(Things I’d do as President, right before everybody leaves)

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America. The land of abundant stuff…especially when you’re a “victim” and the government gets other people to pay for the stuff. But I digress, which is hard to do when you’re only in the second sentence.

But it’s true: Americans have a wealth of available things, including kitchen appliances and disposable genders, here in the land where the deer and the antelope role-play, as they transition sexually in order to use any bathroom they choose, as is their right.

Nonetheless, despite all this stuff, there are some gaps. Occasionally, I think, we, as an occasionally-thinking society, are missing a few handy things.

For example, here are some categories of things we could use:

Words

We need some new vocabulary words, some niche words, new phrases to describe new situations. Situations like:

• That confusion you feel when you hear Sean Penn wants to kill somebody because they don’t support peace
• The yearning envy that grips as you realize you don’t, in fact, own a flashlight that can survive being frozen in a block of ice or run over by a truck, which is entirely possible if you’re extremely bored, or an idiot
• The dark chasm of ESPN emptiness that settles in when football season ends and is replaced by…I can barely bring myself to type it…league bowling
• That heartbreak you feel when you’re in a relationship, but your soul mate hasn’t updated their facebook status yet
• The edgy confusion you feel when trying to decide which indestructible frying pan to buy
• That near-to-nausea spasm in your lower jaw whenever Hillary laughs

Products

Somebody needs to invent an email plug-in that will scan all incoming messages and automatically annihilate any emails that contain certain irritating things – things you can define in a Preferences pane. Here are some excellent candidates for instant obliteration:

• Emails containing jokes you’ve already received, from 17,000 other people
• Emails that start with all the distribution lists from the 17,000 other emails this one went to before you
• Offers that promise to make you so attractive to women that they’ll ask you to autograph an ovary
• All messages containing the phrase “hot Asian women,” because the odds are they’re not actually hot. Or Asian. Or women.
• Any email with the subject line “You just HAVE to read this”
• Or “THIS IS THE FUNNIEST THING EVER”
• Or “Jesus will know who deletes this”

Safety Devices/Warning Labels

CLiM Detector: One day at work long ago, somebody described somebody else’s bonehead move as a clim – a Career-Limiting Maneuver. Generally speaking, a clim is something done in the workplace that is so stupid it could get you fired, beat up, arrested, killed, or in extreme circumstances, several of those. A trustworthy shirt-pocket CLiM Detector would analyze the current situation, determine the stupidity threshold, and then disable the idiot with a strong sedative before he can moron himself out of a job.

Television shows should contain some kind of “Before Watching, Be Warned” label. Something like this…
The show you are about to watch may contain:

• Gratuitous sex
• Excessive violence
• Peanuts or dairy products
• Multiple references to gratuitous sex among dairy products
• Grossly overweight Vegas has-beens singing show tunes
• Geraldo Rivera

Laws

• No written sentence may end in more than three exclamation points.
• Under penalty of law, used car salesmen may not claim that prices will never be this low again.
• If a politician pronounces the word nuclear as nucular, s/he will not be allowed to participate in any votes on nuclear issues. If the politician spells the word as nucular, said politician may justifiably be executed, or relocated to Chicago, which is redundant.
• As of today, if Congress won’t do what a President wants, the President may just write his own laws. Oh, wait.
• It shall be illegal for anybody in sales to stand in the hall and make imaginary golf swings.
• It shall be illegal for anyone driving a car worth less than forty dollars to thudder through my neighborhood and throw a non-requested newspaper on my driveway. If they throw it while it’s raining, it will be deemed a felony without the option of parole.
• Furthermore, anyone caught littering my property by lobbing a small Ziploc containing several pebbles and a hand-lettered “Got ants? Call Lance!” flyer may be shot on sight, on-site.

People

If the humans in TV commercials are any indicator of the general population, there we’re short on several kinds of people. Earth desperately needs:

• Women who are less excited about sharing the good news about constipation
• Attorneys who are not so bleedin’ eager to find out if you’re injured
• Senior citizens who can ride an in-home stair lift without staring off into the middle distance and grinning like a lockjaw victim
• Laborers who can manage to get through the workday without the daily angst of choosing between pain relievers
• Housewives who can manage to operate a can opener without carpet-bombing the linoleum with spaghetti sauce
• Car drivers who can don a pair of anti-glare sunglasses without having a spastic emotional response

Footnote: When it comes to food, the jury’s still out. We may have too many gay wedding cakes and not enough straight chicken biscuits, or the other way around. It’s hard to tell, except in North Carolina, where it’s still illegal for a wedding cake to use the biscuit’s bathroom.