Whether Santa's Real or Not, I Couldn't Care Less

Is anyone else like me, in that when they were a kid, they didn't care whether Santa was real or not? I don't care who brings me the gift. I don't. I don't need a backstory as to how the gift got here. Just give me the gift. I don't need to know how the Playstation 2 made it's way into my house. I just know that now I have a Playstation 2. Even if on a random day in summer a Playstation 2 made it's way into my room and I woke up to find it... I wouldn't even ask how it got there, I'd just start playing it. I'm 9, I don't even question whether God exists or not, you really think I'm going to question how a PS2 got in my house?

That's the thing, parents think, "Oh my child is so innocent and needs to conjure up this fantasy of a jolly fat man with a beard in a red suit with 9 reindeer that puts you on a list and checks it twice..." fuck that. I'd prefer that my parents give me the gift because at least they have an accurate judgment of me. They hang out with me everyday, this fat dude sits up in the North Pole and watches me when I sleep, how is that a good way to judge character? You can't comprehend the human condition, you hang out with elves in curly shoes all day, wearing your dopey red suit.

Red suit. They always say that, but that's not a suit. You've never seen a suit that looks like that, it's a coat. It's not a suit, if you showed up to a job interview wearing that they'd kick you the fuck out.

I don't know if parents understand what kids want. When you're young they bring you to the mall and make you sit on some stranger's lap and everyone has to pretend that he's Santa Claus. Yeah, it's early December, Santa's busiest time of the year, but he's chilling at the Macy's on Atlantic Avenue. Guess all the kids that don't live in New York are fucked, because they can't come down to tell him what they want.
And that was never fun for me. That's like your first job interview as a kid. I was fucking nervous. But my parents would act like it was fun. Because there's nothing more fun than judgment from a stranger! And in the end none of it mattered. I was nervous for no reason. I didn't have to do any of it. Like what, if I had shit in his lap were my parents going to return all the gifts they had already bought for me, just to continue the ruse?

And when are you supposed to tell your kids? What's the cutoff point? You need one, because otherwise you'll have a 27 year old kid living in your basement thinking that Santa's real and the government can be trusted. Probably not a likely source for grandchildren.

So when, 12? What if the kid's born a few days before Christmas (like I am), do you spring it on him then? "Happy 12th birthday! Santa's not real!" Or do you wait until the summer so that you don't fuck with his head, associating his birthday with his knowledge of the Santa Claus lie? But the problem is there, you tell him in July, December rolls around and he's like, "I can't wait for Santa to bring me my...oh. Oh yeah...I remember now..." You're fucked either way.


It's weird that society expects you to lie to your kids about that. They expect you. In this country, you're a bad parent if you don't lie to your kid. because all the fucking parents do it. And if you tell your kid santa's not real then your kid will tell the other kids at school that will go tell their parents and all of a sudden you're a villain, for exposing a lie that those fuckers perpetuated to begin with. Parents always tell you not to give in to peer pressure, but even they can't rise above it. "Don't drink, don't do drugs". Yeah well don't lie to your fucking children.

And that's the only reason parents do it, is because it's so widely accepted. You're allowed to lie to your kid about that one thing. What if I told my child that Bigfoot was real. And that he visits our house one night every year. And that he better be good or otherwise Bigfoot will break all of his game systems. And one day my kid wakes up and sees a giant footprint on his floor that I drew the previous night.


People think it's harmless. "It's just a white lie about Santa Claus, who could it hurt?" Sure, it's just a child, your child...that trusts you implicitly, but why don't you push this lie into their little trusting head that they'll definitely figure out is a lie later on. I'm sure that won't create a sense of distrust between you. I read an article that said atheism is increasing in children... no shit. When you tell your kid that Santa, the tooth fairy and God all exist, and then later you go, "Well, 1 out of 3 ain't bad right?"
"Fuck you mom and dad, It's 0 out of 3!"
All you're doing by telling your children that Santa Claus exists is creating a contrived means to control your child's innocence. That's all it is. And that's fucking sick. "Oh you're so innocent you'll believe anything I say! Santa's real and I'm always right!" That's fucked up. Just stop it.

Tyler Clementi, the bigger picture

Tyler Clementi's suicide was a tragedy. Those two students that filmed him were voyeuristic pieces of shit. But I hate how everybody's acting as if this is an anti-gay issue. Seth Walsh's suicide was an anti-gay issue. He was bullied for being gay until he couldn't take it and hung himself. Tyler Clementi's story was a privacy issue, that just so happened to deal with homosexuality.

The two Rutgers students that filmed him were only taking part in a similar voyeurism that this whole country takes part in. So much of our culture is based on, "Ooh, did you hear what so and so did?" and "Did you see the pictures of blah bitty blah?" and "I bet Tom Cruise is gay." We do this shit all the time. And how dare the shitty media paint these two Rutgers students to be villains when the news pulls the same shit all the time. If the news had found a video of Tom Cruise kissing another man, that shit would spread like wildfire. "Ooh, look we got him! We outed Tom Cruise, tee-hee-hee!" But that's an invasion of privacy that we're comfortable with. It'd be hypocrisy in its finest hour.

"But Lawson, Tyler Clementi was just a student at a college, not a celebrity." So fucking what? That's how this abhorrent cultural wave got started. As if for some reason because someone becomes famous, we have a RIGHT to know everything about their personal life. When Tiger Woods made that public apology, I was more confused than anything else.
"Why is he apologizing to the public? We have nothing to do with who he fucks. Absolutely nothing. We watch him hit a ball with a stick." were the thoughts I had.

A voyeuristic mentality fuels behavior like this. You think these Rutger students would've invaded Tyler Clementi's privacy like this, if it didn't seem so accepted to do in popular culture? We, collectively, are like a bunch of peeping Toms. And the news are our binoculars. "Let's see whose private lives I can look into today..."

It's not a gay issue. It could've been anything they were filming that was private. If somebody just filmed me naked without my consent I'd consider suicide. Seriously, my nude body put on the internet, would make me consider ending it all. I'm in horrendous shape. That's a fucked up thing to do. I don't want anyone to see this, except a girl that I had already lured into my bedroom with my charm and sense of humor.

The two Rutgers students invaded Clementi's privacy for the same reason the news invades the privacy of celebrities: ratings. Now of course the Rutgers students ratings system is a bit different, it's just be other dumb college students going, "Hey I saw that video, that's fucking crazy man!" but you get my point.
And let's be honest, if when you were in college, somebody had sent you a video they made of a fellow student fucking a guy, or fucking a girl, or masturbating, or just crying into his pillow yelling at the demons to leave him alone...you'd watch it. Multiple times. And as you're watching it, you wouldn't think, "Boy this seems wrong to be watching this. I hope the embarrassment that this person will feel from the wide distribution of this video won't lead to his suicide." No, you'd just watch it and laugh. I know I would.

So let's stop acting like this is some sort of anti gay issue, it's a privacy issue. That's the big picture. Let's stop being voyeuristic cunts and start taking some responsibility for the culture we've created.

R.I.P. Greg Giraldo

I don't really give a fuck when most celebrities die. Even if they die young. But Greg Giraldo's death has gotten me quite upset. If you look over at my list of 20 favorite comedians, you may notice Giraldo isn't on there and go, "Well, what the fuck? Not even top 20, and you're broken up about him?" Well, just know that Giraldo would've been #21 on that list. In fact, his last album is one of my top albums of the last decade. http://lawsoncomedy.blogspot.com/2010/09/favorite-comedy-albums-of-decade-part-2.html

On top of that, what's upsetting about Giraldo's death to me is that I feel like he had finally reached a point in his comedy career where he was getting the recognition he deserved. Just about all of my favorite comedians working today are around that late 30's to mid 40's age range, Giraldo died at 44. It takes many comedians that long to get recognized. He didn't put out his first album until 2006, when he was 40.
Giraldo had also been through a lot. A couple of divorces, drinking problems...it wasn't a walk in the park for him. He finally overcame his drinking demons in '05.

He was a great comedian. Original, daring, insightful and fucking funny. When I watched the Flavor Flav roast, Giraldo was slaying it. About 5 great slams in a row, and he continues the rolling laughter by saying that Flav "looked like a skeleton wrapped in electrical tape." I've never laughed harder at anything in my life. I've laughed about that hard at some things, but that brought me to my pinnacle of laughter.

R.I.P. Greg Giraldo. The comedy world will miss you.

A phrase that should no longer exist

Here's a phrase that should probably disappear from the English language: "Excuse me, there's a lady present." Oh really, so what does that mean? All the fun I was just having must now end? I can't talk about blowjobs or tell shit stories or make an AIDS joke, because your delicate lady-like ears might hear it?
This isn't 1873, with women wearing corsets and their hair tied up and piled on their heads... not being able to listen to the men discuss business. It's 2010, women are supposed to be equals now.

What the fuck, I know a lot of girls that I could say anything I want around them and they wouldn't freak out. And by you saying, "there's a lady present" you're being very insulting towards them. Like they're not ladies just because they're adults and hearing me talk about shitting doesn't make them cry and run away.

My sister is 16 years old. She's 16, and she calls me a cunt every other day. I call her that too, we're cool like that. We used to play a game where we would call each other cunts as loud as we could. We would just yell that at each other in the house, and it was freeing to be able to do that.

"Lawson's a cunt!"
"Bryce is a cunt!"
"Lawson's a CUNT!"
"Bryce is a CUNT!"
"LAWSON'S A CUNT!"
"BRYCE IS A CUNT!"

and we would laugh hysterically.

But my sister is a lady. She goes to a Catholic school, a lot of girls there with the short skirts and tight blouses on. My sister dresses conservatively. And she's pretty too, it's not that she's covering up a terrible body. She's in great shape, she does yoga and shit. On top of that, she's abstinent. She doesn't want to have sex until she finds someone who's worthy. On the flip side, I talk about a big shit I took and I hear other girls saying, "Excuse me, there's a lady present," meanwhile they had a different dick in them every night for the past week. Oh really, I can't talk about shit around you, but you tossed the salad of a guy who you just met because he told you he was a director and could get you work, when really he just sells bootlegged DVD's outside of a Rite Aid?! Go fuck yourself.

Because it's "ladies" like you that made me think for a long time that women aren't funny. Wanda Sykes is a lady, and she has a bit where she talks about how cool it would be to have a detachable pussy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8FfFwtL91Q&feature=related
So fuck off!

What's even worse is when guys do it. When a guy says, "Excuse me, there's a lady present," because it's always his girlfriend and the only reason he's he's trying to stop me is so she doesn't see him burst out laughing about the juvenile thing I'm about to say.

I'm going to tell you this story, about the first time I heard anyone use that phrase. I was in 6th grade. I was hanging out with my best friend, Cris Vergara in the school library. And we were on the computer, we were sharing it. Not because we're gay, but he wanted to show me something. ...Not his dick. Anyway, we were on the computer and ironically, he was showing me a website that had jokes on it. Some website with jokes that I guess had been compiled and most adults probably knew, but we were in 6th grade. So he showed this to me, and one of the jokes he opened up went something like this:

A man finds a magic lamp, he rubs it, and a genie pops out. The genie says, "I will grant you 3 wishes." And the man says, "I want to be young forever!" and the genie snaps his fingers and the man is 21 again, with a full head of hair and no wrinkles. Then the man says, "I want to be rich forever!" and the genie snaps his fingers and the man is littered with gold. Then the man says, "I want to be irresistible to women forever!" and poof, the man turned into a tampon.

Now, I'm in 6th grade, I don't know what a tampon is. But my friend does and he's laughing his balls off. i want to understand the joke, I want to be in on it, so I ask him, "What's a tampon? Dude what's a tampon?" But he won't tell me, he's being an asshole. He just keeps laughing. So I ask louder, thinking that that'll make him tell me so now I'm going, "What's a tampon?! What's a tampon?!" he still just keeps laughing, now not at the joke anymore, but at the fact that I keep persisting in asking him. So now I'm mad and I'm like, "Dude seriously, what's a tampon?!! What the FUCK is a TAMPON!!?" I'm yelling that in the goddamn school library. Then I hear a voice behind me go, "Excuse me..." and I turn, it's a classmate of ours, a tiny 6th grade girl. And she says, "Excuse me, there's a lady present." And I was so embarrassed. But I thought she was mad at me because I was yelling, not about the tampon thing, so I said, "Oh sorry." Then I started whispering to my friend, "Hey dude, what's a tampon?"

Later, when I found out what a tampon was, I got the joke and had quite the belly laugh. But what that girl said always stuck with me. "Excuse me, there's a lady present." I mean obviously I wasn't trying to be rude, I had no idea what we were even talking about. That bitch should've just told me what it was so I would shut up. And again, she's not a lady. She's not, she's an eleven year old girl. There's nothing lady like about her. She was probably still picking boogers out of her face and smearing it on the wall. She hadn't developed class yet.

It's a bullshit phrase that keeps women down, and it needs to be erased.