Lyrics Goin' Through My Address Book - George Carlin

Goin' Through My Address Book

So you know what I’ve been doing?
Going through my address book and crossing out the dead people.
You do that?
That’s a lot of fun, isn’t it?
It gives you a good feeling.
Kind of gives you a feeling of power, a superiority to have outlasted another old friend.
But you can’t do it too soon, you know?
You can’t do it too soon.
You can’t come running home from the funeral and get the book out, you know, and be looking through it.
You can’t do that.
A little time has to pass.
You have to let a little time go by.
I have a rule of thumb, six weeks.
If you’re a friend of mine and you’re in my book and you die, I leave you alone for an extra six weeks.
Six extra weeks in the book.
On the house.
It’s on me.
But after that, hey, facts are facts.
Fuck you.
You’re dead.
(Fart sound).
Out you fucking go.
You got to have standards, you know.
Now, these days, a lot of people don’t keep analog address books anymore.
They don’t want to be writing that stuff out longhand.
They’re in the computer age.
And they have an application in the computer called Outlook or Contacts or Address Book or something like that.
So they keep all the information in the computer, and they sync it up with their phone every day or every other day.
So now, instead of scratching out a name you get to delete the fuck.
And deleting someone is an even more powerful feeling than simply scratching out a name.
You know how to delete someone.
You select a name, highlight the person and then poof, straight into the trash.
Now, if it’s a really close friend of yours, you might not want to empty the trash for about six weeks.
Or…or if it’s a little too harsh for you, a little too harsh to delete an old friend, you can always create a new folder, a special folder for dead people.
You keep it on your desktop.
It’s kind of a digital purgatory.
And the nice thing is every now and then, you can open it up, and you can look inside.
And you can see the people in purgatory.
And you can move them all around, you know.
Move them around.
Put them in little groups.
Two people who didn’t get along in life, put them in the corner;
let them work it out.
Let them work it out in purgatory.
Or start a fight.
Have a big fight in purgatory.
That’s a lot of fun.
Nobody’s going to get hurt.
They’re all fucking dead anyway.
Then, you put them in a big formation and have a parade, the purgatory parade of dead people.
Ah, there’s a lot of fun you can have with a computer, so enjoy your digital selves.