The Green Red Green (14 page)

At this point, some of you are probably thinking, “My wife will say it’s ugly.” Well, if you’ve got an old garage door opener lying around—and who doesn’t?—you can give this a real sporty look. Mount the garage door opener on the hood and attach to it a sheet of plywood (or half a ping-pong table, for those of you who have keys to the community centre). Hinge it with duct tape and now you have a European-style plywood spoiler, giving the effect of hideaway headlights like those you see on Ferraris and Maseratis. If that isn’t sharp, then neither am I.

R
ecently I’ve been seeing more commercials for wills: how to prepare them, why to have them, what to put in them. I don’t think wills are used to their full potential. First of all, you shouldn’t try to say how much you care about people in your will. It just makes them feel bad. They don’t need to read it from you after you’re gone—they need to hear it from you while you’re still around.

To me, the true fun is to use your will to make people improve themselves. For example, you can leave your riding mower to your neighbour, providing he returns the hedge clippers he borrowed from you in 1973. (And it has to be the exact pair—you kept a picture.) You can leave your barbecue to the people up the street, providing they camp in your backyard listening to their dog bark all night, as you did for so many years. You can leave five thousand dollars to the city, providing they repave the street like they promised to in the last municipal election. You get the idea. Have some fun with it. A will is your last chance to make a point, and nobody can talk back.

I
’ve noticed that when I ask my computer to do something by pointing at and clicking on an icon, it will try for thirty seconds or so, and then tell me it failed and just go back to where it was. No guilt. No attitude. It doesn’t kick anything or hurt itself. I envy that. I’m not like a computer at all. You can’t just point and click to make me try something. In fact, the more you point, the less I click. And once I do try something, I don’t quit. I just keep working at it until I keel over or the thing I’m working on explodes in a fireball. That’s because once I start something, I’d rather get
incredibly angry than stop. I have attitude. I kick things. I hurt myself. If my computer could see me, it would say, “You have performed an illegal operation.” Maybe one day I’ll turn into a computer and everything will be okay. But for that to happen, I’ll need a lot more memory.

O
ur local television station was doing one of those success profiles of a guy in town who had made a gazillion dollars and had women sending in resumes in hopes of having his children. I found the whole thing mildly irritating at first, but I really lost it when they announced that this guy was twenty-seven years old. No average man over the age of forty needs to hear that. If they can make a V-chip that filters out sex and violence on TV, they should be able to invent a gizmo that prevents the viewer from learning that not only are most people doing better than him but they’re also doing it at half his age. Maybe they could even make a thingy that substitutes a higher, more palatable number whenever age is mentioned. Wouldn’t it be great to hear that Bill Gates was eighty-seven or Justin Bieber was sixty-three or Sidney Crosby was seventy-four? It would give us all hope for the future.

I
need some computer nerd out there to come up with software that will allow me to scan a contract into my computer, enlarge the fine print, and put it at the top of the document. That would save me a lot of eyestrain and a lot of ink. When my wife said,
“Why do they make the important things so small?” I said it was just nature’s way.

H
ere’s a way to reduce your carbon footprint: switch to soapbox derby–style cars. To my way of thinking, we need a smaller, lighter vehicle—one made completely of wood, so it won’t rust. Simple but practical. Lightweight with excellent visibility, easy to park, and with room for only one person, which will probably save a few marriages. You steer the vehicle with your feet, which leaves your hands free to use as brakes.

What type of fuel-efficient engine would we use in something like this? I immediately thought of Roman candles, but they wouldn’t sell me the quantities I’d need to power this unit. So I suggest we go with fire extinguishers. Point them out the back and attach them to the vehicle using duct tape. All you do is squeeze on the trigger for a blast of carbon dioxide; that will propel you forward to the point where you should be able to maintain thirty miles an hour on a flat road, putting out fires as you go.

On a safety note, I suggest you wear a scarf around your neck, because you’re sitting real close to the fire extinguishers and the carbon dioxide gets real cold. You wouldn’t want to be cruising down a major thoroughfare with a frozen head.

I
t’s always helpful to identify the difference between men and women in the interests of universal peace and global warming. One thing I’ve noticed is that men and women generally have a different approach to work: women are doers, and men are dele-gators. Women pride themselves on maximizing their own personal productivity. Men pride themselves on getting someone else to do the job. That’s why women are hands-on while men prefer power tools. We’re programmed for work avoidance. It’s not our fault. The human reproductive process is the model for all other forms of man/woman interaction. The man is there for all the fun and excitement of the first five minutes, and at the end of the meeting, the woman takes sole responsibility for the project for the next nine months.

Y
ou can tell how long people have been married just by watching them drive their car. Here are a few things I’ve noticed:

I
’ll try to keep this short. I find that guys my age have a short attention span. I’m not saying that’s bad. In fact, most of the time it’s a good thing. We’re starting to sense that time is running out, and we don’t want to waste it reading thick books or watching mini-series or listening to the neighbour talk about her cats. We like short, pithy, meaningful sound bites. People who attempt to communicate with us need to accept that and to alter their style of communication to fit those parameters. Here’s a short list of questions I make people ask themselves before they waste my precious time:

M
any of us have several ad hoc time capsules that show the chronology of our lives. Our wallets are one of these. If you found a wallet and it had the following things in it, you’d know it belonged to a middle-aged guy:

I
was in a restaurant for lunch yesterday. It was one of those salad buffet places where you fill your plate with low calorie, no-fat lettuce and tomatoes and then smother it with mounds of creamy salad dressing and a couple of handfuls of bacon bits. So I’m standing at the cashier in a “What a great day” kind of mood, and she says, “Do you get the seniors’ discount?” I was so upset, I could barely go back for seconds.

Offering a seniors’ discount to people over fifty is a fine incentive for customers and all that, but businesses have got to handle it right. Like most men my age, I think I look about thirty-seven. I don’t need some nineteen-year-old sweetie exploding that myth in front of total strangers. Not for a lousy 10 percent. My pride is worth at least 15.

I
t doesn’t take magic to make your car go faster. It takes logic and perseverance, and at the lodge, these things are much rarer than magic. The solution is found with physics, not with psychics. So take a few minutes to understand the principles of friction, gravity, and the internal combustion engine.

Horsepower is the term for the size of the guns your motor can deliver. It’s determined by three things: the size of the engine (displacement), the tightness of the engine (compression), and the explosiveness of the fuel (where are my eyebrows?).

Replace your car’s engine with the biggest one you can find.
Big things have big engines—semis, earth movers, trains, cruise ships. Increase the compression by tightening the head bolts with a crescent wrench welded to the end of a flagpole (for extra torque). Wrap the whole engine in duct tape. Use two layers in opposite directions for the tightest seal since MarineLand put vodka in the performance pool.

Now you want a really explosive gas. I suggest jet or rocket fuel, or anything with the numbers 238 after it. Increasing the spark also helps. Try getting a transformer from a nearby hydro pole when the power is off (that last part is important). Wire the transformer between the ignition coil and the distributor. It will raise the voltage from 50,000 volts to 125,0​00,000,​000,000,00​0,000,00​0,000,00​0,000,00​0,0​00,00​0,000,00​0,000,000,000,00​0,000,000, which will make the car easier to start and give you a more interesting hairstyle. There are ways to get even more horsepower, but I feel they’re just too dangerous.

While friction is a key component in the propagation of the human race, it is a bad thing in every other race. There are two ways to reduce friction in your car. One is to build the vehicle really well using only the best materials under strict tolerances with stringent quality control. And the other, which is what I tend to favour, is to really lay on the lubricant (see also “Propagation”). A good rule to live by is “If it’s dry, something is wrong.” That applies to everything except the driver’s seat.

Cover everything with lubricant—the shocks, the springs, the linkage, the engine, the driveshaft, the tires, the hood, the windshield, the air freshener, the steering wheel, the door handles, but not the cigarette lighter. A cigarette lighter popping out of your hand can bring an unwanted understanding of the term “grease fire.”