My wife and I recently decided that we were living under our means, and as patriotic Americans we should really be buried in so much debt that any suggestion of ever paying off all our bills should be met with screams of laughter. This strategy seems to be working for our federal government so far…

We thought about buying a new gas-guzzling SUV, but everyone we know was already doing that.

Then we thought about buying a whole bunch of useless consumer electronics (”But Dear, I need a combo mp3 player/shaver/coffee maker/video recording device!”). But almost none of that is made in America, so we felt remarkably unpatriotic for even considering the idea.

Then we came up with a sure-fire way to buy something 100% American and put ourselves into debt forever: we decided to buy a house. I work right outside New York in one of the “hottest” housing markets in the country. The house buying process here reminds one of a live cow being thrown into a tank of hungry piranha, only much more painful for all the parties involved. Even the cow would agree.

I learned a lot from my house-buying experience and I thought I would pass that advice on to you:

Step 1: Put your existing home up for sale for a ludicrous amount of money. Think of the highest, most wacky value you can imagine and then double it. That’s your asking price. You do this knowing that anyone who puts in a serious bid on your house is shooting heroine on an hourly basis, legally insane, or a professional boxer.

If you receive any offer higher than your asking price, the person is obviously all three.

Note: if you don’t have an existing home for sale, all is not lost! You could always sell any internal organs you aren’t using or, if you’ve already done that, rob a bank. In fact, bank robbing is expected to be one of the fastest growing career fields in the next decade. Start now!

Step 2: “House For Sale” signs give off a special scent which can only be picked up by real estate agents. The moment you put the sign in your window you can expect to see a line of Mercedes slowly driving past your home at all hours of the day and night. Do not be afraid. These are real estate agents trying to have their clients buy your home so they can sell someone else’s.

If a real estate agent doesn’t sell a home at least once a week, he or she usually dies. You’ll recognize the real estate agents because they’ll look like used car salesmen, only they’ll be slightly better looking and wearing marginally less polyester. The people in the back seat of the Mercedes are “potential buyers”. They really aren’t that important.

Step 3: When a real estate agent with clients drives by your house and likes it, he or she will usually then try to see the inside of your house, which means you must keep it clean twenty-four hours a day. This is impossible. So you must always greet the real estate agent and clients with, “Hi, sorry about the mess!”

The potential buyers then walk through your house, holding back giggles and spending exactly ten seconds in each room saying things like “Hmmm…ooo…yeah… well…” to assure you that they are not blind and can see your horribly tragic taste in decorating. If you’re lucky you might have three or four groups of people doing this at once.

Then everyone walks outside to discuss your house and each group of people runs to the hood of a Mercedes to fill out and sign paperwork. This paperwork is called “making an offer” and it means the potential buyers will soon become the buyers! And while this is a good thing for you, the home seller, it is generally considered bad form to yell out, “Holy Christ, you want to pay me HOW MUCH for my shitshack!?!”

Under no circumstances should you directly answer any questions about your house. This is called “lying” and all real estate agents require it of their customers. The slightest bit of honest could ruin a potential home sale.

If someone asks about the freshly dug mounds of dirt in the back yard, just answer, “I don’t know…”

If someone asks about the head-sized hole in the ceiling you just shrug and say, “I never noticed it before…”

If someone asks you about the blood stains on the wall you just shake your head and say, “It was here when I moved in…”

For more examples of real estate lies, look at any house listing in any newspaper.

If you receive more than one offer on your home you can either take the highest offer or you can arrange to have everyone fight to the death in your front yard. You simply need to tell the survivor where he can park the dump truck filled with money.

Step 4: While you are selling your house, you should also be looking at other homes, signing paperwork on the hood of Mercedes and trying to figure out what you can afford (Hint: the answer is always “not much”). My wife and I sold our existing home in about six hours and spent the next three weeks driving past hundreds, and visiting over 50, individual homes in a wild rush reminiscent of that old movie It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

We put in offers on four houses in that time period. Our first offer was rejected because our offer came in twenty minutes after another offer, our second offer was refused because my wife and I weren’t…well, we weren’t gay enough…our third offer was refused because we failed to offer the requisite 155% of the asking price and our forth offer was accepted because the seller was desperate. And the guy used to be a boxer at the local asylum.

Once you find your new house you will only needed to sign about three metric tons of paperwork, pack a lifetime of belongings into little cardboard boxes, call the movers, call seven hundred different utility companies, change our address in about a bazillion places, paint all the walls, fix everything that’s broken in your existing home, move everything to the new house and then do it all again in reverse order.

And once it’s all over you can sit back and relax and spend the next 30 years finding all things the seller lied to you about.

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I wear glasses.

I make no secret of the fact that my eyes are genetically mutated when compared to you few out there who can recognize faces in satellite photos, spot friends in airplanes cruising at thirty thousand feet and read bumper stickers in adjacent states. I’ve gotten quite used to waking each morning and not having a clue where I am until I reach over to my nightstand and grab my extra set of eyes. The floor of my bedroom could have dissolved over night and left a mile-wide crater, but I’d roll right out of bed none the wiser if I didn’t have my glasses on.

I got my first pair of glasses when I was in the fourth grade. At the time I was only one of two kids who actually wore glasses, so I was fairly thrilled at having something which very few fourth graders had at the time. I’d go around looking at people and smiling and hoping they’d guess what was new about me.

The other fourth graders would look me over and ask , “Did you lose some weight?” or “You get a haircut?” But one fine day the smartest fourth grader of them all, Patrick Panduzi, walked up to me and said: “I know what is different about you. You just had your braces taken off!” I was overjoyed, of course. I’ve never actually had braces, but at least he was getting closer.

My first pair of glasses were big and round and ugly. The frame was made of a thick plastic whose color could only be described as “a dark sewage-like brown with lighter brown blotches reminiscent of puke swirled in for that really sophisticated effect.” They were the kind of glasses that could assure my nerdom for all time if it had ever been doubted before. The term “bullfrog” comes to mind when I think of my portraits in those days.

But as a fourth grader, I was happy with them. We fourth graders would regularly have discussions about whether or not they could deflect bullets if I was shot in the eye and always wondered what would happen if I stared straight at the sun while wearing them. Some said the lenses would form a laser beams, melt my eyeballs, and blow my brains out the back of my head. But the smarter fourth graders knew that eyeballs don’t melt, they explode.

Today I still wear glasses, but now I’ve left the wonderful world of crap-colored plastic and moved on to wire frames. I do this for a number of reasons such as comfort and fashion, but mostly because I know that my chances of being hit by lightning in the face are not greatly increased by wearing them, as we used to think in the fourth grade.

Contrary to what many of you believe, wearing glasses is not all fun.

It is not fun to walk in from the cold and immediately lose all visual contact with the world as your glasses fog over.

It is not fun to misplace your glasses, only to discover that you can’t find your glasses unless you are wearing your glasses.

It is not fun to poke yourself in the eye while trying to adjust your glasses out of habit, even when you aren’t wearing them. This maneuver is usually followed by a quick glance around the room to check if anyone saw you making a fool of yourself. The glance is useless, of course. Without my glasses, I can’t even see if there are people in the room, much less if they are watching me or not.

Sure, a lot of people have made the switch to contact lenses, but I’m not one of them. There are a number of reasons (okay… four) why I don’t trust contact lenses.

1. Contact lenses are invisible. (Have you ever seen contact lenses in anyone’s eyes? No? Then they must be invisible.)

2. I’m not real keen on the idea of putting these little things into my eyes and just expecting them to stay there. I mean, is there some kind of glue holding them in? Is it magic? Do all contact lense wearers hold their heads tilted slightly upwards? What happens if you look down? Won’t they fall out and get lost in the carpeting?

3. People who wear contact lenses always walk around with bloodshot eyes that make it look as though they’ve just returned from a funeral for their entire family where all the attendees grieved by smoking tear gas grenades.

4. When a person wearing contact lenses gets something in his or her eye, the experience does not seem to be a fun one. Most voice their discomfort with a very clear: “AAAAAAAAIIIEEEEEEEEE!!! GET IT OUT, GET IT OUT, GET IT OUT!! OH DEAR GOD!! AAAAAARRRRRG! KILL ME! KILL ME NOW!!”

And if I’m bothered by the idea of sticking a little piece of clear plastic in my eye, you can imagine how I feel about having laser surgery to correct my less-than-perfect vision. I looked into this process at one time but quickly felt that it wasn’t quite for me:

“So, Doctor, you’re going to point a laser…”

“Yes…”

“…at my eyes?”

“Yes…”

“A laser…”

“Yes…”

“And when you say ‘laser’ you really mean a microscopically thin unimaginably hot blade of concentrated light that, from what I can tell from copious science fiction movies, is pretty much the ultimate cool weapon if you want to overthrow an evil empire or blow apart a planet?”

“Well…”

“It was a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question!”

“Now, Tom-”

“And this laser has, on the side of the casing, a good thousand scary words warning you of exactly how amazingly, blindingly dangerous and stupid it is to aim this laser straight at your eye.”

“Umm…”

“That’s the laser you’re going to shoot into my eye to ‘fix’ my eye sight?”

“Tom, I think you’re simplifying this a bit…”

“Your laser. My eye. Not going to happen…”

I have been wearing glasses for most of childhood and adult life now. I think I’ll probably continue to wear glasses for the foreseeable (ha, get it?) future. In fact, when people ask me what things were like before I wore glasses, I have to say I don’t know. It’s all just a blur to me…

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I suffer from seasonal allergies. For a month or two at the beginning of Spring and another few weeks at the end of Fall I become a blubbering, snorting, sneezing, snotty watery-eyed fountain of phlegm unless I stay on a fairly regular course of decongestants and antihistamines.

I pretty much NEED to take them, or I’m absolutely miserable. I take the medications exactly as directed, I only take them when I needed. These are completely legal, perfectly legitimate allergy medications, but they all happen to contain pseudoephedrine. This makes me a criminal.

Let me explain…

I’m taking a vacation in a week or so and I thought I would purchase an extra box of allergy medication just so that I wouldn’t have to stop having fun and hunt down a drugstore during my short holiday away.

However, the medication that works best for me contains pseudoephedrine, which is a nasal decongestant that can apparently be refined or cooked or magically turned into methamphetamines or “meth” as it is commonly called on all the police websites. And because a few people are using cold medicines to make illegal drugs, our politicians have nearly fallen over themselves trying to pass laws which make buying cold medicine with pseuoephedrine a difficult process.

As a result, normal allergy sufferers can no longer just grab a box of cold medicine off the shelf and buy it. Most stores in New Jersey and New York appear to have similar procedures, but my special hell was brought to me courtesy a visit to Wal-Mart:

1. Pick up a little plastic place card for the item you want from the shelves where the medicine used to be. So, here I am, a thirtysomething adult, and I can’t buy a box of cold medicine. Yet I’ve seen eleven year old kids grab the “Multi Variety Fun Pack” of condoms off the wall and purchase them without anyone batting an eyelid.

2. Take this little place card to the pharmacy window. There I stand in line with all the people who need real prescription medication. If you’ve ever stood in these lines, you know that half the people in them are pushing 100 and you know the gal operating the register only hit puberty a year ago.

3. When I’m asked, I need to show my photo ID. Okay, this isn’t a big deal for me. I have to show my photo ID to buy beer or cigarettes. But this next step is what scares the willies out of me.

4. The clerk then REGISTERS my name and my cold medicine purchase in a FEDERAL NATIONWIDE database. What? My nose is running, so I’d better be monitored by FBI. It’s at this point in my Wal-Mart trip that things take a dangerous turn.

5. The clerk informs me I can only buy one box of cold medicine, not two, as I had intended.

“Why?” I ask.

“The machine says so,” she replies.

“Why does the machine say so?” I ask.

“I don’t know. It’s a law, I think.”

“What law? What’s the rule?” I demand.

“Sorry. It doesn’t say. The machine just tells me you can’t do it,” she says.

“If the machine told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”

“Maybe. I have to use the machine to get paid…”

6. I stomp out of Wal-Mart without any cold medicine. I make sure to sneeze on several unmanned cash registers just for good measure.

Now I’m fairly angry with two large organizations. I’m ticked at Wal-Mart for employing someone in the pharmacy department who is clearly no more intelligent than a trout. And I’m ticket the US Federal Government for passing a law that treats me like a criminal.

I have done some searching and it appears that the “law” in most states limits the purchase of cold medicine with pseudoephedrine to a certain amount, which loosely translates into one box per day, no more than 30 days worth in a given month.

This is something that is now frustrating a lot of people, seeing how many experts are noticing that this one of the worst allergy seasons in years for the United States.

This law only manages to penalize the legal users of cold medicine.

If anything, I’m now going to take more sick days (yes, seasonal allergies can be downright debilitating) and cost my employer more money, which will raise the cost of my company’s product for all consumers and will, more than likely, cause the eventual collapse of our entire world economy!

Okay, maybe not. But you get the idea.

Let’s review this law and compare it to reality:

1. I have to register in a national database to buy cold medicine which keeps snot inside my nose, and I’m limited to three boxes a month. This is very important to the security of the United States because I’m sure Osama Bin Laden’s next terror plot involves a particularly high pollen count and 30,000 cases of Aleve Sinus and Headache.

2. I can buy all the gasoline and fertilizer I want to make a truck bomb. Curiously, I’m not registered in any sort of “Unleaded Fuel” database every time I purchase a tank of gas. Timothy McVeigh used a Ryder truck, yet I can still rent one of those as often as I want without being entered into a national Truck Rental database.

3. I can buy all the bleach and ammonia I want to make chlorine gas. Heck, I can even buy all those things from Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart even puts the two products in the same “cleaning supplies” aisle, so it’s clear that Wal-Mart supports terrorism.

4. I can buy kitchen knives, chainsaws, deep fryers, bowling balls, lead pipes, cigarrettes and cases of booze (all at Wal-Mart) with an intent to kill, maim or at least leave a nasty scar. All those things are very, very dangerous if used improperly, yet I don’t have to register in a national database for any of them.

Essentially, I can buy all the supplies needed to kill 100 people, but I can’t buy something to unstuff the snot in my nose.

Getting the idea here?

EVERYTHING can be abused and misused. It’s an absurd idea to limit the purchase of some things that can be abused without limiting the purchase of ALL things. And by limiting the purchase of things that are mostly harmless (like certain nasal decongestants) then you are really punishing the millions of people who use the drugs as intended just because of the sins of a few.

The reality is that New Jersey’s own website admits that they’ve only found seven “meth labs” in five years (scroll down). That’s hardly an epidemic.

Do other states have a problem? Yes. Many Midwest states have a problem because they have a lot of open space and it’s more difficult to detect the strong urine odors that emanate from a meth lab. You need both pseudoephedrine and open spaces to make a meth lab unnoticeable, so why not outlaw or severally restrict wide open spaces and houses on large plots of land?

The entire idea of a law to limit cold medicine is borderline insane. Do the politicians who passed this law really think it’s going to cut down on meth labs? I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I would guess the people who run meth labs out of their basement are about as bothered by this cold medicine law as convicted murderers might be annoyed at a jay walking violation.

We have thousands of laws against illegal drug sale or distribution and yet, curiously, we still have a drug problem here in the United States. What sort of moron (ahem, sorry, “policy maker”) thinks to himself: “Hey, let’s pass another drug law! Those other 14,000 laws didn’t stop the problem, but this next one will!”

In fact, if you read some of the methamphetamine news stories, you’ll see that this law is actually hurting US drugstore sales because now the drug makers are getting their pseudoephedrine from other countries instead of buying them at the local drugstore.

So, what am I going to do? Two things…

First, I generally limit my Wal-Mart shopping to times when I need to buy cheap inferior products produced by the equivalent of American slave labor. But when I do visit Wal-Mart I’m going to purposely buy the cheapest thing I possibly can on each visit and I’m going to use my credit card to buy it. Why? Because when I use a credit card (like Visa or Mastercard) Wal-Mart pays a fee to Visa. I like that. And there is a minimum fee, so if i hunt around enough I’m sure I’ll find something that cost less than the fee Wal-Mart pays, thus causing them to lose money. It’s not much, but it makes me feel good.

Second, I’m going to follow this federal law on pseudophedrine to the letter. At the start of every month I’m going to buy one box of alergy medicine for each day until I reach my monthly limit, whether I need it or not. I’m going to stockpile my alergy medication throughout the year so that I always have plenty on hand. And I’ll probably have my wife and friends do the same, just to be sure.

If a law-abiding citizen can do this, why can’t the meth makers?

Why did none of the hundreds of United States politicians ever look beyond the headlines and see how useless this law really is? Maybe because they’re United States politicians who are only slightly more intelligent than the aforementioned trout and, if they weren’t in office, would probably be associate managers at the local Wal-Mart.

Now, if you excuse me, I have to go blow my nose and mail the tissue to my congressman.

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