Dave Barry
Bad Habits

Dave Barry.
Bad Habits: A 100% FactFree Book

Dedication

To Mom and Dad, who never forced me to go see Santa Claus.

Introduction

When people come to my home for the first time, they often ask me, "Dave, where's the bathroom?" To which I always answer, "Down the hall there, on the left." And from that point on we are usually close friends.
I bring this up because people often wonder what I'm really like. "Dave," they often ask, when they get out of the bathroom, "are you really as witty, insightful, articulate, and handsome as your writing suggests?" I would have to say that yes, I am, although I am not as tall as you might think. I'm maybe five nine. But then a lot of truly great writers were of average height or less. William Shakespeare was only fifteen inches tall!
Which leads us to accuracy. When Doubleday & Company decided, after days of heavy drinking, to publish this book, they hired a panel of extremely brilliant nuclear physicists, who combed through these essays and marked, with a red pencil, every sentence that might conceivably be accurate, and these sentences were all removed with pruning shears. So I freely admit, right up front, that there are no facts left in this book, and I don't want you Little League coaches out there to send me a lot of cretin letters informing me that a tenyearold can't really throw a baseball six hundred miles an hour. Okay?
So there you have it, except for my philosophy of life. My mother used to say to me: "Son, it's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick." I think that still makes a heck of a lot of sense, even in these troubled times.

Household Perils

It's In The Genes

My wife and I were both born without whatever brain part it is that enables people to decorate their homes. If we had lived in the Neanderthal era, ours would be the only cave without little drawings of elk on the walls.
When we moved into our house eight years ago, there was this lighting fixture in the dining room that obviously had been installed by vandals. Simply removing this fixture would be too good for it; this is the kind of fixture that needs to be taken out in the backyard and shot. When people came over to visit, back when we first moved in, we'd gesture toward the fixture derisively and say "Of course that's got to go."
Of course we still have it. We have no way of deciding what to replace it with. What we have done is get an electrician to come in and move the fixture to another part of the dining room, because, after years of thinking about it with our defective brains, we thought this might be a good decorative idea. To move the fixture, the electrician had to punch holes, some of them big enough to put your fist through, in the wall and ceiling. I have taped plastic sandwich bags over these holes, to keep the air from rushing in and out.
So now, after eight years, we have the original vandal fixture, plus we have holes with plastic bags over them. We eat in the kitchen. We will always eat in the kitchen, and our dining room will always look like the South Bronx. We have learned that anything we try to do to improve it will just make it worse, because of these missing brain parts.
We do a lot of work with plastic bags. We made curtains for several rooms by taping up dark plastic garbage bags. My wife feels guilty about this, because she believes women are supposed to have this Betty Crocker gland somewhere that secretes a hormone that enables them to sew curtains. God knows she has tried. She reads articles, she takes measurements, she even goes to the fabric store, but because of what she perceives to be a deficiency of her Betty Crocker gland, she never actually produces any curtains. Which is fine, because I have a deficiency of my Mr. Goodwrench gland and would never put them up.
So we use plastic garbage bags. They work fine, but I have noticed that most of our friends, now that we're all grownups, have switched over to actual cloth curtains. Also they have tasteful Danish furniture. They just went out and got it somehow, as if it were no big deal, and now everything matches, like those photographs in snotty interior design magazines featuring homes owned by wealthy people who eat out and keep their children in Switzerland. We have this green armchair we got at an auction for twentyfive cents. This is not one of those chairs that are sold for a song but turn out to be tasteful antiques worth thousands of dollars. This chair, at twentyfive cents, was clearly overpriced. It looks, from a distance, like a wad of mucus, and it could not possibly match any other furniture because any furniture that looked like it would have been burned years ago.