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StitchesforSnitches

(45 posts)
Sat May 12, 2012, 08:10 AM May 2012

Remember the Old National Lampoon from the 70's?

and great stories like this...........

How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink

When it comes to taking chances, some people like to play poker or shoot dice; other people prefer to parachute-jump, go rhino hunting, or climb ice floes, while still others engage in crime or marriage. But I like to get drunk and drive like a fool. Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you're half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban side street. You'd have to watch the entire Mexican air force crash-land in a liquid petroleum gas storage facility to match this kind of thrill. If you ever have much more fun than that, you'll die of pure sensory overload, I'm here to tell you.

But wait. Let's pause and analyze why this particular matrix of activities is perceived as so highly enjoyable. I mean, aside from the teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over. Ignoring that for a moment, let's look at the psychological factors conducive to placing positive emotional values on the sensory end product of experientially produced excitation of the central nervous system and smacking into a lamppost. Is that any way to have fun? How would your mother feel if she knew you were doing this? She'd cry. She really would. And that's how you know it's fun. Anything that makes your mother cry is fun. Sigmund Freud wrote all about this. It's a well-known fact.

Of course, it's a shame to waste young lives behaving this way – speeding around all tanked up with your feet hooked in the steering wheel while your date crawls around on the floor mats opening zippers with her teeth and pounding on the accelerator with an empty liquor bottle. But it wouldn't be taking a chance if you weren't risking something. And even if it is a shame to waste young lives behaving this way, it is definitely cooler than risking old lives behaving this way. I mean, so what if some fifty-eight-year-old butt-head gets a load on and starts playing Death Race 2000 in the rush-hour traffic jam? What kind of chance is he taking? He's just waiting around to see what kind of cancer he gets anyway. But if young, talented you, with all of life's possibilities at your fingertips, you and the future Cheryl Tiegs there, so fresh, so beautiful – if the two of you stake your handsome heads on a single roll of the dice in life's game of stop-the-semi – now that's taking chances! Which is why old people rarely risk their lives. It's not because they're chicken – they just have too much dignity to play for small stakes.

Now a lot of people say to me, "Hey, P.J., you like to drive fast. Why not join a responsible organization, such as the Sports Car Club of America, and enjoy participation in sports car racing? That way you could drive as fast as you wish while still engaging in a well-regulated spectator sport that is becoming more popular each year." No thanks. In the first place, if you ask me, those guys are a bunch of tweedy old barf mats who like to talk about things like what necktie they wore to Alberto Ascari's funeral. And in the second place, they won't let me drive drunk. They expect me to go out there and smash into things and roll over on the roof and catch fire and burn to death when I'm sober. They must think I'm crazy. That stuff scares me. I have to get completely shit-faced to even think about driving fast. How can you have a lot of exciting thrills when you're so terrified that you wet yourself all the time? That's not fun. It's just not fun to have exciting thrills when you're scared. Take the heroes of the Iliad for instance – they really had some exciting thrills, and were they scared? No. They were drunk. Every chance they could get. And so am I, and I'm not going out there and have a horrible car wreck until somebody brings me a cocktail.

continued....
http://heretical.com/miscella/reptile.html

15 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Remember the Old National Lampoon from the 70's? (Original Post) StitchesforSnitches May 2012 OP
You've made me wistful and nostalgic. The magazine? Yeah, that was cool, too. MiddleFingerMom May 2012 #1
"If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog" DinahMoeHum May 2012 #2
Gahan Wilson did an illustrated FloridaJudy May 2012 #3
Sometimes Silent, Always Deadly... nolabear May 2012 #7
who could ever forget the high school year book? rurallib May 2012 #4
and Charles Ulmer Farley "Call me Chuck" n/t msu2ba May 2012 #5
The fetal pig club... WCGreen May 2012 #12
Dirty Duck Art_from_Ark May 2012 #15
Mrs. Agnew's Diary Zorro May 2012 #6
That piece was written by P.J. O'Rourke gratuitous May 2012 #8
PJ was wicked funny back in the day StitchesforSnitches May 2012 #13
Too much of a coward to drive fast sober....... Mopar151 May 2012 #14
Letters FROM the editors!!! MiddleFingerMom May 2012 #9
Got a raggedy old collection of them in the closet. annabanana May 2012 #10
Yeppers...the '70s. ChazInAz May 2012 #11

DinahMoeHum

(21,794 posts)
2. "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog"
Sat May 12, 2012, 11:43 AM
May 2012

. . .who can forget that cover?

Oh yeah, and their "News On The March" column wasn't so bad, either.

FloridaJudy

(9,465 posts)
3. Gahan Wilson did an illustrated
Sat May 12, 2012, 11:47 AM
May 2012

"Paranoids Guide to Travel" that was one of the funniest things I ever read. That and the "Terminal Flatulence" fundraiser are etched on my brain forever.

gratuitous

(82,849 posts)
8. That piece was written by P.J. O'Rourke
Sat May 12, 2012, 08:19 PM
May 2012

And is now a museum curiosity: Yes, P.J. O'Rourke was, once upon a time, long, long ago, funny.

 
13. PJ was wicked funny back in the day
Sun May 13, 2012, 06:50 AM
May 2012

I just don't get his transformation into unfunny Republican PJ of today.

ChazInAz

(2,569 posts)
11. Yeppers...the '70s.
Sun May 13, 2012, 02:17 AM
May 2012

Back when it was funny. Unfortunately, PJ brought it down pretty quickly. I thought most of his stuff was unreadable and about as witty as a drunk recounting what he remembered of the past weekend in Tijuana.

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