American Madness Journal

  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...

  Wooooooo…rough one this week, even by the weary, battered standards of the year two thousand twenty-two. Well, grab yourself a beer, or a whiskey, or a great big slice of cake, or, I dunno, your favorite tentacle porn video, whatever gets you goin’, and let’s...

  I feel like there are two kinds of news stories these days: those demonstrating the catastrophic consequences of empowering the rageful nationalism sweeping through the global Right, and the ones about America’s Republican Party looking upon those consequences...

  When Kickstarter backer Fran Scianna asked me to review his band’s song, my initial thought was that I have absolutely no qualifications to review music. Then I remembered I have absolutely no qualifications to talk about politics, either, so I figured I’d...

  “There’s no shortage of assholes,” my dad used to say, as a sort of catch-all explanation for the seemingly endless supply of irksome weirdos one collides with over the course of one’s life. And I think that holds up. There are certainly no kinks in the asshole...

  In many ways, the universe has been telling humanity the same story, over and over again, for at least half a decade now, and the moral of that story is that Nationalists Cannot Do One Fucking Thing Right, on account of the debilitating inefficiencies of their...

  A week without malignantly insane, world-wrecking assholes…that’s all I want. One little week. Wouldn’t that be nice? To just once click over to Ye Olde Shower Cappe Blog, braced for the expected litany of horrors, only to encounter a brief, “Well whaddya know,...

  If anybody had this week in the office pool as the one when the world’s many asshats would finally stop fucking more or less everything up, and let the rest of us just LIVE OUR FUCKING LIVES IN PEACE, you lost your fucking money, didn’tcha? Well, feel free to...

  Y’know, I’ve been writing these posts for five fucking years now. I’m just…I’m really, REALLY ready to live anywhere other than here, at this hellishly inescapable intersection of idiocy and indecency. Someplace with better restaurants and fewer violently angry...

  I feel like “don’t put assholes in charge” is probably the single clearest lesson of human history, and yet here we are again, dealing with the inevitable, catastrophic consequences of Putting Assholes in Charge. At the risk of upending an already contentious...

  “Concise” isn’t really the house style here, but if I had to boil this blog down to something like a mission statement, it might go, “the authoritarian Right, because of their bottomless stupidity and nigh-incomprehensible malice, should not be in charge,”and I...

  See, this is why you don’t let narcissistic assholes run counties. Because countries come with armies. We should have known, I suppose, that even war would find a way to be dumber in this age of fuckheads run amuck, but my God, it’s soul-crushing, how stupid...

  Y’know, my greatest hope is that the need for this blog will fade with time, that the madness dies down, and the billions of humans who just want to get through this damn life with minimal bullshit will no longer be subject to the insane whims of the shittiest...

  If you’re just tuning in, and O how I envy your blissful ignorance if you are, a substantial chunk of the American electorate has gone quite insane, and seems determined to stay that way. They simply will not be enticed from the madhouse, though it is filling...

  Fellow frogs, I know it’s nice n’ cozy here in the boiling water, but do you ever hop out of the pot for a minute, just to take it all in? It happened gradually, day by day, but our status quo got all sorts of fucked up, didn’t it? 31 different flavors of...

  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...