Are you drinking more bleach than you were four years ago?

How about eating more horse paste? How's that working out for you? Yeah, 2020 was fucking AWESOME, wasn't it?? (And if you're dead, why are you reading this??)

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Totally off-topic, but still fun:

The prompt was “In six words, or fewer, write a story about this picture.”

Challenge accepted….

And now for our regulary-scheduled silliness….

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“Are you better today than you were four years ago?”

It’s a prima facie absurd question. I mean, consider the orange-hued, morally depraved, intellectually vacant shitgibbon who insists on asking the question. The utter lack of self-awareness combination with the absence of historical awareness is stunning. Is Agolf Shitler not the Dumbest Amoral Subhuman © to ever soil the White House?

The question answers itself, no?

Think about it for a moment. If you’re not dead (and if you are, why are you reading this?), you DO remember what was happening in April 2020, yeah?

When I can clear away the cobwebs and the obstacles I’ve constructed in my memory to prevent myself from remembering 2020, I remember it like it a lifetime on another planet. The Pandemic- the year when life as we knew it ground to a halt, the world shut down, and you could take a nap during mid-day in the middle of most interstate highways with fear of waking up with oil stains on your forehead.

I spent most of the year at home, a virtual prisoner in my own home. I had my dog, two cats, and a laptop for company. Erin was still working in the hospital then, so her day-to-day work life changed little, save for the PPE she wore like a suit of armor.

I watched a lot of MSNBC, but I did manage to finish the book I’d been working on, so at least one good thing came out of that weird, fucking awful, sorry excuse for a year. I remember most of the “entertainment,” if it even qualifies as such. So much of the news, revolving around body counts and pandemic denialism, involved watching Trumple Thinskin and his COVID-19 clown posse Dance the Forbidden Dance ©.

While his posse was heavily invested in trying to do good and meaningful things, Donny Diaperstain was trying to pretend that the worst pandemic since 1918 was just a bad case of the flu. Sure, genius…that explained why hospitals, first in New York and then other cities, searching far and wide for find refrigerator trucks to store bodies because their morgues were full.

So much of the pandemic still seems like a bad dream. Yet, we lived through it- the terror, the denialis, the assholes refusing to mask up or get vaccinated, our idiot President who declared that one day it would simply vanish- all of it. It eventually did go away like a bad dream, yeah?

And yet it never really did. Not when the Brooks Institute estimate that Mango Mussolini’s ineptitude, incompetence, and denialism was responsible for more than 780,000 deaths in this country. In another context, there might be a word (and a war crime) for that:

GENOCIDE.

You know, so much about the early COVID days feels like a weird dream now. Going from store to store in desperate search of toilet paper while simultaneously trying to avoid getting within six feet of anyone, failing so, so hard at doing a sourdough starter, being terrified that you or people you love were going to die, Tiger King. But one of the true standouts, in my opinion, was when Donald Trump got up in front of the entire damn nation and casually started suggesting some very unusual possible cures for the virus … including somehow shining UV light into the body and injecting cleaning disinfectants.

- Robyn Pennacchia

So, four years ago, yeah? Donald Trump was the President of standing before America and wondering if there wasn’t a way to shine a light inside a person to rid them of the COVID-19 virus. Perhaps drinking bleach, eating horse paste, or maybe even driving their Porsche Targa 150mph into a concrete retaining wall? Surely, that would have to cure them of the virus and everything else that ailed them.

The daily Trump Show came to take on the trappings of a bad Chinese game show. None of the doctors Agolf Shitler trotted out every day ever had any idea of what he would say. Nor could they envision the stupid way(s) he would go about making a tragic epoch in our history all about himself. It was pathetic and so far beyond ridiculous you’d need a spaceship to get there. Still, people were dying by the truckload, so it wasn’t like we could laugh about it or even at him because we all knew what the body count was.

At it’s peak, it was more than a 9/11 every day. Let that rattle around your brainpan for a more. That salient fact should have shocked us into action. Sadly, reasonable Americans from coast to coast were so benumbed by our daily reality that any thoughts beyond survival and finding toilet paper were beyond our capabilities.

We’ve just passed the four-year “bleachiversary,” as it were, a landmark of arrogance, ignorance, and disdain for the preciousness of human life in a tragic period ruled by stupidity, malice, and yet more malicious stupidity.

You know, so much about the early COVID days feels like a weird dream now. Going from store to store in desperate search of toilet paper while simultaneously trying to avoid getting within six feet of anyone, failing so, so hard at doing a sourdough starter, being terrified that you or people you love were going to die, Tiger King. But one of the true standouts, in my opinion, was when Donald Trump got up in front of the entire damn nation and casually started suggesting some very unusual possible cures for the virus … including somehow shining UV light into the body and injecting cleaning disinfectants.

Four years ago, it did feel like a weird dream, and yet we all lived it. We lived the Presidential bleach and bright light prescriptions, the brain-dead COVID-19 denialists who believed their Google and YouTube degrees but refused to believe doctors, epidemiologists, and immunologists.

We lived the airheads and assholes who were convinced COVID-19 was a Chinese bioweapon. We didn’t dream the assholes who refused to believe that they owed anything to society and thus refused to get vaccinated or mask up (this is why death rates were higher in red states).

Nor did we dream those who came up with their own homemade “remedies” they convinced themselves were warding off COVID-19 (yeah, the same COVID-19 that eventually killed millions of them in a fit of natural selection).

So, are we better off? Perhaps in that we have fewer of the idiots and numbnuts underfoot than we did four years ago. I hate to sound cold and uncaring, but those ill-informed and arrogant clowns decided they’d do “their own research,” and they too often “researched” themselves right into a horrible, needless, and pointless death. I see no need or reason to feel sorry for those who were too arrogant and stupid to take reasonable, easy precautions that would’ve almost certainly saved their lives.

In that sense, yes, we are better off. I think having fewer stupid people to booger up things is always good. But are we better off in the traditional sense Presidential candidates ask that question?

But if you think we were better off in 2020 than we are now, you’re either from another planet or dumber than a post turtle, and I don’t know which is worse.

Get off my planet, willya? You’re wasting precious oxygen.

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