President Me (8 page)

Last year the city council in D.C. proposed a waiting period for tattoos. I'm down with this notion, and will make it a federal law. I think the waiting period should apply based not only on age but also on tattoo. No matter how old you are, if you want to get Wile E. Coyote on your titty, you're going to have to wait while we check to make sure you're not on government assistance.

Clearly I have all the ideas ready to go when it comes to commerce. I have a million plans for how we, as a nation, can make better products that will not annoy our fellow Americans. Less annoyance equals more opening of the wallet, right? But because I will be president and commander in chief, I will have to focus on other things, like the size of my American-flag lapel pin, and I will need a Secretary of Commerce to put all my great ideas into practice. I need someone who can take abuse, because my new rules and regulations are going to piss off a lot of the business community and also the entrenched political interests that have created the red tape I'm going to cut once and for all. I am also, as you can see, going to raise the standards for all businesses so they make better products and we will want to buy their goods, not just shit from China because it is cheaper. That's why I'm nominating as Secretary of Commerce Sanjeev Mehta. He works a phone bank in Mumbai, goes by the name Dave, and would be happy to provide you with excellent customer service today.

THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE

The
U.S. Postal Service is on its way out. And I'm fine with it. I don't need mail.

I lived in a house that had a large wooden gate at the end of my driveway—a gate I built myself, by the way. I put a mail slot into the gate with a basket hanging on the inside to catch the mail when the mailman put it through. One day I got a note from the post office saying that I needed to have a mailbox outside the gate next to the street. This was clearly so the mailman could pull up, put the mail in the box, and drive off without having to get out of his weird jeep with the right-side steering wheel. This is clearly more convenient for him, but a major inconvenience for me. If I did it his way, I would have to go all the way down my driveway, use the clicker to open my gate (which doesn't work half the time—don't get me started), and risk getting stuck on the wrong side of the gate in my bathrobe while the van full of hicks taking the tour of the stars' homes gawk at me. That's the other part: with the box this far from my abode, it's easy pickin's for anyone walking down the street to grab something and steal my identity.

So I left a return note that said for the amount I pay in taxes, the guy can get out of his truck. They responded that I was not in compliance with blah blah blah. I responded with the message that I didn't need this service. My important mail goes to my accountant. So they could kindly take the PennySavers and flyers for shitty sub joints and bring them back to the post office to recycle them, or shove them up their ass for all I cared. They're just going to end up in the garbage or my bushes.

The postal service is dying for the best reason possible—competition. E-mail killed the letter and UPS and FedEx do a better job with packages. UPS takes the doors off their trucks because opening and closing them would add an extra thirteen seconds. I'm sure their uniforms are brown so that they can just crap themselves rather than taking the time to shit. In fact the uniforms used to be white, but rather than slow down their delivery, the drivers delivered a deuce in their shorts. You've never seen a bunch of UPS drivers hanging out, leaning against their trucks, blowing a butt and drinking Snapple. You don't see fat FedEx guys, because they get paid based on performance. Go to the post office and tell me if you notice a difference. You've got a line out the door with one surly Korean bitch behind three inches of Lexan to handle it. If they were doing a great job or were incredibly vital, they wouldn't be considering ending Saturday delivery. Restaurants that are making money aren't saying, “Let's close on Saturdays.”

That said, I can't stand the guy who complains about the price of a stamp going up. If I handed you a piece of paper and said, “I want you to get this to Maine in two days, but I can only pay you forty-six cents,” you'd punch me in the face.

I feel like the government makes my point about how incompetent and useless they are over three hundred times a day. The latest example was when the Michelle Obama “Let's Move” fitness campaign came out with a line of stamps showing kids doing activities like running, jumping, and skipping rope. You know, important stuff we need to use our tax dollars to inform kids about. And what kid even deals with stamps anyway? When was the last time a kid went to the post office to be inspired? Plus, a kid that is really into stamps and is unaware of jump ropes isn't going to get off his fat ass anyway.

Stamps used to be a big deal. We'd unveil them at press conferences, debate whether to put the fat or the skinny Elvis on them, kids proudly displayed their stamp collections. Now, if you gave a kid a stamp, he'd put it on his tongue and then complain because he didn't trip out.

Well, the cherry on top of the wasteful retard sundae is that hundreds of thousands of these pointless stamps were recalled and destroyed because they depicted “unsafe activities.” And what extremely dangerous activities were these kids participating in? MMA? Russian roulette? Jumping Snake River Canyon on a motorcycle? Nope. Doing cannonballs and headstands. I guarantee every guy who is in a wheelchair from doing a headfirst dive into a too-shallow pool wishes he had done a cannonball instead. If you pushed me off a bridge, I would go instinctively into cannonball mode. That would be the safest bet. But a kid can't do a cannonball? That's a rite of passage.

Or the kid doing a headstand? The problem with that one was that she was doing it without a helmet. I think we all had that neighbor kid who did a headstand without a helmet and caught on fire. It's literally burned into our psyche. Right? Fuck no. Who needs a helmet for a headstand? I would argue the helmet would get in the way and cause more injuries than it prevented.

And as far as the government goes, do we have money or don't we? We're always talking about budget problems but we can literally burn hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of stamps. If this were a business with a real bottom line, people would be shit-canned for this. But since it's the government, they're playing with house money. There are no consequences.

The government spends a shitload of our tax dollars telling kids to do cannonballs, and then spends even more changing their minds because they're a bunch of pussies. Please, let's have the government shut down again like we did in 2013. I bet we wouldn't even notice except that we'd get less junk mail.

2

THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
 
 

I'm
an efficiency expert/weirdo, and I will bring this quality into the White House with me. I see a lot of wasted energy in this country and I'm not going to waste any time addressing it.

People see me going around constantly flipping off lights and think I'm OCD. No, I'm just turned off by lights that are turned on unnecessarily. It's not about wasted money, it's just about waste. Whenever I see someone throwing out food, I just picture all the energy that went into making that food being lost—the diesel in the farm equipment that picked it, the energy in the fertilizer and the whole fertilizer plant, the truck that brought it to the restaurant, the BTUs used to cook it, and the electricity for the heat lamp at the shitty restaurant. All gone because you couldn't finish your taco salad.

That's why I love race cars. There's nothing that doesn't need to be there on a race car. It's all to make it run faster, or to cool it down so it can run longer, or to provide downdraft. It's all about faster, smoother, more efficient. Every time I go downstairs in my house, I bring something that needs to go to the first floor. It bothers me to make a bunch of trips up and down the stairs. Even when I'm pissing in a urinal, I lament the loss of that energy. That stream of liquid that comes from my cock could be harnessed. That's why my first directive to the Department of Energy will be to put miniature hydroelectric waterwheels in every urinal. It will even be part of my campaign slogan: “A natural-gas car in every garage and a waterwheel in every piss pot.” The urinals at the Super Bowl alone could power all the lights and Jumbotrons in the stadium. I even want a device invented so that I can power a flat-screen TV on the interior lid of my coffin with the energy from my decomposing body. Just because I'm dead doesn't mean I don't want to watch
Access Hollywood
.

When it comes to wasted energy, if I come home and the space heater is buzzing in the kids' room while they're at school, I go ballistic. If that heat could be channeled to someone who needs it to boil pasta, I'd be fine with it, but the idea of heating a room that no one is in boggles my mind. I run into this all the time at home. My family puts the kill in kilowatt. I went into the kids' room the other day and the lamp on their end table was on. So I had to do the move where I reached up under the shade like I was some sort of lamp gynecologist. Here's how this usually goes. The light is on, so you have to look down the barrel of the lampshade at the blinding shaft of light while you feel around, and you burn your hand on the bulb in a fruitless attempt to find the switch. So then you think, “I'll go down to the base.” You feel the base and still, nothing. So you pick it up, spin it around, can't find anything, and then decide that maybe the switch is three feet down the cord. I hate that shit. I have stayed at hotels where the switch for the lamp was a yard down the cord behind the desk. I shouldn't have to move furniture or slide on a mechanic's creeper to turn my light on. Switch placement should just be uniform. It should be at the base. That way you're not searching down a cord that's tucked behind furniture and you're not reaching up a lampshade like some perv copping an up-skirt feel on a teenage girl at the mall.

It's more than the petty annoyance of not being able to find the switch. It's the fact that we were illuminating a room that no one had been in for several hours. Worse is that no one was going to be in that room for several hours more. Had I not noticed it, more energy would have just gone into the ether.

This is a chick problem, by the way. They all have the “save the whales” gene and the “save the dolphins” gene but not the “save the kilowatts” gene. Maybe we need dolphin-shaped lightbulbs. I bet Cameron Diaz, despite all her “save this” and “save that,” right now has a closet at home with a light on and the door closed.

First Lady Lynette can just skip this next section and we could avoid my being the first president to get divorced while in office. Lynette will not commit to an iron. She just has this weird hot stick with a diamond-shaped head that spouts steam. It's basically a miniature iron attached to a handle the size of one on a toilet brush. She doesn't even have an ironing board, so when it comes time to do the collars on my dress shirts before I go on
O'Reilly
, I'll find her sitting on the floor steaming the collars on the carpet.

And that was where I found the iron-stick one day when I came home, sitting on the carpet. Unfortunately I did not find Lynette sitting on the carpet with it. I passed by it three times looking for her to no avail. Sadly I had to go and check to see if it was still plugged in. Even more sadly, I was right. I touched the iron part and it was hot. So I unplugged it immediately. But just as immediately my waste-not instinct kicked in and I rushed to the closet, grabbed a couple of shirts, and pressed the collars to milk every last kilowatt out of the iron before it cooled down.

The part that bothered me much more than my wife leaving a hot iron on the carpet was the fact that it doesn't have a little light to tell you it's still on. Shouldn't the thing that can burn down your house have a built-in diode to warn you of that possibility? Irons are some of the least stable objects around. A dwarf could fart and knock over an iron.

Just add little LEDs to stuff to let us know the wattage is still flowing. All electrical equipment produced in this country must now include this feature.

The one that really drives me nuts with this is the ceiling fan. I have several in my house. I've got one in the bedroom, one in the office, and one in the workout room. I love them so much I'm thinking about having one installed in my car. But I never know when the thing is on or off. A lot of other items in the house—like the toaster oven or the coffeemaker—have a little red light to let you know if the juice is still running. With the ceiling fan, you only have the noise. So when it comes time to leave the house, you have to pull the chain and guess. You give it that one tug. (
Ka-chink
) “I think it's off, but it's just slowing down. Maybe one more.” (
Ka-chink
) At this point the ceiling fan goes into turbo mode. Birds are getting sucked into the vortex. So you then overcompensate and pull it three times but then it's back to where it was when you decided to start the retarded fan dance. Eventually I do what we've all done, I grit my teeth and say, “Fuck it. I'm gonna put my hand in there. I don't care if I burn out the bearings or lose a pinky.” I even give it a little push back just for good measure to see if it recoils.