If This Continues… Well It Has

Friday the 13th is a mnemonic I use to remember a bad event. I deliberately remember. We are already post-apocalypse. So why freak out about another one? I’m not saying that to be click bait, I mean it. Shit that would be considered “apocalyptic” has already happened. It’s not negative or a “blackpill” to accept that shitty things are already a done deal. Don’t despair; embrace it and grow.

Here’s the good part. “Apocalypse” ain’t as bad as I expected. The terrifying phrase “post-apocalypse” is “just another day”. It could be worse… and it has been… but I’m not ravaging the wastelands for canned goods. Neither are you.

Let’s back up a bit and talk about my “mnemonic date”.

I bought my first dirt bike on February 29th 2020. “Leap year day” is another excellent “mnemonic date”. (Spoiler alert… the bike was an awesome decision!)

Being a cheapskate, I’d driven all day to get a better price on the motorcycle. That night we checked into a hotel. A busload of diversity showed up at the same hotel and partied like a herd of wildebeests. It was pathetically clichéd. Youthful hollering dipshit hoodlums had imported what can only be called “a couple carloads of hos”. Loud mating rituals annoyed the hell out of me.

The following day, despite my rush to get home, I pulled up to a grocery store and told Mrs. Curmudgeon “…there’s this thing going on in China, I think it’s probably nothing but people might overreact…” She agreed. We bought a ton of food. That was the day after February 29th.

I already knew people were frazzled. All events came with blame and accusation. Democrats were (predictably) calling Trump a racist for interfering with Chinese airplane flights. Trump was trying to do something about which he could do nothing useful. Regardless of which party bitched at which other party, the pathogen was probably already planet wide. The other news was (I think) forest fires in Australia; which were of course caused by global warming.

Two weeks later a nation that had been tearing itself apart for years finally had the nervous breakdown it craved. I knew something stupid would happen in 2020. It was the fourth year of concerted temper tantrums because Hillary wasn’t coronated. Something had to release all that pressure. Now I know that a large portion of humans, find it thrilling to publicly lose one’s shit. I also learned that many folks, once pushed to the edge, can’t return to normal. They literally lack the ability.

To me, COVID was just one more of the usual (and repetitive) panics over pathogens. Bird flu. Swine flu. Hanta virus. Zika. Ebola. Growing up Gen X, I’d already seen the granddaddy of them all; AIDS. Panics happen periodically and they’re an addictive pleasant activity for mentally ill or mentally ill adjacent. Why did COVID do what Ebola did not? I don’t know. We’re all just mammals in a social media experiment. It was probably timing. Social media hit a new plateau just as COVID gave an excuse to flake out.

I was on the road a few weeks later. It was Friday the 13th in March of the year 2020. (The ultimate mnemonic date!) I drove home listening to the radio. It was fascinating. Hourly and then quarterly and finally continuous reporting on civilization’s cracking façade. Dominoes fell all day. It started with cancelled basketball games. Then it was travel stuff. Soon it was a race to see who could overreact the most, the fastest, and demonstrate their new mental state the most publicly. By sunset, idiots were fighting over toilet paper.

What a year it was; “lockdowns”, “mostly peaceful protests”, curb stomping the economy, shut down churches, irrelevant arrows panted on Walmart’s floor, the end of medical privacy, arresting people on beaches and at parks, medically pointless masks made of old bandannas, closed hospitals, dancing nurses, the list is endless. None of it was reality based.

It culminated (or maybe it didn’t?) in the all time record setting vote count for Joe Biden. Joe’s awesome come-from-behind win was one for the ages! It came a few hours after I watched Trump win the election and turned in for the night. I went to bed in one world; I woke up in another.

Repeat after me because it was once required by law: “Biden is the most immensely popular candidate to ever exist. His vote count, the highest in record, was official and legally enforced proof of his popularity.” Questioning Biden’s amazing record vote count  would get you cancelled, deplatformed, demonetized, ostracized, censored, doxed, fired, sued, and possibly imprisoned. Joe Biden, the most popular candidate to ever exist, was sworn in behind chain link fence; as one does. Some 1,500 political prisoners were tossed in jail; which is to be expected from a totally legitimate massively popular candidate.

All those things I mentioned… we live after them. It doesn’t have to be my list. Pick your list. Think about what you remember most. Whatever it was, we live post-that.

Was 2020 “the apocalypse”? Not in the true “everybody dies” meaning. I’m writing this and you’re reading it, so we’re both alive. But we did experience the complete end of one way of living and the abrupt, violent, angry, emergence of something different.

It’s at least apocalypse adjacent.

Biden, the most popular president ever, put me on a list of people without required injections. I was on another list to be fired. I was not fired. I didn’t control events that put me on the list. Events that made it moot happened without my input. I was viciously shoved to and fro by huge waves of stupid.

I learned then that people don’t want to do their own dirty work. Karen at the HOA would gladly have you shot, but she won’t do it herself. The vax was enforced with isolation, travel limits, de-banking, censorship, social ostracization, free donuts, Walmart gift cards, relatives in hospitals dying alone, PSAs in media, you name it… but the goal was to make you subjugate yourself. You were ordered to bow your own knee.

That’s odd. If they were truly worried about a pathogen why not just grab me? If it’s life and death assign a handful of Marines to slam me to the ground and administer an injection. Didn’t happen. It wasn’t life or death. They didn’t dose illegal aliens. Or prisoners. Or “peaceful protesters”. Or welfare recipients.

Many people reading this got an injection they didn’t want. They did it to shut up someone who badgered them into it. Or maybe an employer suddenly decided they had the right to fire anyone who didn’t get medical treatments like a good pet should. But nobody got tackled in the street and whacked with a pneumatic injector. Why not? That was an important lesson.

Was it the apocalypse? To me it was.

Laws stopped being laws. If it could be done it was done. If it wasn’t done then it wasn’t. Legal stopped mattering. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 limited disclosure of protected health information. Until if didn’t. One day it just became ok for your boss to demand your vaccination data. He could put it on an Excel spreadsheet and post it on the wall if he wanted. After a few weeks, he was allowed to demand you get an injection. The vaccine? Heroin? Steroids? At least for one of them was suddenly the bosses pejorative.

Was that the apocalypse? Seems like it.

Illegal aliens were distributed to various voting districts. Are there immigration laws. Are there no immigration laws? Our government engaged in human trafficking. How is that legal? Because “shut up” is how it’s legal. Even if you support what happened, why not just change the law first and then follow it. You know, like civilized people?

Was that the apocalypse? I think so.

Which of many straws broke the camel’s back? Hard to day. But life now is forever different than life then. It sounds like an apocalypse. It felt like a zombie outbreak. It was like catastrophe.

The most popular president we’ve ever had was non compos mentis. Was he in charge? If not him, who? A leading opposition politician was sued, lawfared, censored, harried, and shot. We were told it such mistreatment was legal, moral, and justified. A bullet passed a quarter inch from the major opposition party candidate’s skull. It flat out killed a man behind him.

That’s an apocalypse.

If you don’t like the word “apocalypse” here’s a different phrase: “the shit hit the fan”. 

And now? I’m on the other side. You are too. More stupid shit will surely happen, but I’ve lost the ability to freak out about what might happen. I’m hardened by what has happened.

I can’t get on board with panic talk. They say if the SAVE act isn’t passed it’s the end of democracy. It sounds impressive but aren’t we looking at some event that already happened? Was 2020 was the end of democracy. Maybe what went down with Nixon was the end of democracy? Or Lincoln? Why fret over degrees of shit hitting varieties of fans? Nor do I care about the bleating of emotionally incontinent shallow thinkers. If you don’t know the difference between democracy and republic I don’t care about your opinion.

Another threat, this thing or that thing is another Ft. Sumpter. We already had a Ft. Sumpter. It sucked, a lot of people died, and a different Republican president got shot. Feels like that was a nice clear apocalypse? Our apocalypse has been a lot less bloody… so far.

Same with war reporting. It’s always impending and it’s always horrific. War in Iran is going great, or terrible. But didn’t they take hostages when I was nine? I’m supposed to fret over Venezuela. But didn’t a portion of their whole nation cross the border a few years ago. I’m supposed to flake about Cuba. But didn’t they finally achieve net zero. Wasn’t net zero a goal? Is this worse than the Cuban missile crisis of 1962? Does anyone remember their dumb little Facebook icons about Ukraine?

The point is, don’t fret over bad shit that may happen because you’ve already ridden out bad shit that was very real. It was oddly survivable. Being agitated means nothing to nobody.

The president himself declared the contents of my bloodstream not up to his standards. I lived. I didn’t even get fired. I lived through 9/11/2001. A huge terrorist attack on the tallest buildings in one of our biggest cities is… well… what was it? Yet another apocalypse.

See what I mean? Some disasters are very bad; the black death in 1350. Others just suck, disco and bad cars in the 1970’s? Bad shit happens, if we’re lucky we endure, very often the aftermath isn’t quite as dismal as we feared.