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What are the ruins of tomorrow – Larry predicts ● What really caused Chernobyl? ● What Larry finds when he tours a bomb shelter ● Bomb shelters vs panic rooms – which is for sissys? ● What’s a Heracles couch and why do men need one? ● The movie in your head and how it can destroy you ● Who needs a $70,000 cork screw? ● How a New York paradise turned itself into a ruin ● The word nitwits love to use ● Larry reveals his secret recipe for the best malted milk shake ● What junkyard ghosts know about you
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This episode is about two things. First ruins, then desire. Then it circles back to ruins. Maybe that’s no accident. Don’t desires sometimes lead us to ruin?
What is it about ruins? Why do they fascinate? As a kid, I would rather poke around some long-abandoned building than explore the newest, shiniest skyscraper. I still feel that way.
If I took a trip around the world, I’d want the ruins tour. You can keep the freshly minted; gimme musty, crumbling, leaning, rickety structures.
A couple of years ago, I drove from New England to LA. The only stuff I really looked at was rusty, cracked, and/or decayed. One of the oddest was this school, which I think was somewhere in west Texas.
Though a warm sunny day, it was still eerie as hell. The wind whistled through those swings and monkey bars. 
When I closed my eyes, I could hear kids laughing and doing sing-songs as they jumped rope.
Looking through the broken windows was like peering into another dimension. And I could not get enough of it. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to have a picnic right there on the broken concrete steps of that school. A retro hero with a side of nostalgia, please. And hold the introspection. No analysis. Just listen to the wind moan through the broken windows and sagebrush. When it gets cold, I’ll leave.
The other half of this episode is about desire. We all want everything – but what makes us want what we want? Answer: the movie in our head. Unless it’s a bag of potatoes or a tank of gas – some commodity. But if it’s a more personal and unnecessary item – we want it because of the role we assign it in the screenplay of our life. Anything from a new pair of shoes to an automobile can start the projector and fill the 16:9 screen in our minds.
Like this video for the Heracles couch.
I need one of those like I need a hole in my ass, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting one. In the movie in my head, I’m sitting on that couch and inexplicably, a squad from Isis bursts into my living room, just as Kevin O’Leary is telling some wantrepeneur “you’re dead to me.” Then, as I use a bullet proof couch cushion for a shield, I whip out a 12 gauge pump from the safe inside the couch and with 3.5 inch shells filled with 00 buckshot, I paint the walls with terrorist blood and hair. And the chick in the video smiles and tells me I’m great.
When the episode circles back to ruins, it’s a whispered monologue from an automotive graveyard. Some guy’s former pride and joy, once a gleaming, rolling boudoir but now a rusting heap of above-ground landfill, reminisces with another jilted lover – an ancient pickup truck.
If our cars could talk, oh, the things they would say about us.
Write to Larry: thatlarryshow@gmail.com
Call Larry: 302-71-Larry
