get three or four letters every day just from companies that want to tell me about my Medicare options. Here’s the thing:
I don’t want to know about my Medicare options.
I don’t even want to even think about Medicare because Medicare involves (follow me closely) medical care, which involves medical professionals inserting unnatural objects deep into your personal orifices and always (if you are an old person) discovering that you need Additional Tests. If there was a Medicare option whereby the professionals would be prohibited from coming any closer to you than fifteen feet unless they could see blood spurting from both of your ears, THEN I would be interested in reading about my Medicare options.

I’m looking at one of the Medicare letters right now. Here’s how it begins:

65 IS THE NEW 50. AND BEST OF ALL, YOU ARE NOW ELIGIBLE TO JOIN A GREAT HEALTH CARE PLAN . . .

OK, number one: “BEST OF ALL”?
BEST OF ALL?? You’re telling me that the BEST THING about reaching this age is that I’m eligible to join your health care plan? What’s the
second
-best thing? Nose hair?

Number two:
Sixty-five is not the new fifty.
Whoever wrote those words is (1) an idiot and (2) not sixty-five. I am sixty-five and I remember being fifty, and they are not remotely the same thing. I’ll tell you what sixty-five is: It’s
sixty freaking five
. It is an age that is viewed, correctly, throughout the human world, as OLD. If you’re sixty-five and you keel over
*
and die, people don’t think:
What a completely
unexpected shock!
They think:
Well, he was sixty-five.

Every day I get the newspaper (which, for you younger readers, is a paper with news written on it) and I check the obituaries to see how many of that day’s deceased were younger than I am. That gives me one number, which we will call X. Then I check the People page to see how many of the people who qualify as People and who have birthdays that day—indicating that they are still alive—are older than I am. This gives me another number, which we will also call X, because at our age we have trouble remembering things. If the first X is smaller than the second X, then it was a good morning of newspaper reading. But most of the time, the first X is bigger. Sometimes the second X is zero:
Not a single People-worthy birthday person is older than I am
. On those days, I put down the newspaper and slowly chew my soy-based meat-free sausage with the realization that it could, statistically, be my last breakfast ever.

So do NOT try to tell me sixty-five is the new anything, Mr. or Ms. Direct Mail Marketing Douchebag.

I’m not kidding about the forgetfulness. Here’s a recent example: Every morning, after I feed (in this order) the tropical fish, the dog and my daughter, I go out and get the newspaper.
Every morning
I have done this, for centuries. So one recent morning I was in the kitchen, and the various pets and offspring were eating breakfast, and I said to my wife, “I’m going out to get the newspaper.” My wife gave me a look and said, “You already got the newspaper.” She then pointed to the newspaper, which she was reading. It was lying on the kitchen counter, where I had just placed it after bringing it in from outside. So I said, quote, “Ha-ha,” indicating that I was not at all alarmed by this minor “brain fart” that in no way meant I was well along on the road to becoming a drooling fossil, doddering around with poop in his undershorts.

Then I poured myself a cup of coffee.

Then—this was
at most
ninety seconds later, I thought to myself, quote:
“Hey, I need to go get the
newspaper!”

So I went to the front door, opened it and stepped outside. It was only then that I remembered that I had just made a fool of myself by declaring to my wife, who was reading the newspaper I had just brought inside, that I was going outside to get the newspaper.

I turned around and I saw that my wife was watching me. This was a tricky moment, a moment when quick thinking was required to establis
h that I had not morphed into the late Walter Brennan (who, for you younger readers, was an actor who portrayed a fantastically old rural coot on an early sixties TV sitcom called
The Real McCoys
*
). Here is what the shriveled husk of what was once my brain came up with for me to say as I stood there in the doorway looking at my wife looking at me: “I’m just checking the weather. It’s gonna be warm.”

This was a statement of spectacular idiocy. We live in South Florida. It has been warm here for five hundred and thirty million consecutive years. Going outside to see if this tre Ke iuthnd is continuing—especially if you have
just been outside—
is not unlike randomly jumping into the air every few seconds to determine whether gravity is still working.

My wife, to her credit, resisted the urge to say anything, and there are definitely things she could have said.
Have you also pooped your underwear?
is only one example. Later that day, however, out of the blue she said, “You weren’t ‘checking the weather.’”

“No,” I admitted. “I’m going senile.”

Then we both laughed. Although not that hard.

Speaking of not that hard: I hate Viagra commercials.

Let me stress that there is no shame in needing Viagra, although I personally do not need it, but if I did need it I would not hesitate to acknowledge this, although, as I believe I mentioned earlier, I do not need it. But the commercials are loathsome. First of all, we are talking about a product intended to enable a man to—and here, in the interest of discretion and professionalism, I will employ medical terminology—get a boner. No question, this is important. Human males
need
to get boners;
this is one of their three most critical biological functions, along with farting and second-guessing pass-interference calls.

Unfortunately, the human penis is poorly designed. It is the Windows Vista of mammal penises. Other, better-designed mammals—your raccoons, your gorillas, your moles—have no boner issues because the males have actual bones in their penises. Really. It’s called a
baculum
and it’s brilliant, whoever thought of it. I have, in my office, for legitimate, tax-deductible journalistic reasons, the penis bone of a walrus, which the Eskimos call an
oosik
, and which I call Walter. It’s nearly two feet long. It is
very
impressive. You could easily kill a person with Walter. The mature male walrus is basically packing a billy club in his tallywacker. He is
not
worrying about getting a boner. He is
very
confident in his manhood. This is why you almost never see a male walrus driving a Corvette.

But whoever designed human males failed to include the baculum option, so our mechanics are trickier. As we age, many of us (although, as I may have mentioned, not me personally) need help. So Viagra and other erectile drugs are a welcome development.

But here’s the thing, and I am about to speak for everyone in the United States who is not some kind of degenerate sicko pervert: When we are watching television, in our family room, with our family, which includes our children, and we have chosen to view what is supposed to be family-appropriate programming, such as a sporting event,
we do not want to be exposed to a sixty-second commercial about getting boners
. We do not want to have to answer questions about boners from our younger, more naive
children; and we do not want to have to sit in mortified silence while avoiding eye contact with our older, boner-savvy children. In other words, this is a time when we, as a nation, DO NOT WANT BONERS TO COME UP
*
AT ALL.