President Me (9 page)

And why does it even have a speed that does nothing? Are we in a 1930s southern courtroom or shooting a Don Henley video in the eighties? Just give me the medium and high settings. I bought this device to move air. I doubt it can do that when it's rotating slower than the Earth.

While I'm on rotation, fans, and waste—what's up with oscillation? I don't understand the point of oscillating fans. You lie down on the sofa for a midsummer's nap, turn the fan on, but forget there's a button which makes sure the air is only blowing on you 8 percent of the time. Why do I need an option to make sure that the potted plant in the corner and Grandpa's urn on the mantel get as much cool breeze as I do? You're wasting 90 percent of the energy used to run the thing to blow the papers off your dining room table. There's no other place where oscillation is what you're looking for. There's no such thing as omelet oscillation. You don't take a bite of the Denver omelet, then pass it around the table.

There's also the withdrawal. This is one of my few hypocritical moments. Even though I constantly rail about wasting electricity, I'm hooked. I had my bedroom ceiling fan going full blast all summer, but when fall finally hit L.A.—usually two or three days before Christmas—I still needed it to sleep. That whir helps me nod off. That and several tumblers of Mangria. Is there some sort of ceiling fan methadone that Dr. Drew can prescribe—Fanax? Maybe I can just hire someone to stand next to me and make that
hmmmmmmm
sound?

It's not just affecting my sleep; it's affecting my marriage. Lynette is not a fan of the fan. When I turn it on anytime after September 1, she makes a noise that is the opposite of the soothing
whisshhh
of the fan. It's an exasperated
uaaahhhhhh
. I tell my wife that I need the ceiling fan on to sleep, and ask her why it bothers her if she's under the blanket. She'll be bundled up under a duvet with a postage-stamp-sized piece of her face exposed and complain, “My forehead is cold.” I'm skeptical of this. There are no nerve endings up there; you could put a cigarette out on my forehead. I have to explain to her that I'm a junkie, I'm hooked on the sound. All those white-noise makers they have at Brookstone don't have the right ambience. They have the sound of waves crashing on rocks, which I guess is good if you're Tom Hanks in
Castaway
and you can sleep on the beach. Or they have the babbling brook or rain forest. I don't know about you but I rarely sleep next to a babbling brook. (By the way, Babbling Brook would be a great name for a female cattle auctioneer.) I need more realistic sounds, the ones I'm used to, to lull me to dreamland. We need the ceiling fan sound on a white-noise machine. It would save millions of kilowatts. (And let's get rid of the term “white noise.” I don't even know what that is. I just assume it's a bunch of attorneys repeating the phrase “at the end of the day.”)

One last complaint about chicks and electricity. We'd never have to build another hydroelectric dam or dig another coal mine if women would stop blow-drying their hair. Blow-dryers are deceptively energy draining. You could use one of those things for ten minutes or keep a porch light on for ten years. I know it. Next time your wife is blow-drying her hair, take a walk out to the power meter and see it spinning like a dreidel.

Not only does it use as much power, it makes as much noise as the engine of a 747. No wonder most women can't think. They spend a significant portion of their lives with a deafening device deep-frying their brains. Think about how many hours they spend heating up Aqua Net and blowing hair dryers into their faces. When that hairspray hits the heat it becomes weaponized. Forget secondhand smoke, heated-up hairspray needs a PSA. I think the reason we don't have an equal society where women get the same wages as men and they're all engineers and other unrealistic stuff is because they spend all that time on their hair and not on the brain right beneath that hair. Don't get me wrong; if guys did this we'd be in the same sinking boat.

And this is why all hairdressers are flaky and nuts. They're all on their third marriage, believe firmly in guardian angels, and their best friend is a macaw named Blue Man who doesn't judge.

But again, think about how much power gets sucked off the grid for hair dryers. Twenty minutes every day, times 75 million women. That's why I think President Obama missed an opportunity. He should have forced Michelle to go full Shirley from
What's Happening!!
with her hair. If Michelle just let her hair go natural, all the women of color would follow. Hell, maybe even some Jews and Italians. This could bring the races together. Italians, Jews, and blacks could all dunk their heads in a pool, let their hair dry in the sun, and say, “We're not so different after all.” I secretly suspect that this is why the African American community is not so fond of swimming. Black chicks spend so much time straightening their hair they don't want to fuck it up in the (public) pool. But more importantly it would end the scourge of hair dryers and we'd never have to deal with the fucksticks in the Middle East again.

FOSSIL FUELS AND ALTERNATIVE ENERGY

Here's what pisses me off about the constant “debate” we have in this country about natural gas and fracking. We all agree that we don't want to pour our collective cash into the giant ashtray that is the Middle East, correct? I'm pretty sure we're all on the same page that dumping all of our money in the hands of people so they can have Beyoncé perform a private concert for their son and think it's a great idea to throw acid in the face of twelve-year-old girls for having the audacity to read isn't a great plan.

I understand that everyone on the left wants cars that run on good vibes, but the technology isn't there yet. That's their beef with natural gas. They just don't like the internal combustion engine. They love the word “natural,” but when you follow it with the word “gas,” they're out. I bet if it had been called “natural fuel” from the beginning and “fracking” didn't sound like something Darth Vader would do, there'd be much less of an issue. But these lefties need to accept the reality that the internal combustion engine is here to stay, so take your life partner's dick out of your mouth and let's talk about the best way to power those engines.

I'm a car guy, so I know that engines can be converted easily to work off of natural gas. They perform exactly the same. In fact, if we switched to natural gas we could get rid of catalytic converters. We'd not only save in gas, but we'd cut $500 from the manufacturing cost of each car and thousands in the disposal of the heavy metals contained in catalytic converters.

Why all the fear? Natural gas is the same stuff that's coming out of the stove in your apartment. Why not in your car? That's the disconnect. My Prius-loving Los Angeleno friends conveniently forget that the batteries in those cars are being charged by a coal-fired electricity plant. Fracking isn't nearly as dangerous as coal mining. I know we all want a perfect, risk-free fuel, but you know what? Shit happens. Nothing can have a zero risk factor. There's no such thing. So let's just minimize the risk. One way to do that is to get our fuel from home, not from people who then use that money to buy gold toilets and fund terrorism.

Shouldn't we have learned this lesson in the seventies? I lived in California in 1973 during the OPEC embargo. I remember sitting in my mom's VW squareback waiting in rationing lines based on whether you had an odd- or even-numbered license plate. And this was when gas had skyrocketed to
forty cents a gallon
!

At that same time we had assholes like Martin Sheen chaining themselves to bulldozers with their “No Nukes” message. Like fracking, I think that was a nomenclature problem. “Nuclear” sounded scary. It was the same thing we were constantly being told about how the Russians were going to drop on us, so everyone got paranoid, conveniently forgetting that with nuclear power you can have something the size of a tennis ball powering an aircraft carrier the size of Cowboys Stadium, and uses more electricity, for years with no problems and zero pollution.

So because of all that sky-is-falling bullshit we continue to power our country with the black shit sucked from the ground underneath the worst people on the planet.

Except that we can actually get some of it from the second-worst place on the planet—Alaska.

Alaska seems like the most rough-and-tumble spot in the world. Everyone there seems to be running from something in the Lower 48, whether it's the law, the tax man, or their ex. Alaska's where you go to forget your past, especially when you owe your past a shitload in child support. The state motto should be “Love fishing but hate your kids? Alaska.” Forget the
Jackass
movies. I'd like to do a hidden-camera show where we get a guy with a salt-and-pepper mustache, put him in an ATF windbreaker, have him walk into any Alaska bar or honky-tonk after quitting time, and say, “I have a warrant for . . .” and just watch everyone jump out the window. It's never “I was born and raised in Alaska, lived here my whole life.” It's usually something like, “My business partner faked his own death and then tried to kill me, but that was before my wife had her gender reassignment . . .” Basically Alaska is the cold-weather Florida. It's Florida without the Jews. The state capital should be spelled “Jew? NO!”

I'm not in love with Sarah Palin but I was completely fine with her “Drill, baby, drill!” message. We can do that easily without screwing with the caribou. And fuck the caribou anyway. What did they ever do for us? Can you imagine the horror of living in a caribou-free world? I can and I'm fine with it.

But now we have guys like Mark Ruffalo picking up the blowhard actor/environmentalist torch from Marty Sheen, except Mark is bitching about fracking. Well, here's my message back to Mr. Ruffalo and all the other actors weighing in on this issue. How about some answers? If you've got some ideas, I'm wide fucking open. But until then how about you shut the fuck up. Ten years ago every celebrity was an expert on AIDS; now they've all become experts on “climate change.” We should put all these blowhards in front of windmills and power the country with their hot air.

That's why I'm naming as Secretary of Energy the Dyson vacuum guy. I feel like we need some new brains on this problem. Someone without opinions or the need to blog about them who is just going to crunch some numbers, invent some new technologies, and get us away from the people who burn us in effigy every day. Hell, maybe he can come up with a way to extract natural gas without hurting the environment or losing suction.

I know what many of you are thinking. What about solar, wind, biodiesel, etc.? I'm fine with all that alternative energy stuff on paper, but it never adds up to shit on planet Earth. Solar might work if you're in the Nevada desert, but what about everyone up in not-so-sunny Seattle? Biodiesel sounds good but I think it will be bad for childhood obesity because the VW microbus you're driving behind is pouring the smell of fries from its exhaust, reminding all the kids it's time to hit the drive-thru. And as with solar, wind power needs to be captured in batteries and we certainly don't have our battery technology sorted out.

ASSAULTED BY BATTERIES

Shit, never mind the industrial batteries for wind and solar, we can't even get our household battery shit sorted out. My house, like many of yours, has the battery drawer. The other day I needed some new batteries in the remote. So I went to the drawer and found that my wife had recently stocked up. Sounds good, right? Except that what I saw when I opened the drawer were literally nineteen nine-volts; forty-nine of the second least useful, the C battery; and forty brand-new, still-in-the-package size Ds. There aren't enough flashlights in the world to need that many Ds. But no AAs.
Zero
. Then just for salt in the wound there was a bushel of assorted small, flat batteries that looked like pocket change. You know, the kind that if you go to Home Depot looking for them they tell you to head over to the hearing aid store.

Not only do I have issues with the batteries, I've got issues with the battery hatch. There's the simple design where you have to push your index finger in and the window just pops open. Then there's the one that takes the micro Phillips-head screwdriver to open. If you took it to an optometrist, he'd say, “Sorry, I don't have a screwdriver that small.” Why do the batteries have to be locked away in a vault?

My kids are out of the phase where their toys take AAs; they're now in the AAA phase with all the small electronic stuff. Do we really need AA and AAA? That's like creating a bra size between A and B. Anyway, there were many nights when they wanted their dinosaur to walk around or whatever and the batteries were dead. After using a steak knife to pry open the battery hatch and figure out what kind it took, I headed to the battery drawer to come up double-A dry. The rug rats were freaking out, so I was facing the moment all men fear. I had to take the AAs out of the universal remote. It's the same feeling as putting a dog down. You're on the verge of tears. “I'm sorry, brother, I've got to power you down. It's Sophie's choice, I don't want to do it, but I have to. As soon as those little shits fall asleep they'll be back in your belly in no time and we'll be watching
SportsCenter
.”