Well, it’s certainly been a very normal week, and it’s shaping up to be another very normal week on this very normal Sunday where the tri-state area is getting its first rain in forty some-odd days. Russian state actors are belived to be the source of a bunch of magnesium-based pipe bombs implanted into Personal Massagers on U.S. bound freight planes. A new venture capital backed “restaurant concept” has opened up a few blocks away where it’s just openly a bunch of ghost kitchens that you can also eat inside of I guess. They rebranded the mall food court, made it more depressing, and now it sits on the ground floor of some dogshit condo building.
Oh yeah and Donald Trump got re-elected. I have no other word to describe that piece of news than “retarded”. You might dislike the use of that word, but really ask yourself if you can think of a better word. Furthermore, why tarnish a perfectly good word that you can call an annoying coworker to their face, when you really just want to call them retarded? Burn your r-word coupons on this one, it’s good bang for the buck.
People have been freaking out in every which direction on this one, in all the ways you’d typically expect. The Democratic Party has lost the electorate, and all the familiar faces of the past 30 years of neoliberalism are desperately pointing their fingers at each other and then at you and I in a cartoonish frenzy of “he went that way” in an attempt to throw blame on anyone but themself. It’s the brightly lit, big league, multi-year contract, Gold Bond-endorsed version of “don’t blame me, I voted for the email lady.” We’re stuck in a loop with these people until time decides enough is enough.
Conspiracy theories are starting to bubble up about the counting of votes in the “blue wall” swing states. Supposedly, Starlink was involved in counting votes and was reporting results in real time, delivered first and foremost to Elon Musk’s phone. It seems like a massive conflict of interest to have a company owned by a guy with many vested interests (all of which conflict with conducting free and fair elections) in seeing the election go a certain way counting the heaviest hitting section of the electorate. It’s kind of hilarious that it was ever allowed to happen, almost bordering on the cartoonish doings of a finger-tenting gold-toothed charlatan like Mr. Burns. Guys like Musk and Peter Thiel are blood sucking vampires though, and I’m sure their fingers tented just a little bit less than their pants when they figured out they could get away with that. Even if absolutely zero malfeasance occurred (and who are we kidding here?), it’s retarded to allow that one to fly.
Will these accusations go anywhere? Absolutely not. It doesn’t matter if a truckload of evidence was unearthed that pointed towards election fraud. Same as it doesn’t matter if all of the Epstein files get unsealed and we get all the tapes of him calling out at least two former presidents as former homies. Same as it doesn’t matter if the Kennedy files ever get fully redacted. People are stupid, and they’ve moved on. Maybe if you get a juicy enough string of 5-10 words that you can stick on the bottom of CNN for a few days, that’ll get people talking about it for an hour before they go play pickleball. They’ll forget about it though. They’ll forget about it almost immediately. Remember, these are the same people who are comfortable with a guy who proudly carries on his family tradition of being an adult with a hole in their head being in charge of what we put in the drinking water all because their friend’s older brother talked about chemtrails in front of them a bunch, and a little too much of that sunk in to take up roots.
It’s too much for people to grasp on to. It doesn’t help them buy groceries today. Trump and Elon and RFK Jr. aren’t going to either, but as long as it feels like they will, then it’s good enough for them. People are easily placated in the moment, and as long as they get to stop for ice cream and afford to take the long way home every once in a while, they’re good. Nothing else really matters.
I make a shitload of money. Way more than the average salary by multiple times. I have times where I do work hard. I’ve managed others before. I’ve been paged out at 3 AM to fix something that could have waited until 8. However, I wear my pajamas as long as I want to. I don’t really have to sit in meetings or interact with others if I don’t want to. I take time off in the middle of the day to run errands and go to the gym. I shut my laptop at the end of the day, and maybe I end up at a hardcore show or something later on at night. I can get away with the odd day or couple of days where I do nothing at all. I’m single. I’m straight. I’m white. I go to bed and wake up when I feel like it. Life is easy. I remember being on my feet all day, dealing with customers, working for tips that weren’t coming, burning myself on bread ovens, folding clothes so I could leave ten minutes earlier. That shit sucks ass, I did it for years, and I don’t envy those doing it now. It’s a time gone by for me. Life is pretty easy from a day-to-day getting by standpoint for me. I’ve got a lot in savings and investments. I will own property when I decide I’m enough of an adult to commit to staying somewhere for 15 to 30 years.
The point of all of this is to say: nothing about the last week will affect me. That’s an oft-repeated way for mealy mouthed assholes to get out of making a decision on election day in the US. “I don’t care which way it goes, it won’t affect me.” You’ll hear something to that effect repeated more often than someone caring about abortion, Gaza, inflation, healthcare, education, trans rights, or any other single issue.
If it doesn’t rip off their roof and dump water on their bed, it doesn’t matter because it won’t have affected them. If it doesn’t round up all of the undocumented brown skinned folks who pick our fruit in this country, then it won’t have affected them. If it doesn’t start picking up a couple stray brown skinned folks on work visas or with permanent resident statuses, it won’t matter because it won’t have affected them. If it doesn’t start rotting their kids’ teeth because they took the fluoride out of the drinking water and they’re too bad of parents to even do the bare minimum by making their kids brush their teeth, it won’t matter because it won’t have affected them. If it doesn’t impregnate them and then die, causing sepsis and an easily prevantable death at the age of 27, it won’t matter because it won’t have affected them. If it doesn’t tear gas them when they try to exercise their civil liberties and make their voices heard for once, it won’t matter because it won’t have affected them. If it doesn’t cause a full economic collapse due to misguided tariffs similar to the exact scenario from a hundred years ago that we’re quickly hurtling toward repeating, it won’t matter because it won’t have affected them.
Something about the next four years will undoubtedly affect them, whether they realize it in the moment or not. When they try to buy strawberries, but they’re 24 dollars a carton and they didn’t budget for that. When they want to buy a game console and it costs more than double what it’s supposed to because Sony isn’t paying the import tariffs on consumer electronics for them. When they bust a nut inside some girl they met at the bar and now they have to have a kid together and act like they like each other for eighteen years because there was no other option. When their skin color isn’t the right one, and they get picked up in a white prison bus and taken to a field somewhere to work. When they get hauled into court because they had a couple tweets that were critical of the President in 2017.
We’ll see if it actually gets that far. My money is on these doofuses cocking it up and infighting because there are just too many huge egos battling for ideological dominance and the media spotlight. It’s no secret that we’re a nation, and a people, in steep decline. However, I think this is only the beginning of the fall. It’s the moment you’ve crested the top of the first drop of a roller coaster, and you feel that the momentum has shifted that first centimeter over the edge. Gravity will take care of the rest, and we’ll see where the bottom is as long as the wheels don’t come off and the last guy in charge of the cool rollercoaster button panel thing left the key in there so that some other idiot employee can hit the emergency stop button in time.
As for me, it’s like I said. None of this affects me directly until the dollar isn’t worth shit or they decide to start rounding up rich, straight white guys who like Rollins Band. I highly doubt either of those scenarios plays out. All I have to worry about is the possibility that the defense system has truly failed us, and a Russian dildo bomb is going to blow up my plane on my way to Thanksgiving, where I will hopefully land safely and not talk about any of the events of the last week for even one single second with anyone in my family.
We’re all gonna just have to shut up, act like we like each other even though we don’t, and watch the tube.