The Horrors of Berkley

And how to improve SAT scores and phlebotomy.

I went to get blood drawn yesterday. It was at one of those medical labs where the employees seem disinterested enough to give you hepatitis. The entire staff at this one was comprised of one person, an old bat who was manning the front desk as well as the phlebotomy station. If she hadn’t been wearing scrubs I wouldn’t have trusted her to park my car at a valet station, but here she was sticking a needle in my arm.

Or trying to. She got one in and started squeezing on some kind of bicycle pump and not a lot of blood came out. “Did you drink a lot of water today,” she asked, scratching her nose in an unsanitary manner.

“No, was I supposed to?” I said. I hadn’t had blood taken in several years. I forgot the protocol. I could see that blood wasn’t coming out of my arm.

“Yeah, if you’re dehydrated, we can’t get blood,” she said. A likely story. So, if I want to pull a cool party trick, I can just not drink water for a few days and throw myself off of a three-story building and not bleed at all when I land? Like my blood is in nut butter form?

She then pricked my arm with a needle in several more places, putting the needle in and removing it and then asking me to switch arms. Finally, I said, “I’ll come back. I’ll drink enough water to turn this place into a slip and slide.”

Driving home I was pretty angry. She’d poked me like twenty times. It was nerve racking.

I passed a few drug addicts doing the limbo as I was driving, this being LA, which got me to thinking.

I’m always hearing stories about how recovering heroin addicts are enrolled in certain jobs programs to reintegrate them into society, like working as substance abuse counselors or in soup kitchens.

I can almost guarantee you a heroin addict would have gotten that needle into me properly. I’ve seen those disturbing HBO documentaries. That’s why I nearly said to the lady, “Try taking it from the webbing of my toes.”

You can see what I’m getting at: We need to start turning former heroin addicts into phlebotomists.

They will need very little schooling. They’ll get that blood the first try.

PETA is an embarrassing organization on every level. Their problem as I see it is that they tend to go for shock value, it reads as hyperbole, and nobody takes them seriously. It’s like your niece who’s a freshman in college standing up at the Thanksgiving table to scold everyone on their participation in capitalism. While wearing Kate Spade.

People just laugh it off when they compare catching a mouse to being a van-driving serial killer.

I don’t have a dog in the fight. I’m an environmentalist, I don’t support factory farming, I’m mostly on PETA’s side, except I don’t really care about animals. They just don’t mean anything to me, I don’t know them. This is why I’m able to look at the issue with a fresh set of eyes.

PETA’s top priority, I think, is for people to eat less pigs, cows, and chickens. If the people who run PETA didn’t have their heads so far up their own asses, they could hire me as an advisor, and I’d show them how to cut meat consumption in half in just a few months.

We’ve all heard these stories, I assume. There’s a family who lives in a rural area. They get a bull or a flock of goats or a llama so that they can fatten him up and sell him for slaughter after some time. A nice little side hustle.

The matriarch, or one of the daughters grows attached to the animal, and they convince the man of the house to allow them to keep it as a pet because it would be cruel to send it off to its death.

So, what separates an animal seen as disposable from an animal seen as a sentient being with feelings and the capacity for affection? When did this cow go from being a commodity to a pet?

I’ll tell you when. When it was given a name. Bessy. Rudy. Angus. Duke. Whatever.

“Did You Food Have a Face?”

That’s one of PETA’s more successful campaign slogans. It sucks.

“Did Your Food Have a Name?”

That’s effective.

Commercially farmed cows and pigs live in big industrial Cowshwitz style concentration camps. Outdoors.

What PETA needs to do is get some drones and fly over the feedlots and give each cow a name and then find some way to identify them based on the pattern of their hide, like how marine biologists do with whales’ tails and sharks’ dorsal fins. (If this proves too challenging and PETA’s identifications are not totally accurate it doesn’t matter. People are very gullible and stupid. Just fake it.)

Then they’ll need to set up a website and track where each cow is being shipped off to after it’s slaughtered. That way your annoying niece can check an online database and stand up over your ham at New Year’s dinner and announce, “I’d just like you all to know that you’re eating (checks phone) @William22756.”

You’ll hear the forks clanging on the plates. You can’t eat something with a name, what are you, an animal?

Of course, let’s say you check the database and your cow has been sent to the local McDonald’s. A single McDonald’s hamburger can be made up of dozens, even over a hundred ground up cows.

This is when your community will need to rely on a very angry person with autism incapable of humor or self-awareness, such as Greta Thunberg, to put out a news release listing the names of all of the many cows contained in your burger.

The report could be posted on BlueSky and even local news programs. “The school lunch for today is chicken nuggets and green beans. The McDavis bridge will be closed through Friday for maintenance so find an alternate route. McDonalds will be serving Jerry1412, Gene88, Sylvio, Bernardo76, Elvira, Rawhide1947…”

You might not take me seriously, but I’m a hired gun. I don’t play games, I find solutions and frequently mix metaphors.

I would like to thank the graduates of Berkely, Columbia, and several other institutions which produce arrogant liberals, as well as just mediocre ol’ progressives who went to junior college, for getting Donald Trump elected. And I’m being facetious of course.

As of a year ago I lived with this woman, I’ll just call her Rebecca. She went to Berkley. Like many people confusing narcissism with political philosophy, this person had deemed anyone to the left of her ephemeral line in the sand of politics a naive patsy and anyone to the right a brute.

As such, during my time conversing with her, I was at various times called, “Misogynist, Trump supporter, anti-Semite, racist, homophobe.”

I’m fairly certain I was more liberal than this person, and obviously none of the above labels applied to me. My cause for being called these things was, I dared to respond to prompts with my own thoughts.

I was recently ruminating about how if I were more of a reactionary, lesser man, I would have just voted for Trump out of spite, because that’s what you seem to think of me anyway.

Unless you have good cause, every time you, as a verbose person prone to giving unsolicited lectures and name-calling, label someone a bigot, you’re pretty much reaping what you sew.

The Dems cannot get this through their skulls. They need to stop this, altogether, right now. It just lost them another election.

Your current beliefs are not stone tablets you hand down to the masses. People will not be blackmailed into prostrating to you at the price of being called a racist.

Most of them will just vote for a racist name caller if you name-call them a racist. This includes actual racists and non-racists who just don’t like your attitude, sadly.

It’s time to do away with those labels entirely. If everyone’s a racist, well, then it looks like everyone’s a racist, given our country is technically unified under one president.

Get it, we’re going on a decade of this you dumb fuckers. If what I’m saying seems obvious, how come one of the two parties doesn’t seem to get it? You guys are really smart, right?

Lastly, I just ran the Honolulu Marathon and I must commend the city of Honolulu for putting on a flawless production. The event attracted 30,000 runners, 20,000 of whom were from out of town.

I shouldn’t say I “ran” the marathon because I didn’t. I just walked it.

Volunteers did a commendable job of passing out water and Gatorade to participants at regular intervals, as well as Vaseline swabs to prevent chaffing.

There were medical tents for anyone who needed attention.

Within an hour of the event being completed, you couldn’t see one paper cup littering the ground.

The marathon brought in around five million bucks for the city just based on entrance fees and generated millions for the local economy.

A marathon is 26 miles, and toward the end everyone is struggling. The final three miles of the Honolulu Marathon is a two-lane road, thirty feet wide, which 30,000 people passed through, from the winner who came in at just over two hours, to me, who came in six hours later, to those a couple of hours behind me.

Along this humble road toward the finish, the city had hired DJs to blast music in an effort to motivate those who were straggling, limping, regretting their decision to participate.

I thought it was a nice touch. They were playing upbeat, energy inducing jams.

My sister, who was walking next to me, was not having the easiest of times. “You know what would really help me right now?” she said.

“What?”

“If Obama was standing on the side of the road telling me to keep pushing forward.”

“What a brilliant idea,” I thought. “Celebrity cheerleaders.”

Now, Obama is a tough get. But it got me to thinking, I could open an agency and farm out celebrities to cheer people on in various situations at different events.

Take the marathon. The operating budget is millions of dollars. Why not pay Jennifer Aniston, Sean Astin (dressed as Rudy), Sylvester Stallone (as Rocky Balboa), Hugh Jackman, The Rock, Keanu Reeves, Kelly Clarkson, Tom Hanks, Shaq, or any number of public figures who are famed for having a positive attitude half a million bucks to stand near the finish line for eight hours and yell, “Let’s go! You can do it!”

Professional sports teams would be a good source of clientele. Yeah, when you watch a Lakers game they’ll often show Rob Lowe in the stands. Why not pay him to swing some pom poms around and sell out his dignity?

The California Bar Exam is held at huge venues, the Oakland Convention Center, the Anaheim Convention Center, etc. Thousands of people stressed out, under untold amounts of pressure. There’s a fifteen-minute break. And out pops Calista Flockhart, dressed as Alley McBeal.

“As your attorney, I’d like to advise you to keep a positive attitude and stay confident,” she’d intone.

Same thing at the SATs. Get Mr. Beast or someone who’s popular with young people.

Put one of these people in front of the metal detector at LAX. “Man, this line sucks, but, hey, is that Daniel Baldwin telling me to remove my shoes?”

“Have a great flight buddy!” Baldwin will impart to you before you pass through to the other side.

There are so many situations where a business entity would possess the budget to have someone make an asshole out of themselves, and here’s the thing, it would be money well spent.

I’m not kidding. Test scores would go up. The Lakers would score more points. Marathon times would decrease. There would be less incidents at the TSA.

It’s a hell of an idea. Now I just need the right people to listen.