Here's the New Year, Same as the Last Year.
This post contains lethal doses of sarcasm if read irresponsibly.
Right at end of a calendar year, people tend to place their brains on energy-saver mode. Their very close, if not symbiotic, relationships with Amazon become almost codependent. Much like the guy who walked around for years of his life with a railroad spike stuck in his head, much could be said about how American and this behemoth e-commerce platform might well require each other at this point, and both are probably enriched in some ways through this arrangement. When I scroll through Boxing Day deals, I am presented with innumerable discounted items with names like Exquisite Artisan Milk Whistle or FudgeMaster PRO 4500 Signature Edition, or even more mundane things like a Harry Potter-branded teakettle or a high-performance double porcelain cocoa mug. I feel like I must endeavor to describe the ways in which these ridiculous purchases aren’t so preposterously wrong. Instead, I perused different types of Theraguns.
I mostly just ask for booze or Amazon gift cards for Christmas, at this point. I find the contrived gesture of instructing—or implicitly demanding—a loved one to buy me something I could purchase myself to be tedious and a bit self-defeating in a consumerist sense. Returning to this depraved online realm to capitalize on these holiday sales is an annual experience of feeling completely disoriented in the wilderness of luxury whimsy. There are times where I’ve thought of being the type of guy who has really nice kitchen knives, or even a pizza oven, but I am more precisely the type of guy who finds himself settling on purchasing books or flannels once again. There is also the broader, more typical experience of being owned in all the familiar literal, no-fuss ways that come with visiting the internet.
It could be said that 2021 wasn’t a massive improvement over 2020, but it was different. A variant, even. People emerged from their Covid cocoons and began interacting with each other, even if it was mostly wilin’ out from all the pent-up anxiety and content mill brain-rot that comes with sitting inside all day. For a while, the internet inserted itself as the central organ of contemporary life. It rewired our brains, returning us into a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while catapulting us into a very contemporary disposition of sensory input overload. It seems the pandemic and the aftermath has made the most insidious aspects of the internet more overt, where the digital bleeds into reality. Our sense of self distended, our sense of scale destroyed, our sense of opposition maximized. It mostly resulted in copious displays of real-time cringe.
The year began with all eyes on Washington D.C., where outgoing President Donald Trump and his trusted inner circle of supplicants and vampires have been working on an ongoing campaign to prove the 2020 election was rigged in a massive conspiracy that is too complex and sophisticated for the so-called “courts of law” to understand, but is transparently obvious to the My Pillow Guy. On January 6, the Stop the Steal rally soon devolved into a tragic, futile, and utterly stupid riot at the U.S. Capitol on behalf of some wacky Facebook memes and a washed-up game show host throwing a temper tantrum.
The “national healing” began weeks after, as Joe Biden is inaugurated, and Americans joined together to share memes of Bernie Sanders in attendance wearing distinctive mittens and the facial expression of someone who has two wolves inside them, both gnawing at their colon.
Suddenly, the stock price of GameStop spectacularly rose because a band of “autist” investors in a Reddit group took advantage of a short squeeze margin-call algorithm to leverage the arbitrage and create a classic liquidity debenture. In plain English, no one has any idea what happened, but it interfered with the efforts of hedge fund assholes to get marginally wealthier, so it was met with near-unanimous support and Elon Musk pushing Dogecoin for some reason. It also forced CNBC anchors to explain what a meme is to their boomer audience.
A massive ice storm took an especially brutal toll on Texas in February, where record-setting cold temperatures knocked out power and wreaked devastating havoc on large areas of the state. Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz embarked on a family trip to Cancun, and despite an outpouring of memes mocking him for this decision, he blamed his daughter for his dereliction of congressional duties and thus faced no consequences.
Millions more Americans were being vaccinated every day, but medical experts on cable TV became embroiled in a heated debate with various random YouTube guys over:
Is the pandemic is winding down?
What do these incoming variants entail?
Can vaccinated people resume leading a normal life?
Can we stop wearing masks or do we have to wear them in perpetuity?
Can we can gather for “July the Fourth?” (Which one was not specified.)
Blue-State Cuomosexuals awoke from their wet dreams of basic competency when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo came under intense scrutiny over allegations of sexual harassment and underreporting nursing-home deaths. He eventually resigned as governor of the Empire State because he is a loving Italian who happens to get a little too handsy. Prince Harry and Meghan talked to Oprah on national TV for two hours about their ongoing effort to escape the unbearable scrutiny resulting from their association with the British royal family. They mentioned racism somewhere in the interview, so conservatives reacted by defending the monarchy, the institution America’s founding fathers rebelled against, then resumed with their trademark jingoistic bomb-humping and flag-waving. Libs owned, indeed.
On the woke front, Dr. Seuss was added to the swelling list of individuals who are deemed to be P R O B L E M A T I C. If you have to ask why, YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.
International shipping is seriously disrupted when the Suez Canal is blocked by a massive container ship that became wedged sideways. Many memes were inspired by this fiasco, which became a nifty metaphor for facing overwhelming odds and deciding to post instead.
Back to Covid news, as Hot Vax Summer approached, many vaccinated Americans continue to act as if they’re not, unvaccinated Americans continue to act as if they are. Also, many of those who got vaccinated hate Donald Trump (who now considers the vaccine against the “fake China flu” to be one of his greatest achievements). The “delta variant” would soon surge in areas where vaccine rates are low, so pro-vaccine voices attempted to change the minds of skeptics by reminding them that they are stupid idiots, which we have learned from the Trump years, is usually a persuasive argument.
In a chilling reminder of America’s vulnerability to cyberattacks, a major East Coast fuel pipeline was forced to shut down after suspected Russian hackers break into the corporation’s computer system. It sent a stern warning to America’s leaders that citizens of this country can make very crafty uses of single-use plastic containers.
The summer’s most upbeat story involved Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos pioneering a new era in billionaire leisure travel by going up in private suborbital spacecraft. Space enthusiasts say these missions will pave the way toward a future in which ordinary people with millions of spare dollars will be able to ride dick rockets from one part of a state to a different part of that state, thanks to the thousands of Amazon warehouse workers keeling over from kidney failure. Despite knowing this, Americans still use their Prime accounts to order Thanos one-piece swimsuits.
In August, Joe Biden announced the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. After 20 years of intervention, thousands of sacrificed lives, and more than $2 trillion expensed, the once-beleaguered nation transformed from an undemocratic society into an undemocratic society with a whole lot of abandoned American military hardware lying around.
Meanwhile, the Milk Crate Challenge briefly took center stage as the latest means for Twitter-dimwits to injure themselves. You can’t die of Covid if you shatter your face and are denied an ICU visit because half of Florida is coughing out their colons.
Then, the coronavirus vaccine controversy escalated when distinguished rapper/epidemiologist Nicki Minaj issued a tweet stating that her cousin in Trinidad had a friend who got vaccinated and became impotent and his meatballs swelled up. This tweet instantly became international news, receiving more attention than any statement made ever by Fascist Communist Dr. Fauci. Numerous health authorities disputed Minaj’s assertion of vaccine-related ball balloonage, but she doubled down and posted another tweet with the hashtag #BallGate, stating that she was invited to the White House to discuss the situation. None of this is satire.
If you’re the perverted kind of online political junkie who invests themselves in interminable slogs through an incomprehensible legislative process, the Democrats spent all of 2021 locked in an ideological battle with themselves. The contentious debate: how to pass two spending bills—a $1 trillion infrastructure bill and a $3.5 trillion bill for miscellaneous items.
In other disturbing developments, Facebook and Instagram suffered a worldwide outage for several harrowing hours. Billions of people were forced to receive their conspiracies and disinformation from Twitter. Later in the month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a future-oriented rebrand, the parent company would change its name to the Omicron Variant.
In the fall, President Biden traveled to Glasgow to participate in COP26, a 190-nation conference on climate change featuring catered meals and various impassioned speeches about how climate change is an emergency and we should do something about it. Leonardo DiCaprio flew in on a private jet, and in retrospect, this gives a new meaning to “Don’t Look Up.”
As Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled around, inflation continued to be a pesky problem and U.S. consumers saw more and more empty store shelves caused by disruptions in the supply chain from China. There is a direct correlation between Joe Biden’s poll numbers and the price of a Mountain Dew.
As 2021 mercifully nears its conclusion, people are asking themselves what 2022 has in store: Will it suck as much as this year, or suck more? In the waning days of December, friends and family members asked if I felt like I’d had a good year, and while I didn’t hesitate to say “no, not really,” I am glad I didn’t leave it at that. I didn’t have the year I wanted to have; no one did. But I am here and will be here next year, and hopefully, you will stick around too. There will be more nonsense, more idiocy, more hog-people to gawk at, and with the grace of whatever deity or other force has oversight over 21st-century America, we are still doing this.
For New Year’s Eve, remember to remove your mask before you puke.