2020 just couldn’t let us leave it behind without one last fuck you. One last slashing of the tires, brick through the window, flaming pile of dogshit in the passenger seat, a small man reported missing then left bound and gagged in the trunk while it trained a bird to shit on the bridge of your nose, and called your mother and told her that you actually missed thanksgiving to get high with your friends. 2020 ruined the times square ball drop with the fierceness and panache of a lion in platform high heels winning RuPauls drag race by eating half the contestants with its dick tucked.

    I’ve never really cared about the NYC NYE nonsense. My early new years eves were spent with my family trying to stay awake while watching the disney channel’s NYE programming and, after I had discovered the blessed anesthesia of drugs, my adolescent and adult New Year’s plans usually consisted of experimenting with said anesthetics. The juxtaposition of wholesome Disney childhood and train spotting adulthood is a solid representation of my life as a whole: my two favorite movies being The Princess Bride and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I was told once that being able to hold two diametrically opposed thoughts in one’s head at the same time was an indication of intelligence or he might have said it was an indication of a chemical imbalance. Who remembers?

    Moving on. If any of you missed the absolute Hindenburg that was NYE 2021 live coverage do yourself a favor and click this link and come back.
    Now that you’re back or, having already seen the most depressing thing ever because you watched it live, are in the process of setting your hair on fire to cleanse your brain of the nightmares it has induced, let me point out something that struck me as horrifying beyond all reason. There are more wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube-men celebrating in times square than there are living human beings. When our plastic alien overlords watch whatever footage of this night that survives the great, wiggly uprising they will mark NYE 2021 as the moment that the wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube-men began their takeover of the USA. Herding the humans into pens and making them wear large madhatter-esque top hats emblazoned with Planet Fitness logos to brand them the property of their capering captors, as the wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube-men danced, flailed, and jeered from the sidewalk creating an hilariously impenetrable border.

    The few people there were in that human zoo were forced to smile and dance to sad harmonica music and old standards as the cameras panned between a grand total of 25 people over the course of the 5 hours of live coverage from Time Square. Shunning the typical Jock-Jams associated with New Years Eve in fear of provoking their inflatable captors, the music played that night seemed to vacillate between psych-ward-sleepy-time music and a suicidally depressed robot learning to play the harmonica. When the ball dropped, the plastic poo-bahs amped things up by playing the classic Sinatra jam, New York New York, followed by Somewhere over the Rainbow by Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwoʻole.
    The prisoners in their little pens were constantly sprayed with experimental hallucinogens and anti depressants and military grade amphetamines from the wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube-gaurds to keep them placid, smiling, and dancing for the cameras. Which, again, had only 25 people to cut to.
    Thanks and praise be to our plastic Planet Fitness overlords and their wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-enforcers. All hail the Boneless Old Gods of Planet Fitness!
  
    Best. New Years. Ever.

    Got a quick one for you this week so push in and don’t be shy you delightfully desecrated, semi-sentient, Christmas puddings while I reveal to you the genius that is… Blub Week.
    But first, some history; Blub Week, as it is formally recognized today, began as a way to combat the anxiety, pain, anguish, and pre-pubescent, radioactive, roaming scooter gangs of toilet paper pirates that swept through the western world this year. It began, in June I believe, out of sheer exhaustion, having woke up one morning more drained and lethargic than when I had retired the previous night due to the immense and terrible vibes this year shat into its greasy hand and smeared all over everyone's face. On this fateful morning, I shambled from my bed and flopped down next to my equally exhausted, much better looking, wife upon the couch and declared, “I need a Blub Day”, not knowing that Urban Dictionary was well ahead of the game by defining “Blub” as “cute, chubby, or lethargic”.
    Throughout the unmitigated diaper-fire that has been 2020, the Blub Day has become a staple of self-care in our household and, being that I am still here clacking on this keyboard and not hanging from a slowly spinning ceiling fan with a needle in my arm, a dick in my hand, and my pants around my ankles , I believe it has been a total success.

    So what is Blub Week? The best analogy I can come up with is the week in between Christmas and New Years when I was still in primary school. No school, no schedule, no pressure, just playing with gifts, watching holiday movies, relaxing, and eating leftovers, decompressing from the crushing anxiety of the horrendous, blood orgy that is public school. Blub Week is a week to let go of the stress and bullshit of the year while making room for better things to come. So far it’s been amazing; we’ve ordered in a bunch of great food, hung out with wonderful weirdos, we’ve watched all our favorite Christmas movies at least twice, we’ve played with most of our new toys, we’ve done magic journeys and read tarot cards, and we have made time to heal from the actual trauma of this year and prioritized our wellbeing by rescheduling commitments.
    So this year, as a gift to all you beautiful freaks who successfully made it through the weirdest year on record, I offer you Blub Week, the best end of year tradition since human sacrifice went out of style. Take some time to take care of yourselves because the world needs your weird now more than ever.   

Spider Jerusalem is a close personal friend, and hero of mine

    I love Christmas. There. I said it. I fucking love Christmas. I am a Christmas unicorn. I’m not exactly sure why people automatically assume that a weirdo magical star-man with a penchant for virulently contagious vitriolic rants and SARS-potent spite for things that are outdated and oppressive, or offend his delicate sensibilities, can’t also be full of virulently contagious Christmas cheer. Well here’s hoping that you are either fully innoculated against my choleric Christmas contagion or, like me, are already suffering from crippling sugarplum syphilis because Daddy Chrimbo has come early and he’s delivered the traditional gifts of dried Amanita muscaria mushrooms, reindeer piss, and a Christmas rant about Christmas. So gather round because Santa Claus wants some lovin’.
    Usually, to celebrate the rebirth of the sun and the birth of sweet baby J, and to kindle the spirit of the season and remind folks that they have an actual spark of divine light and stardust inside them I find a reindeer, feed it powerful psychedelic mushrooms and follow it around with a jar until it begins cavorting like it’s off its face on drugs and collect the piss it sprays everywhere once it looses control of its bladder. Upon completion of this harrowing task, for it is no laughing matter to be kicked in the head by a reindeer while trying to get high, I steal swiftly out of the petting zoo and get to work.
    Firstly, I don my traditional Christmas garb by slathering my body in a bucket of goose fat. Then comes a drinking game I call “visit the local mall whilst wearing nothing but said goose fat and some giblets and have a large swig of reindeer piss every time you successfully slip through the greasy fingers of your would-be captors”. After a quick stop at home to reapply the traditional and protective Christmas grease it’s time to get to work.
    Sliding down peoples chimneys while naked and out of my tiny mind on hallucinogenic reindeer wee can be challenging at the best of times, but it’s worth it. I’m not really bothered by Santa’s whole not-being-seen rule whilst delivering joy to the world. I hope to startle people awake from their drunken Christmas dreams after sliding swift and smooth and nude down their chimneys and crashing into their, hopefully, cold fires in a mangled and giggling soot-covered tangle of contorted, gangly limbs. Unfolding six and a half feet of naked, greasy, skeletal drug-fiend amidst a roiling cloud of chimney soot and floating embers is enough to fill even the grinchiest of home owners with enough Christmas spirit to send them reeling backwards into spasms of terrible delight and Yuletide catatonia.
    While the occupants of the house are still stunned and comatose with Christmas cheer, I quickly drop off gifts of dried mushrooms, loose change, and haribo gummies, and fill all the mugs in the house with my powerfully potent psychedelic piss. Then, borrowing a move from Kurt Russel (the best film star, and Santa who ever lived), I place my index finger against the side of my nose and, in a swirl of smoke and sparks, burst into coal-dust and fly back up the chimney, with care, to continue Kringle-ing the city until dawn.

These nightly excursions go on for weeks. From the day after Thanksgiving until Christmas day and sometimes even up until Easter, depending on the ambient levels of Christmas spirit and my supplies of goose fat and reindeer wee.

    And that, you wassailing weirdos , is what Christmas means to me.

    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.

    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.