It ain’t gonna be that easy, folks. Sorry
The World Isn’t Ending. It’s Just Turning Into Hell
Nuclear oblivion might not be so bad after all
“You have to feed the cats,” yelled my wife from the other side of the bed.
“Fuck the cats,” I mumbled.
Such retorts are now possible since my wife and I decided to get separate quilts — a game changer for marriage and, surely,
‘a positive step on the road toward separate beds,’
as she puts it.
Between my wife’s constant Hitler-like commands and the cat sticking its arsehole in my face, eventually, I dragged my dehydrated corpus ambulatuz upright and considered doing a nazi salute and a stomp of the leg to her, only I remembered it had now become illegal in Victoria to do so.
So instead, I paused for a moment and thought about how wonderful our governments in the West are, putting people in prison for making Hitler jokes to their friends while simultaneously sending weapons to support right-wing governments.
And yes, I bid you adieu as you leave this article for suddenly not conforming to your ‘beliefs’, aka your social media sinkhole conditioning.
Don’t feel bad at all. Go find something else that contains nothing that will ever challenge your sense of what is or isn’t real. Like this:
I assume from here on, I am speaking entirely to myself
So, parasitic cats fed, wife coffeeed, I sit up in bed and practice the morning writer’s routine I learned on the Andrew Hiverman podcast:
- Pick up your phone
2. Check yer email to see if any literary agents have had a late night red wine revelation and gone, ‘well, would you look at this fucking genius,’ and immediately emailed you to offer you their firstborn child.
3. Feel like a depressed loser when your inbox is empty.
4. Check Medium to see if anyone has responded to your stories to affirm that you are the greatest writer in the universe.
5. Feel like a depressed loser when you have no responses.
6. Check Twitter to see how close we are to nuclear oblivion and also to see if anyone randomly liked your genius-level tweets:
7. Feel like a depressed loser when your tweet still has zero likes.
8. Check cockrocket.com to see if anyone has bought your sad Kindle books
9. Feel like a depressed loser when you haven't even made $0.01 from book sales in the month of March.
10. Wait for your wife to go to work so you can have a good wank by the fireplace to make yourself feel better for five minutes.
11. Feel like a depressed loser when she calls in sick.
So, instead, I ended up randomly crawling on webbed hands and knees across the splinternet to find something to soothe my aching perineum
I fell down a political lagomorphic hole and stumbled upon a picture of Xi Jinping visiting Vladimir Putin in Russia. And I thought, well at least China still knows something about that estranged, endangered term:
DIPLOMACY (Aka talking shit over) noun : the art of dealing with people in a sensitive and tactful way.
But instead of celebrating the meeting of two minds, the headline read:
Putin’s Only Friend
And it affirmed to me that our governments do not want peace
You can tell because nobody from our countries will sit down and talk things through with Putin since there is a real danger that peace talks might work and actually end the war (and thus end the sales).
Next, I read an article by the immortal Darius that got me thinking more about that:
And you know what?
HOW DARE ANY FUCKER MAKE MONEY FROM WAR?
But, we live in a time where that line won't even resonate with people. Nobody seems to give a flying fuck about the absurdity of war profits.
Instead, the concept will float through their heads, past the TikTok reels and spin out the back end like a ghostly turd.
Or, they will say shit like, Oh Frank, You’re so naive. You know nothing about world politics.
The truth is:
We are too dumb to fucking care. And that's our problem.
It’s not our love of fighting that is killing us. It’s our lack of intelligence
We are so focused on ending social insults that we just let the tight networks of corporations, government, media and the military continue to create a dystopian hell for us.
- You can’t say fuck on Twitter anymore cos it’s a ‘micro-aggression.’
- You can’t assume some fat plumber’s gender just cos they have nads and a tash.
- You can’t stand too close to someone with purple hair cos you might trigger their AHRP or whatever fucking acronym they are suffering from.
But it’s alright to make money by forcing prisoners to work sixty hours a week for slave wages:
It’s alright to make money from dropping bombs on children:
It’s fine to let families freeze to death on the streets cos they can't afford mortgages:
And we are too busy policing our own lame interactions to be concerned about the growing power of corporations.
anyhoo
I took a breath and went in search of something more intelligent.
And, thankfully I found a tremendously uplifting Twitter post about a woman who decided that it was a good idea to make fresh pasta from dried pasta by grinding it down.
And at that point, I sat there, sipping my locally bought coffee called ‘Daddy’s balls’ or something, and I wondered why people are so afraid of nuclear oblivion.
Cos, I think ya know that will be damn quick. You’ll sniff the wind one last time, and you’ll be dust. But it’s just wishful thinking to think its gonna be that easy.
Instead, we are going to develop some medical tech that means any disease can be cured.
And no, we’re not going to develop it in fifty years when all these decrepit white zombies in suits have carked it. We’re gonna develop it while they are still alive and they are gonna all reset their bodies, and keep living indefinitely.
And this fucking world —where turnip-brained wannabe influencers think it's alright to grind up dried pasta to make fresh pasta, and where I have to feed parasitic cats and take orders from my wife every day, and where it’s okay to profit from cancer and war and imprisonment and where journalists like Julian Assange can be tortured in claustrophobic, solitary conditions indefinitely without trial and where governments can take legal bribes from anyone who has enough money and where history can be openly censored under the guise of some moral cause and where an atomic Wind in the Willows joke blows unnoticed like Forrest Gump’s ass feather — is just gonna get more deranged and upsetting.
So, that’s something to look forward to
