American Madness Journal

  Friends, knowing what’s in store for you in the paragraphs to come….well, I hope you like white grievance, cuz you’re getting a heapin’ helpin’ of it tonight. The lunch lady is dispensing softboi whinging with an industrial-grade scoop this week. Plop. Plop....

  If anybody asks you what life in the United States was like in 2022, well, the big thing was Donald Trump trying to drive as many people as possible violently insane, because he figured the threat of further terrorism was his best shot at avoiding prosecution....

  Y’know, I think it’s perfect, actually, that we’re watching our stupid, stupid history unfold in fast food chain parking lots. We earned this. We cut zero corners constructing this madhouse. Holy shit, this country is sick in some genuinely strange ways. My...

  I hope the leather-bound, multi-volume tomes on the Rise and Fall of Whatever the Fuck We Wind Up Calling This Madness are able to capture just how goddamn irritating it was to live through. Like, when you open the book, maybe a speaker in the spine emits a...

  Y’know, if this does all fall apart, at least future generations will be able to easily distinguish between the first American Civil War and the Dumb one. Silver linings. Okay, we better get the documents thing out of the way first, because it’s all so stupid,...

  How does it keep getting dumber and dumber every single week? Mathematically speaking, it shouldn’t be possible to get too terrifically much dumber than bragging about passing a cognitive test, or telling folks to inject disinfectant, but damned if we don’t...

  So, I’ve never been a big slasher movie guy, are there ones where the Attractive Vacationing Youths find themselves locked up with, like, hordes of heavily-armed morons? Gibbering idiots, incapable of so much as processing objective reality, yet still imbued...

  Well, the news continues its lascivious, herky-jerky dance ‘twixt the slapstick and psychological horror genres. You’re trying to enjoy the simple purity of laughing at some masturbatory wingnut performance art, when WHOOPSIE, one of ‘em did a terrorism again!...

  Folks, I gotta tell ya, I had a little trouble with this week’s blog. Just couldn’t get into the right headspace for some reason. Sure, there was the usual litany of abject madness to document, but there was something else, too. I think it was maybe…hope?...

  American politics is like some sort of warped nature show, about animals behaving in impossibly self-destructive ways that upset everything we believe about evolutionary survival instincts. You can almost hear the gobsmacked British narrator, wondering why on...

  I’ve just learned we live not only in an era of rampant disinformation and ascendant fascism, but also, it would appear, to my chagrin and horror…the age of the Velveeta martini, and perhaps it’s time to pull the plug on the American experiment after all. I...

  If you’ve ever read this blog before, you know the opening paragraph is always some needlessly verbose variation on “can you fucking believe how fucking crazy this shit is,” and I have never once needed to deviate from that format, because seriously, can you...

  Keeping up on current events, one winds up banging one’s head on one’s desk with some regularity, so I can’t be certain I’m not hallucinating most of this…that’d be preferable, honestly. I would like to request hallucinations of a more enjoyable nature,...

  Every day is a thrilling new adventure, here in th’Land of the Free slash th’Home of the Brave; you tuck yourself in at night, never knowing which of your rights the power-drunk, illegitimate SCOTUS majority will take from you next. When you wake up, you don’t...

  So, I was feeling kinda judgy about the latest cynical serving of Jurassic Product, you know, “you honestly expect me to believe they’d keep making dinosaurs after five movies’ worth of T-rex rampages” kind of stuff, but then I gave a moment’s passing thought...

  Are we absolutely certain it was heat that killed all those cows in Kansas? Did anybody check to see if any of them had, like, a Twitter account? Cellphone with a couple news apps? Because it’s been a lot lately, y’know? Just…a lot. Well, the second week of the...

  I know I can’t be the only one out there who keeps the Hamilton cast recording on in the car, just as I’m surely not the only one who shouts “oh go fuck yourself” every time they get to the part that goes “look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right...

  Scanning through the week’s insanity, I’m overwhelmed with unanswerable questions. Why do we live like this? Does it truly have to be this way? And wait, does this mean John Hinckley’s room is available? Because I could use the peace and quiet. Can you believe...

  So, Republicans’ meticulously maintained system of intentionally insane gun laws once again extracted its toll. And since they remain ideologically opposed to (checks notes) protecting children from gun violence, we may as well start the countdown to the next...

  Keeping up with the news these days makes me feel like someone is using my skull for a vomitorium, at a party where somebody’s gross cousin brought really bad acid. Well, there’s no way that image didn’t whet your appetite, so I’ll take the liberty of assuming...

Well, my efforts to escape into an alternate reality where James Comey kept his ego in check have yet to bear fruit, so I suppose I may as well chronicle the insanity in this one. Where I’m trapped. With the dumbest, craziest, shittiest motherfuckers in human history....

  I hope your Halloween was as adorable as mine. All the neighborhood children dressed up as the House Republican Conference and played a musical chairs variant called “leadership election,” where the kid left standing became the “speaker-designate” and got...

  Apparently, there’s a manifestly unwell man in an ill-fitting suit wandering into and periodically storming out of New York City courtrooms, shitting himself and screeching threats at judges and prosecutors, who, I am told, is the frontrunner for the Republican...

Wait, step on another couple rakes before you go, Jim!