I Have Never Felt More Insane, And So Can You!
A Survival Guide for the Next 24 Hours or 4 Years or Decade or Whatever Please Just End It
I have never felt more insane. I have never felt more insane! I know I say this a lot and it is definitely true every time, but not as true as this time! I feel absolutely batshit fucking insane. Shithouse rat crazy. Like the human version of dog zoomies. You know that thing dogs do where they run around every night like they got into their human’s barbiturates? Cats do it too I think.
I briefly lived with this cat back in the day who’d go absolutely fucking insane long about 11:00 each night, and this one time she ran the entire length of the apartment and dove head first into the oven door and then ricocheted off it and stumbled around on the floor in a daze and it is among the funniest things I have ever witnessed in my life and also the most relatable. I mean who among us hasn’t dreamt of just barreling hell for leather head first into a standard-issue apartment oven? It worked for Slyvia Plath or Virginia Woolf or whoever it was! No Virginia Woolf was the rock in the coat pocket and the river, I’ve seen *extremely Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic nose voice* The Hours 437 times, I can’t believe I even had to question this. It was definitely Sylvia Plath. Anyway my point is Mrs. Dalloway said she would get the flowers herself and also who among us?! In terms of heads in ovens I mean.
Because IDK about you and yours but this is how I am spending fully 150% of my time: Actively panicking abt Nazi terrorism and coronavirus and all of the things and then my brain abruptly swings alllllllll the way in the other direction and I’m like “Biden’s up in the polls by high single sometimes actual double digits and the journos all say that we’re likely to know the most important states on Tuesday night and like there really is something ~*different in the air*~ this time around and people are fed up! They are fed up! They have had ENOUGH of the terrorism of the Trump family! All! Stocked! Up! With! The fuckshit! It’ll be fine it’ll be fine it’ll be fine!!!!”
And then another abrupt swing comes and I come back to reality al like “LOLOLOL BITCH SHUT UP.” I mean I do think Joseph will win. (Though I will not be one bit surprised if he doesn’t do not quote me!) But will he take office? That, friends, is an entirely different question than the one posed! It is, as my friend Jen used to say, a whole other episode of Oprah!!!
Even when I get to a place of like, “Okay, let’s ~*implement*~ the mental and emotional ~*skillsets*~ we have learned over a combined nine years of ~*psychotherapy*~” and become very zen, suddenly the last tweet I see before closing my phone for the night to watch an episode of Younger (because I am only ONLY watching abject garbage at this time thank you for your inquiry) is from a journo-type who says, “Do not go to protests this weekend. The alt-right message boards are on fire right now. A normal country would be having its state dept warning its citizens to stay indoors.”
EXCUSE ME SIR WHAT?!?! The fuck is going on in these message boards?! Honestly I prefer when the alt-right was still on Twitter instead of all these secret messaging apps I don’t understand (The fuck is a Telegram, Trevor? Qu’est-ce que c’est qu’un Parler, Travis???), because at least you could see what they were up to without having to create a fake persona on WhiteNationalistsOnly dot net dot biz!!! You’d simply open your DMs, and there’d be a Pepe the Frog cartoon and a message like “We’re gonna come kill you faggot we know where you live” and you’d be like, Yes ok! I bet you are lying but I will keep eyes akimbo for be-flanneled white dudes with arm patches I don’t understand coming out of the Starbucks with a Frappucino in one hand and a rocket launcher in the other thank you for your kind message, Chad!
This time around, it’s all just so ~*opaque*~ (At least for me, an irrelevant white gay whom the algorithms have faded into “old man yells at cloud” obscurity so no one DMs me about anything ever.) Infuriating! It’s bad enough they stopped being skinheads and rebranded as clean-cut All-American buttonshirted chino boys, now you have to go to fucking J-SCHOOL to be able to monitor their communiqués?! Plus you’re giving me raging pestilence, mischievous fires popping up hither and yon like “LOL BITCH I’M BACK,” 837 hurricanes in a six-week period, ON TOP of a looming second referendum on whether or not a country is like “You know what might go nicely with the drapes in Satan’s waiting room is some full-tilt fascism!”??? No offense but this reboot of the reboot of Nazi Germany is ass! Who wrote this shit?! This dystopian thriller has jumped the fucking shark! Rein the writers in because this bitch is about to ~*plummet*~ in the Nielsens my darling, the advertisers will not be happy dear heart, the network suits will dissolve the contract beloved!!!
I have had it. I have absolutely had it. And I bet you have too! And yet! I am here, not just surviving but actually thriving. How am I doing it? Here are some tips:
CHECK. THE. POLLS. EVERY. 30. SECONDS. OR. ELSE. YOU. WILL. MISS. THE. ONE. THAT. FINALLY. PUTS. YOU. AT. EASE!!!
I cannot stress this enough. Most mental health professionals will tell you to do the exact opposite but the secret no one tells you about mental health professionals is they all became mental health professionals so they could diagnose themselves because they’re fucking crazy! Are you really gonna listen to someone like that?! Not in my mental and emotional breakdown due to the intersecting horrors of political, societal, and environmental collapse! I don’t think so Tim!
Others will tell you that polls aren’t real and can’t be trusted and that is absolutely true because who even has a landline anymore besides your weird aunt who’d been a Democrat for 65 fucking years and then suddenly just happened to turn into a fascist at a time when there just happened to be “a Black” in the White House but that is just a really weird coincidence and one has nothing to do with the other wow humans sure are complex and life sure is full of surprises isn’t it you just never know what’s gonna happen and that is the beauty of the human ~*journey*~!
Anyway that weird aunt is literally the only one who still answers the phone so lol polls are definitely not real. But let me ask you a ask: What if they are?! Didn’t think of that, did you, fucko!
Now lemme ask you a follow-up ask: What if Nate Silver’s weird gumpy ass posts a poll that says it’s literally mathematically impossible for Biden to lose on account of every Republican in the country spontaneously combusted into a cloud of dust and blew away on a breeze AND YOU FUCKING MISS IT?!?!?! You’ll spend the next 36 hrs panicking about the election when you could’ve just been reclined on your couch eating peanut butter M&M’s with one hand and jacking yourself off in the butthole with the other while reveling in the relief that comes with your broken brain finally reaching stasis because the utterly impossible news that is the exact thing you needed to hear in order to feel at peace has finally arrived!!!
Do you really want to miss that? THEN KEEP CHECKING THE POLLS YOU DUMB BITCH HERE’S THE LINK TO 538 YOU STUPID PIECE OF SHIT FUCK YOU!!!
Truly Get On Your Dumb Bitch Shit and Watch Emily In Paris.
I can’t stress this enough. You see this shit? My goodness, it is fucking terrible! It is the stupidest shit I’ve ever seen and I just wrapped an entire 25-issue series of recaps of Real Housewives of New York. I have never finished a series more broken-brained. In fact I’m not even 100% sure that Emily In Paris isn’t the reason I am currently doing shit like fully dissociating out the picture window after opening the curtains every morning and not coming to until one of these goddamn cats I’m taking care of cries for their fucking breakfast like they haven’t eaten in four years man fuck a cat for real.
JK I love them both so much omg look at them they are perfect.
the girl one on the left who looks real mad cuz she hates her brother’s guts scratched the fuck out of my chest today because I had the unmitigated temerity to clear my throat while she was snuggling isn’t that adorable it bled and everything! Also the boy cat on the right’s shits smell so bad I threw up a little bit in my mouth the other day while cleaning the litter box and had to go spit it into the garbage disposal I love a cat! I love a cat.
Anyway. What? Where am I who is this how did you get this number? Oh right Emily in Paris.
So Emily in Paris is basically like if you took the final-season episodes of Sex and the City that are in Paris and stretched them out but made Carrie even more insufferable and the kind of disgusting asshole who goes abroad and treats the entire shit like her personal theme park and then gets into all kinds of ~*wAcKy HiJinKs*~ when the French refuse to meet her demands that they cook her stupid fucking steak extra well done with anything other than a hearty “MDR va te faire foutre.”
Then, take all that and cross it with Younger except make the story even stupider and less plausible and remove any semblance of a discernible grounding in the actual human condition and then compensate for this by filling it with terrible, forced jokes like the one where Emily orders “preservatif” with her toast and LOLOLOLOLOLOL IN FRENCH THAT MEANS CONDOM AHHHHHHAHAHAHA!!!!! Because that’s totally a thing that would happen since in English we put “preservatives” on our toast right oh the foibles of overseas living we are laughing what mirth!!!
Anyway this show is literally the same show as Younger and I’m not kidding, right down to the fact that the hot guy from Emily in Paris looks like the 25-year-old version of the hot guy in Younger. I mean look at this shit.
He is the Robert Kardashian hologram Kanye bought Kim for her birthday version of that guy in Younger and you will never convince me different I’m not an idiot ok! The point is this show is an absolute piece of shit and I cannot wait to rewatch every episode tomorrow in order to avoid Steve Kornacki’s chaotic ~*touchscreen electoral map energy*~ on MSNBC.
And so can you!!
Listen To the Same Songs Again, and Again, and Again.
I cannot stress this enough. If you follow me on the Instant Gram, you’ll know that in my case, for most of the summer this took the form of incessantly listening to Katharine McPhee’s “Over It.” It is execrable and terrific! I listened to Katharine McPhee’s “Over It” so much that I started not sleeping because it was so embedded in my brain that my brain could find no rest, no solace, no purchase, but to lucid dream every night and soundtrack those dreams with Katharine McPhee’s “Over It.” It was a problem! But then the gay internet mafia uncovered that Katharine McPhee is a fucking Republican and has hosted fundraisers for Trump and now I hope she dies of rectal gonorrhea ~*all alone*~ because David Foster left her for being sick and boring the way he left Yolanda Hadid from Real Housewives of Beverly Hills because she had debilitating Lyme disease. Fuck a Katharine McPhee!
Next I moved on to Madonna’s “Music” because it was recently the 20th anniversary of that song and album and the algorithms found me and were like “Hey you dumb bitch you thought Emily in Paris was your Dumb Bitch Shit well go grab yourself a tall glass of Dumb Bitch Juice because it’s time to obsess over this song again like you did 20 years ago and reach your final Dumb Bitch form.”
I got to that delicious lyric where she’s like “Don’t think of yesterday and I don’t look at the clock/I like to boogie woogie” and suddenly I was back in my college apartment with my best friends Michael and Kelly bumping this CD so loud the doctoral students downstairs were like CAN YOU TURN THE HIP HOP DOWN WE HAVE CHILDREN WHO SLEEP and we were like LOL you fucking square it’s Madonna not hip hop just because it has a hot bassline you think it’s hip hop lolololololol what a maroon go away don’t you have a ThEsIs To DeFeNd or whatever and he’d be like THESES ARE FOR MASTER’S DEGREES I AM A DOCTORAL STUDENT and we’d be like well why don’t you DOCTOR yourself back downstairs and PRESCRIBE yourself some Engelbert HUMPERDINK or whatever it is OLDS listen to because we are TWENTY YEARS OLD and all SEX AND UNEARNED CONFIDENCE and we don’t THINK of yesterday and we do NOT LOOK AT THE CLOCK OKAY??? And then they’d call the cops on us! Those were the days. If those people are reading this I am sorry and thank you for not caulking all our doors and windows closed and filling our apartment with raw sewage while we slept because that is absolutely verbatim what I would have done.
Anyway, the point is, I guess that lyric is kind of bad but when it’s so syncopated to hell it’s almost in iambic pentameter and underlaid with a Zapp-style disco-funk guitar riff it is, like, intoxicating??? You’re like “Hey wow if this election goes sideways we are literally going directly to camps hahaha I don’t give a fuck this rhythm slaps DON’T THINK ABOUT THE CAMPS AND I DON’T LOOK AT THE POLLS I LIKE TO BOOOGAY WOOOGAYYYYY!!!” I’d just scrub to that lyric and sit on the couch or a park bench or the toilet for my 15th stress shit of the day and go into a fugue state and sometimes cry!!! I haven’t had a moment’s peace since!
Other songs I did this with include, but are not limited to:
That one Dua Lipa song that sounds like that one INXS song!
“Sweet Love” by Anita Baker!
That one Richard Marx song where it’s like he may or may not have but definitely did murder his girlfriend and threw her in a river?!?!?!
“Knew You Were Waiting” by Aretha Franklin and George Michael!
This song called “Venus” by this soft sensitive French boy named Peter who is like if John Mayer went electro and had heavy gay vibes and was also not a douchebag. I listened to this song approximately 436 times per day for weeks during which time I would fantasize about moving to Paris and sucking Peter off in the bathroom at Le Depot and then we’d fall super in love and I’d get EU citizenship and a long-awaited substitute for my parents’ withheld love and like my French isn’t great but neither is his English and it doesn’t even matter because who needs LANGUAGE when you’re in LOVE with the one you were MADE FOR you know and then I read an interview with him in French Elle and he’s fucking straight.
Anyway this is all far more effective than doing what your therapist says and going on anxiety medication or learning to meditate. Fuck that bitch she’s fired! *hits play on Atlantic Starr’s “For Always” for the 973rd time*
Eat Absolutely Fucking Everything You Can Get Your Hands On and Then When You’re Done With That Eat Some More and Then When You’re Done Eat Still More Until You’re Like OMG I Need To Barf Because Then You Will Go Into a Carb Coma and Dissociate!!!
I cannot stress this enough. For example: I have not actually slept in days because I have carb-coma dissociated so much I am now superhuman and don’t need sleep! I mean it’s also because I have eaten an entire large pizza for dinner every night, and who can sleep with that much dough in their belly? Not this guy with two thumbs in the early stages of cardiac arrest with a creeping dread that diabetes is settling into the nooks and crannies surely bored through his pancreas from decades of emotional eating!!! Pretty hard to catch some z’s when you’re so distended of abdomen you can’t even sleep on your side! And this is the lifehack!
Because while any doctor will of course tell you that a lack of sleep will cause even more stress, they are a bunch of scheming George Soros-paid Democrat crooks leading us astray with more lies because GUESS WHAT: If you can’t sleep due to if you lay flat you will definitely vomit up the 17 boxes of Velveeta Shells and Cheese you ate while watching Maddow and softly weeping into the old sock you wedged between the couch cushions after using it as a jizzrag, YOU CAN’T HAVE ANY NIGHTMARES ABOUT TRUMP’S AMERICA AND THE EVER DEEPENING RAVAGES OF PESTILENCE!!!
How’s THAT for medical advice “doctor”! PLUS! When you don’t sleep you get that ~*burst of sleep-deprivation mania*~ where you finally clean the kitchen for the first time in eight years and suddenly find straight male comedians who aren’t John Mulaney funny! Who doesn’t love that?!
But sleep deprivation isn’t even the only upshot of gorging yourself with an array of emotionally sustaining but nutritionally bankrupt foodstuffs. It also ensures that you continue to suffer from an array of ailments such as acid reflux, indigestion, and weird poop stuff, and the agony of those conditions lets you know that you are alive and real and shining in this singular moment. Wow!
These are the tips and tricks that have worked for me, and I bet they’ll work for you too. But you must make this process your own! Nobody knows how to take care of you, but you. So get creative! And soon, before you know it, this will all be behind us, because we have had a psychotic break and no longer exist in ~*this reality*~, or because we have packed a backpack and hiked over the unpatrolled part of the Canadian border we found on Google Earth, or because we are all dead. We are all masters of our own destiny, so always keep hope alive and keep moving forward!
See you in the camps!
Your Gay Uncle John
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Okay this is probably far enough to not ruin the ending of the joke. So okay! A PS. This is all in good fun and whatever but I refuse to indulge in hopelessness (for my own sanity as much as yours) and so what I actually want to leave you with is this: Biden is probably going to win tomorrow. Maybe not (and I won’t be surprised if not, but that’s me!) but probably!
But the sad truth is, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to take office, and the next few months are likely to be shocking in ways a lot of us aren’t prepared for. And even if he does take office, there’s still so much work to be done, so many genies that can’t be put back in their bottles. It’s a lot! And it’s okay to be scared! But I want you to remember a couple things that help me get through all this.
We are more powerful than they are because there’s more of us. It may take 6 months or a year or five or 20 for that to matter, but we are the majority. Plus, nothing lasts forever, and this won’t either. Not a single fascist regime has lasted. They all implode eventually. This one will too. Remember that. And if tomorrow does go pear-shaped, or the next few months get dark, cry. Scream. Break shit. Crumble. Then get up and keep going.
Because here’s what: Those of us who are terrified are terrified because we’ve been through shit that has given us lived knowledge of just how much damage this regime can do. Right? We’ve got context here. We’re women who’ve had to seek reproductive healthcare. We’re people who’ve nearly died for lack of access to basic medical services. We’re same-sex couples scared our marriages will be invalidated and our adopted kids taken from us, because we know how these people operate. We’re people of color who’ve been subjected to a million different kinds of inhuman bigotry and violence. We’re trans people who feel like we’re being hunted. We’re religious minorities who see the abuse we’ve been subjected to written into law. We’re scared because we know--viscerally, personally, experientially--what’s at stake. And that means (and this is trite as fuck, but what else have we got right now?) that we’ve survived stuff. Which means we’re stronger than most other people. Orders of magnitude stronger. And eventually, we will win.
Unless climate change kills us all first, that is. There’s not really any way around that, so!
But seriously, hang in there. Breathe. We will get through this. Eventually. Even if it takes a revolution. Now go be great*!
*hide under a blanket until it’s all over