[Warning #1: This post meanders. What can I say? I wandered into the weeds addressing astronaut shit and covfefe. You expected linear thinking? Here? Good luck!]
It’s an odd, disjointed, winter. The weather is tame and that’s fabulous luck. But it isn’t not doing me any good. I “recovered” from an illness that nuked me during a routine winter hike in January only to “unrecover” in February. I’ve been slogging it out and even missed a few day’s work. I keep trying to do good things for my health but it doesn’t seem to work out.
[Warning #2: I was mugged by politics, feel free to skip the rest of this post.]
One evening I was out of energy and sleepless due to illness. Most Americans are couch potatoes so I thought maybe I should try that for a while? A lifetime sitting on the couch will ruin you but what harm comes from a few hours? (That’s foreshadowing y’all!) I forgot… TV is evil. My bad luck (and likely this will happen often in 2024) was that it was “one of THOSE days”. Idiots reminding me that everyone has lost their goddamn mind started coming out of the woodwork!
As a non-political aside, I feel like I should define “THOSE days”. It’s a special combination of something silly and the media (and in fact society) climbing up their own asshole to experience the true level of their inanity. Here’s an example story to help define “THOSE days”:
Back in 2007 (also in February… it’s a bad month) an astronaut named Lisa Nowak freaked out. She’d been through a painful divorce and subsequently hooked up with another astronaut. He (presumably) dumped her and she lost it. I have nothing but sympathy up to that part of the story. Life sucks and sometimes a person just breaks.
However, unlike an average jilted ex-wife, who drinks a box of wine and adopts a cat to get over it, Nowak went off the rails. She packed a car with latex gloves, a black wig, a BB pistol, pepper spray, a trench coat, a drilling hammer, black gloves, a folding knife and various other items that make for interesting mob stories. Then she hurriedly drove 900 miles. She did this to confront an air force captain who was landing at an airport. Apparently the female captain was bonking Nowak’s former main squeeze. (I’d like to point out this story from 2007 has no throuples or videos of anal sex in the United States Senate hearing rooms. Freaky astronaut drama in 2007 was practically wholesome compared to current Congressional staffer shenanigans.)
Luckily for everyone, things didn’t go much further. Nowak didn’t effectively follow through on whatever mayhem was in her jilted mind. She did find, confront, and pepper spray “the other woman”. But she had enough sense to refrain from murder. She cried, made a run for it, and was picked up by the fuzz. A master criminal? Nope! Which is good. Really, it’s very good. This is a story where a clearly unhinged woman didn’t kill anyone and I feel like Nowak deserves a pat on the back for pulling out of a very deep dive.
What makes that dumb event into “one of THOSE days”? The press went apeshit! On some level I understand that murdery astronaut love triangles are fun. But in the overall scheme of things, the event wasn’t that big of a deal. Crazy chicks do crazy shit every day and there’s no reason to wallow in a distraught (crazy?) woman’s messy interpersonal drama. What really made the whole thing into “one of THOSE days” is the diapers.
You heard me right. Diapers! Astronauts and air force pilots sometimes wear adult diapers to do heroic sitting sessions. This is entirely logical, there’s no shitter on an F-14 and you can’t step out of the Space Shuttle to whiz on a passing asteroid. If you’re an astronaut having a nervous breakdown and need to drive 900 miles to off some bitch…. you use the tools you have at hand. It makes sense to me but something about adult diapers lit the press’ fucking fuse. It was like crack served to howler monkeys. The press had to report on those diapers all fucking day.* I was driving that day. All day! All fucking day! Every 15 minutes or so every single radio network interrupted my boring drive to rehash the fucking diapers. It was pure hell.
Astronaut diaper media feeding frenzy is a prime example of THOSE days. Stay tuned because in my next post I have another of THOSE days.
A.C.
*Incidentally, the press lost their figurative shit over literal astronaut shit but never addressed my first thought. My initial reaction was “BB Gun”? That made me think the crazy chick was either less nutso than she could be or astronauts were now officially weenies. Astronauts have real jobs and can pass a background check. Why did the crazy chick have a BB Gun instead of an actual firearm? WTF? Even crackhead Hunter Biden has (or had) firearms. If you’re going to drive 900 miles to re-enact a scene from Goodfellas, wouldn’t you equip at least as well as some dipshit thug who carjacks an Audi in Oakland? Nobody cared about that or even noticed. It was all “here’s another expert opinion about astronaut diapers”.
P.S. Mass hyperventilation over astronaut diapers was not the worst THOSE days I’ve experienced. Ten years after the astronaut non-murder, Trump mis-typed “covfefe” into a Tweet. Holy shit! The press went into rut. The only reason it wasn’t insufferable was that I wasn’t trapped in my truck cab that day. “Journalists” spent all week pretending a typo was some mysterious secret code Trump uses to communicate with the space aliens that live in their refrigerator crisper. Normal human being instantly identified it as a harmless if amusing typo. The press has no normal human beings. They knew it was a typo but chose (and yes they made a conscious choice to act this dumb) to flake out over invented shit they know to be false. I think they get some sort of masturbatory high out of it. Trump, who has a sense of humor and also knows how to let his enemy prove themselves a fool, though it was funny. He let them run with the idea. Since they have no filter, the press fucked it into the ground. I mean they really went at it like an Olympic event. Watching supposedly sentient beings get into a feeding frenzy of stupid over something that dumb is profoundly ugly (and it’s worse than twice hourly reports about astronaut diapers). I don’t like to see it. The invented covfefe anal inversion was the worst THOSE days I can remember. Although I did think about buying a covfefe coffee mug because it was also funny. (A few years after the typo they kicked Trump off Twitter while he was the President of the United States. There are beings who live on earth and, probably, breathe oxygen who lost their shit over covfefe and then later cheered when the sitting president of the United States was censored. They walk among us and we have to live in a world that internally inconsistent.)
