It’s The Final Week

This is the last week of Chapter Seven: Thunderdome. I hope you’ve been enjoying it.

Now for some navel gazing…

I started Attack of the Lesbian Activist Squirrels because the election of 2016 sucked. Remember the before times? I thought things couldn’t get worse. How naïve I was!

The media had been bitching for a whole goddamn year about the coronation of Hillary Clinton. It was pre-ordained. The Deplorables had been told to comply and even if we didn’t it wouldn’t matter. The press told me that Hillary was going to win no matter what and simultaneously if I didn’t vote for her, as ordered, I’d be responsible for everything bad that happens forever and everywhere on earth. It was crazy pressure. My vote didn’t count because nobody important lives in rural shitholes. Awesome cities should just kill me off and turn everything beyond city limits into a wilderness park. Anyone who disagreed was an asshole and nobody disagreed at all. (Which is only one of the many bits of inconsistent logic hurled at my head.) The press was in heat… social media was in rut. “Did we mention that you should vote specifically for people who hate you? Well you should. Asshole. Also your vote doesn’t matter anyway. So suck it.”

How can all that stuff be true at once?

By September of 2016 the pressure had been building forever. I hated to see people so demoralized. There was too much despair. Everything was so serious. It was like joy itself was a hated thing.

So, I wrote a silly story. It was my half assed attempt to inject levity into a world exhausted from getting depression enemas and morale beatings.

The story worked. People laughed! What a relief! I’d skated on thin ice and people were nice about it. It was a fun thing.

Then Hillary was elected and we all were conscripted to be happy worker bees in the debt mine. Whoops! That sure didn’t happen.

Thank goodness all the anger was over. Ha ha ha… how could I have even imagined such a thing? A tantrum started four years ago and hasn’t yet ended. It took me by surprise. Pussy hats and burning cars in the streets just seems like a bad sales pitch. I expected rational adults looking to employ wise judgement. They never showed up. Perhaps they’re extinct.

Over time, media transitioned from grim to frenzied. I’d say America suffered a nervous breakdown but it happened planet-wide. For every lunatic in Portland there’s a counterpart in Paris or London or Vancouver or Sydney. Humans took 200 years and many wars to adapt to Gutenberg’s press. Smartphones and F***book are a far more addictive drug and things went off the rails.

Nobody stood back and said “maybe we ought to switch to decaf”. I expected someone to say “gosh, the lowest unemployment in 50 years and no new wars… even if I don’t like the Orange Jerk with the Weird Hair, things aren’t completely tragic.” I waited for an outbreak of mellowness that never happened. Every now and then, when everything was tense and stupid, I’d write another chapter for Attack of the Lesbian Activist Squirrels.

I’d learned that humor mattered. There’s almost a pathological hatred of humor among unhinged people. Humor doesn’t have to be my stories. It can be anything. There’s nothing wrong with fart jokes or a video of penguins with Yakety Sax playing in the background. I don’t care if you like balloon animals or puns so subtle you need to speak Sanskrit to understand them… humor is part of being human.

Never trust anyone who lacks a sense of humor! Humorless people are brittle and dangerous. They’re incomplete and cultlike; rejecting simple positive human emotions is an unwise life strategy. Inside every person too serious to laugh, a monster is waiting to burst forth. People who can’t laugh should be kept away from the levers of power.

Anyway, if 2016 sucked, 2020 was a compressed shit sandwich of galactic proportions. I’m not talking about the outcome. I’m talking about the absolutely unhinged misery that accompanied it. We are told that the newly elected Geriatric Potato got the most votes in history. Dude broke every record to soundly defeat the Orange Menace. Way to go team Potato. You got a homerun. So smile would ya? Yet nobody is happy. It’s like they lost the ability to be happy.

Think about what it means. Surely the half that won is delighted. Right? If winning doesn’t make them happy and losing enrages them… what’s the point of their world?

It feels like there was an election and hatred itself won. (I know you’re dying to rush to the comments and talk about stolen elections. I’m trying to step around that steaming pile of dog crap and just ask why nobody seems happy about anything. Even if it was stolen, someone should be happy about it.)

Since this shit is way above my pay grade I continue to do what I can. I wrote another chapter. It’s almost over. I hoped you liked it. I don’t know how many hours people spent listening to jokes about Gatlin Guns and unbalanced MMA fighters… but it’s more than zero. That’s a start.

Here’s another start. It is spring. It is time to plant. Winter didn’t kill us. Whether the response is wise or unwise / two weeks or a year or forever, you’re reading this. Thus, Covid didn’t kill you. How awesome is that? To celebrate, build and laugh:

• Evil cannot build. If you cannot build, you are evil. Fix it by building. Plant a seed, paint a fence, play an instrument, do a good deed, bake a cake… Do anything that’s specifically and intentionally not destruction.
• If you cannot laugh, you are living wrong. Live better, so that you may smile.

Two more posts remain for this chapter of the story. I hope you enjoy them. I didn’t save the world but I made people laugh and I had fun.

Also, the story ‘aint over. I’ve got more plotted out in my pointy little head. There will be hippy tears, cartoon characters, two vans, chess, and a contextually important Pastrami sandwich. It’s going to be awesome!

A.C.