Mike Birbiglia's: Secret Public Journal
Dear Journal,
I just got back from Texas and I couldn’t get over how many “Don’t mess with Texas” bumper stickers there were. I was like, “Excuse me, Texas - I had no intention of messing with you.” And they’re like, “But you were gonna.” And I was like, “Nuh uh.” And they were like “Yea huh!” It seems to me that George Bush used this logic when devising his foreign policy. It’s like he showed up in the Middle East and was like “Don’t mess with the U.S.!” And they were like, “We weren’t going to.” And he was like, “But you did.” And they were like, “That’s our cousin - we don’t even stay in touch with him anymore.”
So I’m back in New York now and I can’t seem to stop watching the lead up to the presidential primaries, I think because it’s on every channel all the time every second of the day- with the exception of Fox news, which has done a great job of thoroughly covering the Natalee Holloway case and K-Fed’s hip hop and modeling career. I tend to think that people just vote for the candidate who serves their own selfish needs. Like if there was a candidate who could get the smell of cat pee out of my couch, I would vote for that candidate.
On the Republican side my favorite candidate is Mike Huckabee, partly because of the Chuck Norris ad which is hilarious and partly because I’ve been meaning to go to church for a while and I always watch the state of the union address, so I figure I could kill two birds with one stone.
Rudy Giuliani kind of scares me. I kind of feel like Rudy thinks 9/11 is his birthday. He gets that excited look on his face and buys himself a cake and lights two candles and watches them burn down. And then he looks around and says, “What do I get?” And his advisors are like “$15 million in speaking fees!” and he’s like, “That’s even better than last 9/11!”
Mitt Romney is like a presidential candidate from a sci-fi thriller. Like the character who never stops smiling but secretly has that Terminator 2 robot skull. Jon Edwards always gets flack for his 400-dollar haircut, but I feel like he might donate one of those haircuts to Romney, so Romney might look less like a Ken doll. Romney’s hair looks so much like Ken it makes you feel like if you pulled down those neatly pressed pants you might see Ken’s smoothed-over private parts. Maybe that’d be good for the White House. He’d be like, “I am not able to have sexual relations with that woman.”
Which brings us to Hillary, who I like but I’ve always been annoyed by - partly because I like Bill so much and I feel like she’s been cock-blocking this guy for like 30 years. C’mon Rodham - Let a player play! I feel people resist Hillary because they fear she’ll do crazy woman stuff like order wreaths for Christmas in August, so she tries to act like a man, which makes people nervous that she’ll do crazy man stuff like invade Iran, and they’re not sure they should vote for a black candidate because he might do crazy black people stuff like write catchy songs that tell bitches to “get out the way.” One of Hillary’s campaign managers got caught trying to smear Barack for drug use he talks about in his own book. That’s like trying to smear Tom Hanks for doing Bosom Buddies. Let’s focus on the fact that he saved Private Ryan!
I actually did a fundraiser for Barack Obama this week. It’s the first time I had ever done anything like that. But I’m not endorsing him - because I feel like if I endorsed him he’d lose, or at least come in third and trip over his shoelaces. But I performed at the fundraiser because he doesn’t take money from private interests. I don’t know much about politics, but that seems like a pretty admirable thing. Plus, he offered to get the pee smell out of my couch.