President Me (28 page)

While we're talking quesadillas I have a quick mandate for tortilla manufacturers. One out of every four must have a picture of Jesus on it. It'll just be fun to fuck with the Latinos.

Before we move on from Mexicans and cheese, let's talk nachos. It is hereby federal law that the pump squirt of Velveeta goo you get on nachos at a ballpark or the movies is banned. It is not cheese. It feels like Dow makes it. If it were green instead of orange and sold by Mattel instead of Kraft, there'd be a warning sticker on the container it came in saying, “Do Not Ingest and Do Not Expose to Open Flame.”

We need to address nachos in general. Nachos have an incredibly short window in which you can enjoy them. Is there anything that starts better and ends worse? Pizza, when you let it sit around for a while, goes from a nine to a seven. Nachos go from a ten to a negative twelve. They go from the world's greatest food to a soggy pile of hippo flop before you even know it. At some point the chips are like “I can't take the weight of this guacamole another second. Oh shit, here comes some sour cream! Fuck it, I'm going back to being a tortilla. I can't stay solid anymore.” There's no such thing as a nacho doggy bag.

We have overshot the mark with the nachos. We started piling on too much stuff. For years it was, “Hey, I've got an idea. Let's take some tortilla chips and melt cheese on them and maybe a couple jalapeños on the side.” But somewhere along the line it became, “How about we add a snow-shovel worth of fake guacamole, a chub pack of ground beef, and top it off with a bucket of sour cream.” At a certain point this perfect dish went from nachos to a nacho sundae.

But this isn't an issue if you eat your nachos right away. That comes with a completely different problem. Nacho cheese ends cold and congealed, but starts magma hot. If you eat them too soon you burn the roof of your mouth.

What did God have in mind with the roof of the mouth? Feet are tough. I could go out and walk my dog barefoot because the skin on my feet is tough. We're designed that way. Our feet and our hands are tougher because they make contact with hot, cold, and sharp things all the time. So why is it that the roof of your mouth is such a pussy? A cup of Top Ramen that was in the microwave eight seconds too long will fuck you up for a week. Why is the roof of your mouth as soft as a baby's bottom? Why did God make that the most sensitive part of our body when it takes the most punishment? It should be like the shell of a horseshoe crab. I should be able to wash down a fistful of the world's sharpest object—dry Cap'n Crunch—with a pot of hot coffee, while laughing the whole time.

My last straw with the fake cheese is the little packets of Parmesan at pizza places. The sixteen-inch-diameter disc covered in mozzarella isn't enough cheese for you? You have to sprinkle on a weird packet of white dried-out sawdust passing itself off as Parmesan?

As a proud Italian American, I find this offensive. Parmesan is great and doesn't need its reputation sullied by this impostor. I love Parmesan. I've often fantasized about opening a theme restaurant called More Parmesan. Every time you go out to the Italian joint the waiter stops by and asks if you'd like Parmesan. He either then sprinkles it on with a spoon, or even better, grinds it fresh onto your plate. But eventually he slows down and asks if that is enough. You feel weird and don't want to be fat, so you say yes. But three bites in, you need more. At More Parmesan the waiters will constantly be coming by—in fact they may never leave the tableside; they'll just sit there and grind Parmesan on your pasta. Hell, they'll put it in your martini unless you tell them not to.

I'll wrap up with this food-related observation and rallying cry. I was thinking about the decline of this country and how everyone just spits their gum everywhere and blows snot rockets on the sidewalk or leaves pubes on top of the urinal, and then it occurred to me what the issue was. You know what we're missing? Stew and casserole. If you had a graph charting stew and casserole consumption and America's greatness, the line of decline for both would be the same. (By the way,
Stew and Casserole
would also make a great eighties cop show. Thurston “Stew” Stewart plays by the rules and wears a bow tie, but his partner, John “Casserole” Cassorelli, is a loose cannon in a leather jacket.) I say we get back to eating some hearty stews and casseroles. About the time we started eating wraps is when things started to take a shit in this country. And then when smoothies came in it was all over. All I know is this—the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy didn't have a peach-guava smoothie in their belly. So Mamas, let the word go forth from this time and place—get in that kitchen and start rattling them pots and pans. Let's make this country great again.

THE SECRET SERVICE

I
don't know what the budget is for the Secret Service but I think I can significantly cut down the cost. As President Carolla, I won't need a bunch of guys in sunglasses and black suits. I just need some crows. A flock of attack crows would be the ultimate in security.

These are the meanest, smartest animals on the planet. Pigeons are ten times dumber than crows, and we can train pigeons. We are clearly not utilizing a valuable resource here. I once heard that crows are second in weight-to-brain-size ratio behind humans, and are number one if those humans are from Florida.

Those K-9 unit German shepherds are thirty-grand worth of training and breeding down the drain when the meth head in his underpants waving a machete around at a 7–Eleven slashes the dog just before the police finally Taser the idiot. Not the case with crows. They're cheap and abundant. They could live on the White House roof and all we'd have to do is put out a can of corn once a week. Then, whenever the motorcade left, they'd follow along. And if anybody got too close to me they would swoop down in a sea of black wings and razor-sharp beaks and talons. Death from above.

I don't care who you are or how crazy you are, when an angry gang of crows comes at your head, all you can do is run and scream like a girl.

They can fly forty miles an hour, they're black, and they're stealthy. Plus a group of crows is called a “murder.” How badass is that? This is my new security detail. If John F. Kennedy had had my attack crows on that fateful day in 1963, he'd still be alive today. (Actually, he would probably have been claimed by syphilis in the seventies, but you get my point.)

9

THE DEPARTMENT OF
THE INTERIOR AND THE
NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE

A
good president is an environmentalist, sportsman, and historian because he has the solemn and sacred duty to be a steward to our majestic national parks and historical sites. He must protect the land and the noble creatures that inhabit it and preserve the birthright our forefathers bequeathed to future generations.

With this in mind, we're fucked. Everything I know about our park system and historic landmarks I learned from the
National Treasure
movies. I don't have stream water running through my veins. It wasn't like the Carollas were packing up the family truckster to head out and see Old Faithful. I was well into my thirties before I owned a sleeping bag. (By the way, I've always thought “sleeping bag” was up there with “toaster oven” for least creative name. “What is this?” “It's a bag that you sleep in.” “What shall we call it?” “Um . . . ​a sleeping bag?” “Cool, let's hit the Quiznos.” I'm glad these guys didn't name the coffin or the condom.)

THE “GREAT” OUTDOORS

I've never been much of a camping guy. To me the only point of camping is to make your kids hate you a little less. On the surface it looks like family fun time around a fire eating s'mores and getting eaten by mosquitoes, but really it's just a preemptive strike on the conversation in the future where your kid is at the therapist complaining about how you never bonded with him. My plan is to throw Sonny and Natalia in the car, drive up Mount Pinos, push them out, toss a tent at them, and say, “There! Check it off your list.”

I hate camping for a couple of reasons. Every time you go camping you get the guy whose tent is a few spots away who wants to bond. He looks like Liz Taylor's construction-worker boyfriend, he's carrying three cans of Miller High Life by the six-pack ring and wants to know if he can pull up a log for a nice heart-to-heart. And it's not like you can tell him you've got somewhere to be. “Uh, I've got to go sit around on a different log over there. Sorry.”

Camping fucks with my sleep too. It gets dark at 6:30 so at 7:10 it's like, “I'm gonna turn in nine hours earlier than I usually do.” Plus there's no
SportsCenter
to watch and no place to beat off, so I might as well just go to bed. Or, in this case, ground.

As if you could sleep anyway. You spend the whole night hearing things. And when you're in the woods everything sounds like a bear. It never sounds like a rich guy with a pillowcase full of money and the
Deal or No Deal
girls. It's always something that is going to eat your food and then you. (By the way, how bad a role model is Yogi Bear? I can't believe we showed this to kids. He goes around stealing people's hard-earned pic-a-nic baskets with his superdepressed gay partner, the whole time wearing nothing but a hat and tie.)

Bears are pretty aimless. They're the opposite of monorails. They wander around just looking to get into shit. Every summer you see on the news some footage of a bear in a suburban swimming pool. It just wandered down from the hills, thought it found a very clean pond, and took a dip. They have no plan. Bears need Siri. They just leave the cave and decide on the way if they're going to a stream to swat at salmon, down the trail to maul a hiker, or into town to hop in a Dumpster or break into a parked car. This is where they get into trouble. I think they need a bear symposium entitled “Not Getting Shot for Wandering.” I could moderate. I'd start with a warning about how when you get cornered by the Animal Control guys, don't panic and climb a tree. You're just going to get darted with a tranquilizer. And then when you fall out of the tree, you think you'll drop safely into the trampoline net the firemen are holding, but you're just going to bounce out and land ten feet away on your head. Ultimately the lesson of the symposium will be “You want to not get shot? If you're walking around and you feel pavement under your claws, turn around. Here's an easy way to remember—if you feel asphalt, get your ass off.”

I've always been dumbfounded by the advice park rangers, nature shows, or just stupid guys who think they're park rangers give out regarding bear attacks. I've heard two recommendations—both idiotic. The first is to make yourself appear bigger to scare the bear off. I'm not sure how this works. There's no bigger version of myself. I'm not a blowfish. I don't have a rip cord that when pulled turns me into Brock Lesnar. Should I tell the bear, “Hang on, I'm gonna pick my hair out”? Plus the bear is two thousand pounds. The bear ain't thinking, “Shit. He just ballooned up from a buck eighty-five to one ninety-two. I'm outta here.” The bear still knows it's got a fifteen-hundred-pound weight advantage on you. And ultimately doesn't that just make you look like a bigger meal? This would be like if you were at a steak house and the waitress brought you the twenty-four-ounce prime rib instead of the eighteen and you ran out screaming.

The other stupid piece of bear advice is to play dead. That's a lot of range in bear-attack prevention technique. You can shout and flap your arms and try to scare it away, or you can collapse and go into the fetal position. Either way.

That's the second thing I would address at the bear symposium. If you come across what appears to be a corpse, sniff it, nudge it with your nose, and then have sex with it. You'll find out pretty quickly whether it's an actual corpse or someone just playing dead. The poor bastard would come home and his wife would ask him, “How was the camping trip?” “It was wonderful. I definitely didn't get raped by a bear. Now just drop it.”

Again, I'm not sure how the playing-dead plan is supposed to work. I can't hold still if an ant is crawling on me, forget fifteen hundred pounds of Kodiak bear.

Speaking of ants. Usually you'll see a bunch of ants in a line, but every now and again you'll spot the lone ant. Just one ant going solo, wandering around your bathroom sink. It doesn't make sense. There's no food in there. It's not like someone's having a picnic in the can. I think it's something to do with cell-phone towers. The electromagnetism is throwing the ants off and they're just wandering alone in circles. Ants are aimless now. They used to march in nice tight formations and lines like Revolutionary War soldiers. When I was a kid ants knew what they were doing. According to cartoons, they were so organized they could make off with a whole basket of fried chicken.

People always say that a lone ant is a scout. He's the Flint McCullough of ants. I think it's just a weird hobo ant. You don't see a homeless guy wandering around and announce, “He's a scout, get him!”