A Traditional Christmas Rant

    I’ve got a short one for you this week and it comes with a disclaimer: if you are easily offended by intimations of wrongdoing by the folks in charge, foul language, hyperbolic but/and completely accurate reportage about the state of the system, I suggest you set the device you’re reading this on ablaze and duct-tape a pair of horny scorpions to your eyeballs and think about your life choices.

Like this guy

    Here’s a great example of why I would love it if the bloated and rotting corpse of our long-dead and parasite riddled empire would implode under the weight of its own corruption and decay: the Washington state unemployment system. During the first round of p(l)andemic bullshit, the system was overloaded with new claims and it was an appalling bureaucratic wet-dream; filled with rape-clowns, Dutch angle camera work, rusty filing cabinets, miles of red-tape bondage ropes, and dim, flickering, fluorescent lighting, to click through the questionnaire before the session timed out and you were forced to start again while, at unemployment headquarters, the bureaucrats swimming in self-hate and atavistic ecstasy at the suffering of the people all finished at once and ritually drowned an out of work electrician in their acid bukkake rain. We were told that hundreds of millions of dollars were paid out to Nigerian hackers who defrauded the state. And now during the second shut down 7 months later the head of the unemployment department is under investigation for embezzling funds (sorry Nigeria looks like it was actually a terrible white lady who stole millions from her constituents and not your infamous hackers). And now, somehow, with seven months to upgrade, the website is even worse than before, adding splintery wooden buttplugs and Carolina reaper lubricant to the nightmare. To successfully fill out and submit a claim I had to pray to every spirit of mercury, to Ganesh and Garuda, Dakshinamurthy, and Durga and the Ashwini twins and stay up until two am on a fucking Wednesday to get it through. (Praise be to the Divine Creator, Archangel Raphael, Hermes, Mercury, all the other spirits who helped—Mercurial and otherwise, Ganesh, Garuda, Dakshinamurthy, Durga, and the Ashwini twins, as well as saints Cyprian, Justina, and John the Baptist)

This is Lord Garuda

    This amazing example of spirit teams in action and the horror of government in general seems to be a solid juxtaposition for 2020 as a whole: the entire previously stable material world shat the bed spectacularly for a lot of folks, with systems that felt solid and safe (like food and toilet paper supply chains and social welfare systems) crumbling as if they were made of tissue paper (that precious commodity) and held together with the dried semen left over from the drowning of sacrificial electricians, while the intangible took to the forefront and offered support and comfort. Of course the non-physical has, from the beginning of this flaming pile of covid fatalities of a year (still very low numbers in Washington with a 98% survival rate so the pile isn’t all that big) been harnessed as a weapon by those in power both politically and socially with fear and paranoia and social distancing and mask-shaming. It’s interesting that a country so opposed to the communism of the USSR reached immediately for the same fucking tactics of fear and self policing that they demonized as a justification their cold war but I suppose McCarthy, that fuck, did the same thing in the 50’s so it should come as no real surprise.

    The good news is this: the people in charge of weaponizing the non-physical seem to have a very limited idea of what is possible and luckily for us, the folks in charge of telling us what to do seem to, as a prerequisite for being in power, have had the part of the brain responsible for imagination surgically removed with a sharp blow to the head from a rusty hammer. Which leaves the field wide open for us to build a better 2021. So, as N’Sync so brilliantly put it in their criminally-underrated song: Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays.

Joey Fatone is the only one who saw 2020 coming

    It saddens me to write this but with “cancel-culture” as popular as it is right now and with this blog obviously being popular enough to warrant canceling due to any one of the sentences above I feel this disclaimer has become necessary: (Sometimes) I, the writer, do not truly believe that the (lizard)people employed by the Washington state unemployment bureau actually sacrifice noble, out of work, electricians to their Lovecraftian Elder Gods by drowning them in their super-acidic reptilian jizz. Nor am I writing this to make light of the people that have died of COVID this year like that guy who was stabbed to death and then listed as a COVID fatality or the people with 5 co-morbidities like obesity, full blown AIDS, liver failure,  drug overdose, gunshot wounds, etc, that died solely because of COVID. I simply enjoy using colorful language and hyperbole to really drive my points home. Think Hunter S Thompson writing in Rolling Stone that one of the candidates during the ’72 presidential race was addicted to ibogaine or any televised news outlet covering anything and you'll have a rough approximation of the liberties I've taken.