Adam Carolla - Daddy, Stop Talking! - And Other Things My Kids Want but Won't Be Getting

You might not have room for all your stuff in your new place. Even if you move it on up to a bigger abode, sometimes the furniture you had in one place just doesn’t fit into the new one. Or the new house already has a fridge and you no longer need the old one. And in general it’s good to get rid of stuff before you move, so there’s less to pack and break the movers’ backs. So instead of hanging on to stuff you don’t really need or use, just dump it. Don’t do the storage unit thing. The Carollas are a long line of hoarders (except we didn’t really have anything to hoard). Don’t fall into this trap. You’ll be happier if you just leave that old stuff behind, and replace it if you need to. It makes no sense to go out and get a storage unit just in case you want that bread maker in three years. If you haven’t used it in a year, donate it, have a yard sale or use it for target practice.

Those storage-unit commercials paint a much sunnier picture of themselves than is accurate. The roller door slides up to reveal the storage-unit renters and they’re delighted. It’s always happy families going to their clean storage unit to get out the water skis.

Bullshit. Everyone is miserable at those places. It means your abode is smaller than you like, and you can’t even find nine-by-nine to keep a bunch of stuff you don’t need but are too pathetic to part with. Or your old lady kicked you out, you’re crashing on a buddy’s couch and you put all of your shit in storage until you get your own pad. In L.A., those places are all under freeway overpasses, the sun hasn’t shined on them in decades and the only people who are more miserable than the people who go there are the people who work there. If you have to put “do not attempt” on car commercials where the SUV is doing some off-roading, these storage-unit company ads should have a disclaimer, too. “Warning: Professional Actors Portraying Gross Exaggeration of Happiness.”

The last one I saw featured a mother showing her daughter her wedding dress. Mom is taking her dress out of the box and the girl is over the moon. Awesome. She gets to wear Mama’s mothbally, was-white-but-is-now-yellow wedding dress covered in a Rorschach test of semen stains. In storage-unit history, has there ever been a mother presenting her daughter with her thirty-five-year-old wedding dress to her delight? Has that ever happened? I say nay. Could you imagine saying to your twenty-two-year-old daughter, “We’re going out wedding dress shopping.” “Where, Beverly Hills?” “No, we’re heading to the storage unit under the 110 Freeway.” She’d beat her mom with the table lamp she also kept in the storage unit.

One of the things you’ll find out quickly when you own your home is that even if you’re single, you’re not there alone. There are ants, spiders, cockroaches, rats, bats, snakes and various other creatures taking up residence in your residence. Sorry, Sonny, but this is one gender role that is still intact. You, as a male, will be the exterminator in your home, unless you end up gay, and then you two can flip for it. Either way, here are a few tales and tips.

Spiders: These little bitches seem to be out of control. Every house has spiders, but the ones we have in our house as I’m writing this seem to be some turbo-charged, over-caffeinated breed. They’ll get a web up while you blink and it’s not cute, symmetrical Charlotte’s Web stuff, it’s like something MC Escher would shoot out of his ass. It looks like Johnny Depp took his multiple scarves off and threw them in a ball on the chair.

I walked into my bathroom at four in the morning, and there was a giant spider on the wall. I felt like the stepparent who came home early and found the teen banging away at his girlfriend on the couch. I was thinking, is this what goes on all the time when I’m asleep? The spider noticed me and froze. He was probably like, “What are you doing up at this hour, old man? Time to get that prostate checked.” Then, he scurried behind a mirror. It was a stalemate. I couldn’t go back to bed knowing it was there, but the mirror was too heavy to move. I ended up blowing into the crack behind the mirror to try and coax the thing out the other side so that I could smash it. I endured an hour-long retarded Mexican stand-off with an arachnid, instead of catching the zzzzs I need to be able to work and thus afford to house that spider. And my kids.

They always make their appearance at the worst time. Once, about two years ago, I was all set to crash after a long day. I had done a couple of gigs that afternoon, came home, had a couple of Mangrias and headed off to bed. When I flipped on the light, there was a spider hanging out on the ceiling. I was a little wobbly from the day and the Mangria, and standing on a pillow-top mattress, so it was tough to get that little fucker with the toilet paper. You also have to be sure to pick the right amount of toilet paper. Too little, and you can feel the thing crunch, which you don’t want. It’s just gross and its guts will leak through the TP and onto your hand. But, if you use too much, it will create a soft nest for the thing, and it will just scurry away to fight another day. This particular day I didn’t have my TP ratio right, because I ended up with two spider legs in the paper, and the now wounded and angry spider was nowhere to be found. It landed somewhere in the bed and I just knew it was biding time until my head hit the pillow to come back and take up residence in my ear hair.

Rats: You’ll eventually get one of these lovely vermin in your house, too. No matter how manly you think you are, Sonny, when you see that little rat tail scurrying, you will turn into a 1950s cartoon housewife. You’ll be up on a footstool on your tippy-toes, freaking out. I don’t know why rats scare us so much, but they do.

It would be weird to explain our relationship with rats to an alien. They give us our greatest scientific advances, but if we see them in our kitchen at night, we go after them with a tennis racquet. Apparently, we share many biological attributes with rats, but we still want to kill them. We don’t have that range of emotions with dolphins, for instance. It might be a grudge because rats spread the plague. Plus, in the ’80s, there were all those vans painted with evil renditions of rats with fangs cheating at cards. Rats get a bad rap. They’re not looking for trouble and when you turn on the light they run away. It’s not like you come home and a rat is banging your girlfriend. I think the real problem is their posture. Rats always look like they’re up to no good. In Disney movies, the hero always has great posture and the villain is always hunched over. Hummingbirds have great posture and we love them. But the rat is our mortal enemy. We’d all probably have rats as pets if they would just hit the chiropractor and take care of that scoliosis.

Snakes: You kids already know that where we live we have rattlesnakes. You may have been too young to remember when our dog, Molly, was bitten by a rattler. A year or so later, our gardener found a rattlesnake as he was making his appointed rounds with the hedge clippers. Because of those two incidents, your mom decided that not only did we need to get Molly rattlesnake-aversion — trained, but we needed to have the snake wrangler come out and safety proof the place for you two.

First off, I’m not even sure if what the gardener found was an actual rattlesnake. There are nonpoisonous snakes that look like rattlesnakes. They’ve taken on that camouflage, so birds of prey and coyotes won’t go at them. What the snakes didn’t factor in when evolving that camouflage was the fireman who gets called out by Lynette to chop them in half with a flathead shovel.