Most days I wake up believing I have a fairly good grasp of life’s basic truths, but then I leave the house and see what people do and how they spend their time and money and I realize just how much in life can’t be explained. It makes me sad because this unexplainable phenomenon really signals that we are generally becoming dumber as a species and that we are sheep who can be driven to action by hipsters we hear or see on a smartphone. For example …

Bedsheets & underwear. We’re all a bunch of gullible lunkheads, or at least that’s what marketers seem to think. They’re filling minds with ideas that don’t make sense, that we need nicer underwear and sheets and razors and pet collars. Are your bedsheets uncomfortable? The answer is that you have no fuckin’ idea because the only time you come into contact with them, you’re sound asleep! Why would you waste money on the softest sheets ever invented, when you’re snoring your ass off on the ones you already have? No, you buy new bedsheets when the ones on the bed rip. That’s the way life works, same thing with underwear. There are no fuckin’ secrets here. If there’s a pair of underwear in the drawer, men are stoked. If there’s a hole in every pair, then it’s time to go to Penney’s and buy what’s on sale. No one thinks about underwear and the guys that have to make frequent adjustments just figure they’re the lucky ones because making crotch-related adjustments is one of the funner things men get to do. And don’t get me started on hundred dollar shirts that don’t need to be tucked in! For centuries, men that are fat, men that are so fat that there’s no shirt big enough to tuck in, have been wearing their shirts untucked. It’s not a new concept and no one should pay extra for the privilege.

Mail order DNA. Have you seen this? This really solves all of life’s problems. You spit into a tube and then you mail the tube to strangers. They store your saliva in a flophouse in Lancaster and then after a few months they sell it to the FBI (okay, I made that last sentence up). What they actually do is use your DNA to find you an entirely new family, which most people consider an upgrade. Most spit mailers are surprised that they’re not really related to the ancestors they’ve come to know during their lives, but they seem to be happy to find out that instead of Ecuador they’re actually from Scandinavia. Another benefit of sending your spit through the mail to parts unknown is that, in the same packet that tells you about your new family and ancestors, you get a section on your health. Everyone’s is pretty much the same, in that it tells you that all of your health problems – your obesity, diabetes, emphysema, etc. – are 100 percent genetic and that it’s not your fault and there are no lifestyle changes you could have made to stop these maladies because it’s all on account of your faulty genetics.

Movie rentals. There’s actually a kiosk inside of Albertsons. It’s red and wider than a refrigerator. It turns out there are movies in it, actual physical movies, and you put in your credit card and the movie drops through the slot. Who does this? Who says to themselves, “I’ve just gotta watch Fargo tonight?” Who still has a DVD player? In the history of the Earth only seventeen Blu-ray players were ever sold, so how can there be a market for big red movie dispensers? Well, it’s the same guy that still collects S&H Green Stamps, the one that buys lotto scratchers out of a machine, the dude that has a pocket full of quarters and fills up five-gallon plastic containers at that freaky water machine outside of some stores. Nobody microwaves popcorn and snuggles up on the couch and then slips in a Ghostbusters DVD, that was just an advertising concept.

Ingredient delivery. There are services now that will deliver meal ingredients – just the ingredients – to your house so that you can cook them. If you can’t collect your own ingredients, if you can’t figure out the basic items that go into, say, cereal and toast, then you don’t belong anywhere near an open flame! And anyway, we already have a great solution for people who are perplexed by ingredients, it’s called a fuckin’ TV dinner. This is ass-backward – going shopping is the fun part and cooking is the part that sucks, so I don’t get it. Are you really gonna pay someone to go to the grocery store for you? If you do that, how are you going to meet women? If you can’t even shop for yourself the next thing you’ll be looking for is someone to chew your food for you.

Doing two things at once. Last week I saw a woman walking up a hill, very slowly, while talking and playing with her cellphone. She took a couple of steps and then stopped for five minutes and then took a few more steps, I said to her, “If you put the phone away you’d get up the hill faster and then us people behind you wouldn’t have to stop and go around you and since you weigh about 240 pounds it’s a considerable detour …” To be on the cellphone while (attempting to) exercising is an addiction to self-importance and the person who multitasks with a phone wants us all to know that the appearance of popularity is more important than ever actually achieving anything in life.

Half car, half truck. Have you seen these? It starts off being a car and then, at the last minute, it decides it wants to be a truck and so you get a sedan with a two-foot truck bed, a bed almost big enough to hold a lady’s purse or a potted plant. We already have cars with a rear storage area, it’s called a trunk. It makes no sense, right? Truck-car is typically a man thing, women are smarter than this. No, it’s a dude who wants a place to toss his wet umbrella while still having a comfy car to put his makeup on in.

Showers & your gender. Even if I was invited to a real co-ed shower, one with water and shampoo, I still wouldn’t go. The co-ed baby shower and something called a gender-reveal party are always inappropriate for men, in fact, the most revealing aspect of these events is that they are designed to exterminate the concept of gender entirely. If you accept an invitation to one of these events you’re saying that nothing in life needs to be private. If you go to a co-ed shower today, they’ll be dragging you off to get your junk waxed tomorrow … just sayin’.

We must remain vigilant against the forces of the inexplicable.