My Point ... And I Do Have One (19 page)

S
OME
T
HINGS
T
HAT
I H
ATE IN
P
EOPLE

Impatience
Intolerance
Infidelity
Insecticides

I
don’t like to generalize, but you can always tell people’s personalities by the cars they drive … and the bumper stickers they put on their cars (Sometimes it’s no more than pure sexual advertising: “Honk if you’re horny.” You never see people putting those stickers on their front door: “Knock if you’re nasty.”) … and the clothes they wear … and the music they listen to … and the way they walk … and what they say … and what they do. But, once again, that’s just a generalization.

Here’s what I’m really trying to say: If we don’t want to define ourselves by things as superficial as our appearances, we’re stuck with the revolting alternative of being judged by our actions, by what we do.

Now there are the big issues of good and evil. (Murder is evil; donating blood is good. If either of these statements is news to you, put down this book, go to the nearest police station, and turn yourself in—they’ll know what to do with you there.) However, I’d like to deal with the smaller issues. I want to talk about the things that are neither good nor evil but by which we judge ourselves anyway—the little things we do and the countless situations we find ourselves in that conspire to make us feel like idiots.

Do I feel like an idiot? If I had a nickel for every time I felt like an idiot, I’d be very rich. But I’d be too embarrassed to spend any of what I’m sure I’d refer to as my “idiot money.” If I were to spend it, buying an expensive item like a car with about 800,000 nickels would make me feel even more like an idiot. Though the good news is, I’d get another nickel for doing it. This might be a moot oint.

We all feel like idiots at one time or another. Even if we feel we’re cool 98 percent of the time, that 2 percent doofus is poised to take over our bodies without any warning. It just takes a crack in the sidewalk—one little trip. We feel like fools, turning back to look at it. “There’s a pebble, somebody better put up some orange cones to warn the others. Everybody’s gonna trip like I did.” Then we look back that one more time to show the pebble who’s boss, “Damn pebble, why-I-oughta …”

We do that because we think that people are staring at us, sensing our inadequacy, noting our flaws, mocking our clumsiness. But perhaps, sadly (though, for the purpose of this book, perhaps not—perhaps humorously instead), nobody is noticing. Everybody is too busy worrying that they look like idiots to care about you.

If you think that none of this applies to you, just take a look at your picture in your high school yearbook. Because closer to the surface than you think is that awkward adolescent hoping that people like her and praying that nobody notices how much she hopes that people like her and knowing that if people knew what an idiot she was, they’d never like her. Or maybe not. Maybe you’d just see how funny you looked back then and have a good laugh. Either way it’s worthwhile.

O
ne activity that can bring out feelings of idiocy is singing. Sometimes it’s because you’re belting out a tune to yourself (That sounds violent, doesn’t it? “You’ve been a very bad tune. I’m a gonna give you a belting that you won’t soon forget!”) and you’re feeling good—you’re sure that you sound just like Whitney Houston. Then you look up and realize that you’re not by yourself—people are watching you (if you’re in a car or a house with picture Windows) and perhaps even hearing you (if you’re in a plane, wearing headphones, and listening to “Pop Goes the Country” or “The Now Sound”).

Sometimes it’s because you’re singing with a group of people and you don’t know the lyrics to the song. Then you have to play that little game we always play. We mumble through the words we don’t know, but then to make up for it, we sing the chorus really, really loud.

We’re hoping the others are thinking, “I guess she didn’t wanna sing on that little mumbly part back there. Obviously she knows the song—she sang the chorus
really
loud. She is cool.”

Have you ever heard somebody sing some lyrics that you’ve never sung before, and you realize you’ve never sung the right words in that song? You hear them and all of a sudden you say to yourself, “ ‘Life in the Fast Lane?’
That’s
what they’re saying right there? ‘Life in the Fast Lane?’ ” You think, “Why have I been singing ‘Wipe in the Vaseline?’ How many people have heard me sing ‘Wipe in the Vaseline?’ I am an idiot.” But it sounds like that, you know?

There are certain songs you just know have parts where there aren’t any real lyrics, because nobody can figure them out even after hearing the song over and over and over again. For instance, that Aretha Franklin song “Respect.” Everybody gets the part:
“R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Find out what it means to me. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”
But what follows is anybody’s guess. To me it’s either
“Da cha, te ee cee tee. Ho!”
or
“Something about a tee-pee. Ho!”
But then everybody is back on board with
“Sock it to me. Sock it to me. Sock it to me.”

Sometimes it’s just as embarrassing to get the words to a song right. I think in the seventies we really had some songs that were just idiotic songs, and the lyrics were clear as can be. Do you remember that song by Three Dog Night, “Joy to the World”? It started off with “Jeremiah was a bullfrog.” It was catchy, so you wanted to sing. And then we were hooked, and we were just singing along … 
“Jeremiah was a bullfrog. Was a good friend of mine. I never understood a single word he said, but I helped him drink his wine.”

Of course that made perfect sense to us. Why should we question that? We’ve all had friends who were frogs. We didn’t fully understand what they were saying, but if it seemed like they wanted you to help them drink some wine, you did it. They would always have some mighty fine wine with ’em, too. Frogs could get ahold of that stuff.

B
ut back to feeling like an idiot. Two places that tend to bring out the “Oh my God, I’m such a nincompoop” in most of us are elevators and public bathrooms. Now, the difference between an elevator and a public bathroom is … Wait. If you don’t already know the difference between an elevator and a public bathroom, nothing I say is going to be of much help. In the best-case scenario, you’re going to be standing in a stall for a long time, wondering why you’re not going anywhere. I don’t even want to think about the worst-case scenario.

When we’re inside an elevator we feel we have to look above us at the floor numbers changing, as if it’s by the force of our will that the elevator is rising. If you want to make others in the elevator feel uncomfortable, stay facing the back wall after you enter. The downside of this little gag is that you’re pretty likely to miss your floor.

We always do this: we walk up to an elevator, someone’s already there, they’re waiting, they’ve pushed the button, the button is lit. We walk up and push the button, thinking, “Obviously you didn’t push it correctly. I’ll have to push it myself.
Now
the elevator will come.” Then someone else walks up and they push the button again. Suddenly you’re offended. You want to say, “You idiot, I pushed it, he pushed it.” Then, to the original pusher, “Can you believe people?”

Or, if you go to the elevator by yourself, you push the button, you wait for the elevator to come, the elevator doesn’t come. You push the button six more times. Like that’s helping. As if the elevator’s thinking, “Oh, a half dozen people are there now. I better hurry. I thought it was just that one woman. I was resting. Oh no, I …, I could lose my job! I could become stairs!”

In a public bathroom you’re in your own little individual private stall, actually going to the bathroom. For some reason either you forgot to lock the door, or the lock is gone. Suddenly, a perfect stranger opens the door on you. They look at you. You always look at them the same way (sort of a cross between a deer caught in the headlights and a deer caught doing something else, I’m not sure what). They close it immediately and always say, “Oh, I’m sorry.” Then we say, “It’s okay.”

We don’t mean this. I think we’d be surprised if they turned around and came back in, actually. “Oh-oh!” “You said it was all right. Hey everybody, come on in! She said it was okay! Get Julie! This is Julie. And you are? There’s no need to holler. Let’s go, Julie. Yeah, she said it was okay, I wouldn’t have just walked in.”

It’s just so scary if there’s no lock on that door; you’re so vulnerable at that time. You’re scared someone’s going to push the door open on you. Imagine if someone had an aerial view of what we looked like in there, trying to keep the door shut. The positions that we have ourselves in. Then we have the “em-em” noise, that territory cough that we use. Somehow it scares people away.
“Eeemmmm.”

But, even if there is a lock, there are some people who will continue to try to open the door until you say, “Somebody’s in here.” What are they thinking? “It’s just stuck, I know it. Just somebody’s shoes they left in there earlier. Get the ramrod, this one is tight.”

Some of the bathrooms are fancy, they have the railings on each side of the toilet, and you might assume that’s for the elderly or the handicapped. It’s really for people who are paranoid about catching germs—they can balance themselves above the toilet. That iron cross is hard to do, I tell you that. And the dismount! You need a spotter, you do. That’s why women go in pairs—”I’m going. Spot me.” And when you do an incredible job the judges (you bet there are judges in there) yell, “TEN!”

Sometimes you need those bars, don’t you? Sometimes you walk in, the seats are wet. That is a horrible experience. Have you ever just not been thinking, you’re in a hurry, you just walk in, you sit, “OH! Eeeesh!!” How does this happen? I mean, what are these women doing in there?

I
’m sorry. I got carried away.

I think we do some idiotic things out of habit. Have you ever noticed that whenever you’re with someone and you taste something that tastes bad, you always want the person with you to taste it immediately?

“That was disgusting, taste it. Taste it, it’s gross. Taste how bad it is.” And they always do.

Or, do you ever run out of room on the front of the letter you’re writing then write “Over” on the bottom of the letter? We’re not giving the person getting the letter much credit. It’s not like if it wasn’t there, they’d get to the bottom of the page, “ ‘ … and so Kathy and I went shopping and we—’ Now that’s the craziest thing. I don’t know why she just ended that way. I hope nothing happened to her. She managed to seal the envelope. She must have gotten it to a mailbox somehow.

“Could it be this way? On the back? Never mind, don’t call her, I found it. It was on the back. I followed the arrow.”

S
ometimes I feel like an idiot when I’m with people who have more power than me. I don’t mean someone like Hercules (though he probably would make me feel uncomfortable; the age difference alone—a few thousand years, I’m guessing—would make it hard for us to find things in common to talk about), I mean someone who has power over me. I mean policemen. I mean policemen who pull me over when I’ve been speeding.

I get nervous, so I try to lighten things up by using humor. And you know what? I’m always amazed that people (and by people I mean policemen) don’t have the same sense of humor that I do.

For instance, I was pulled over in Los Angeles last week. I was driving—I was speeding. It was obvious I was speeding; I was going very, very fast. So, this policeman pulls me over. He comes up to the window of the car and says, “You know why I pulled you over?” And so I said, “Because of the dead bodies in the trunk?” To make a long story short, he didn’t see the comedy in my remark. Like I said, no sense of humor.

Do you ever lie to a policeman when you get pulled over for speeding? If you look real good that day, you might think you can flirt your way out of the ticket. But, unfortunately, we usually don’t dress anticipating a traffic ticket. We’re usually wearing some horrible outfit that we just threw on to go out and buy some Häagen-Dazs ice cream. But, we try flirting anyway, and nine times out of ten we end up feeling like idiots (the tenth time we feel even worse).