How to Get a Boat

Getting the money for the boat is only half the problem, the other half is usually, your other half...July is fast approaching and if you haven't talked your mate, partner, significant other, into getting a boat this year, here are some strategies.

Strategies for Gals

1. Promise the guy the perverse sex act of his choice, and the bigger the boat, the more perverse the act. Don't worry, you'll never have to do it, just promise him, you can always break your promise later with some creative excuse. I like to say, "You know I'd love to do that, hunny, I just love the whole thing with the chickens and whipped cream, but the doctor said I've contracted Acidopholous corpus rotus delecti, and it's very contagious whenever I'm in an aroused state. But we can if you do it if you really want to..." Gets you off the hook everything.

2. Promise you'll sit and watch his football games with him this fall. He'll be thrilled. All you have to do is keep asking him questions during the first game and by half time he'll be begging you to leave the room. Just keep the beer and sandwiches going and he'll still believe you really wanted to spend four hours watching millionaires in shiny pants running into each other.

3. Tell him that buying a boat means you won't have enough money to go visit your folks anytime in the coming year. This is actually true. You won't be able to afford to visit anyone. After you buy the boat, a trip to Riverhead will be a big adventure. As a matter of fact, once you buy the boat, you won't have money to do anything else except go out on the water, quelle damage...

4. Tell him that buying a boat exempts him from doing any house painting or repairs. This is a really good ruse. After you get the boat, if you need a house repair this is what you do; buy and make sure he sees your new "How to Do House Repairs Yourself" book. Get a hammer, everything seems to start with a hammer, and some duct tape. While he's puttering around the house, start to do your repair work. You know how men do a deliberately lousy job when they do a housework task - so that in frustration, you yank the vacuum/mop/sponge from them and just do it yourself? Same principle here. Once they hear hammering, they'll have to come to supervise you. Once they see what you're doing, because you have no idea really, they'll yank the hammer from your hand and off you go!

I'll pause here to say that I realize the younger readers may think it's wrong to use manipulation and deception with the one that you love. And in a perfect world, filled with only perfect people, perfect honesty would work. But ask yourself how close to perfection your loved one is. I believe that the distance between their existing personality and perfection can be justifiably filled in with delusion and deception. In time, you will see the wisdom of this.

Strategies for Guys

1. If you want that boat, promise her a full day of shopping at the mall of her choice with your credit cards, and you will go along and hold her purse without complaint. Of course, you can always break your promise later, but I wouldn't recommend it. But if you decide to do it anyway, you should sleep with a gun under your pillow for at least six months, just as a precaution.

2. Promise her that she can pick the next four movies you see. She'll pick chick-flicks of course, but you can survive it, that's what drugs and alcohol are for.

3. Tell her that buying a boat means you won't have enough money to go visit your relatives anytime soon. Even better, tell her you won't be able to afford entertaining them at your house. As a further back up, tell her that if your people show up, you'll take them out on the boat the whole visit so she doesn't have to cook, clean, hostess. A woman knows a man won't break a promise like this because men don't like company for more that three hours no matter whose family it is and men certainly don't want to visit anybody's parents and be grilled on what they're doing or listen to hints of what relatives think they should be doing.

4. If the situation is desperate and she's not buying any of your shallow promises, you have one last stratagem left. It's the most difficult for a man, but it softens women up everything. Practice this statement, "I was wrong and I am sorry." You can paraphrase if you want, but get the words "wrong" and "sorry" in there somehow. Women never hear these words from men, so the shock of it stuns us. And after being stunned a few times, you can say, "I was wrong and I am sorry. I don't deserve someone like you and I don't know how you've put up with me all these years. I wish I could ask you if I could buy a boat so I could continue to meditate on changing my ways while on the water, but I know it's too much to ask of you." If you can connect that buying a boat with make you a more sensitive and considerate partner, you're in like Flynn....

When is too much fun too much?

Sat Mar 29, 11:18 AM ET
MUNCIE, Ind. - William M. Bowen woke up after a night of drinking with friends and realized he was inside a commercial trash-collection truck full of waste. The driver had just emptied a commercial trash bin into his truck and was about to activate its compactor when he heard Bowen screaming.
"He looked up and this gentleman was standing out the top of our truck," said Larry Green, market safety supervisor for the Rumpke waste disposal company. Green said the only thing Bowen said to the driver was that he was cold.
"This gentleman was extremely intoxicated," he said.

It’s clearly Spring. I see little dirt piles everywhere indicating that the worms are turning. I see ants in the house. I hear birds chirping in the morning. In a short time the Island will be green.

I’ve also noticed that summer people are starting to trickle in already! As a public service to our summer residents who come here to relax and enjoy themselves, I thought I might review a few indicators that you have overdone the whole, “What the hell, I’m on vacation,” theme.

If you wake after an evening of reveling and find yourself face up on the golf course with a tee in your mouth, and a golf ball on the tee, and someone is about to tee off from your head, you had too much fun the night before.

If you find yourself tied to the railing on the ferry with a multitude of ferry tickets taped to you because you passed out on the deck and have been riding the ferry all night, you’ve been having too much fun. But at least you know you were polite to the ferrymen because they tie the rude people to the outside of the railing.

If you wake to find yourself floating on the raft behind The Dory wearing only your underwear and the Christmas tree lights, you’ve had too much fun and probably made the cover of The Reporter.

If you wake to find ten fire department guys thirty feet below you, looking up at you and shouting, “Don’t move! You’re caught on the windmill! Wait for the cherry picker!” You’ve had too much fun.

If you wake to find yourself in a huge nest made of rough sticks and you see egg yolk on your pants, and a very large bird is looking at you as if it’s deciding which of your eyes to pluck out, you’ve had way too much fun and hopefully, you have a cell phone handy.

If you wake to find yourself on the little kids playground and you have been sick all over the seats of the toys, and you are surrounded by angry mothers who are looking at you as if trying to decide which of your eyes to pluck out, you’ve had way too much fun and a cell phone won’t help you. However, if you can summon any of your sprinting skills from high school, this would be a good time to engage them.

If you wake to find yourself in the girls locker room, dressed in a cheerleader outfit, and you are neither a girl nor a cheerleader, you have had way too much fun and you also have evil friends.

If you wake to find yourself with one arm around a huge coffeepot and a big coffee mess all around you and several half asleep workmen surrounding you with a look of “Give me coffee or I’ll kill you” look in their eyes, you have breached the Holy Coffee Grail at Pat and Steve’s. Step awake from the coffee pot, don’t make any sudden moves. Any amount of fun you had the night before will be canceled out soon by the beating you are about to receive if the coffee doesn’t flow.

If you wake to find yourself in the cabin of a beautiful boat, and you come up on deck to a sunny morning with no land in sight, just the sparkling water surrounding you, and no one else is on the boat, and you don’t own a boat, not only did you have too much fun, but somewhere there is a group of stranded people. Go back in the cabin and look for the ship to shore radio and a bottle of tequila. Hit the May Day button, take the tequila up on deck and get hammered because you’re going away for a long time. On Shelter Island, the rule is one year in jail for every ten feet of boat. If you’re on a 25 footer, that’s two and a half years.

Have fun, but not too much fun!