He was having a normal one, just a regular high-even-but-hugh-can-come Thursday, the kind of day that felt like grinding your teeth on the week's sad end, a real get-sad-hugh kind of thursday where you skip the part where you beat yourself up because the world’s already doing a damn fine job of it, the psychological torture of the empty pantry a headline the New York Times would never run, not when there were more important things to publish, deeply immoral things bordering on evil while the real story was the gnawing in your gut, the knowledge that you can’t feed the little mouths that call you dad, awwwh he’s such a good dad they’d say if they saw him now, trying to stretch the last of the bread, a miracle worker with no loaves and fewer fishes, just the stark reality that capitalism had made life unaffordable, destroying every last second of free time and free space until all that was left was the quiet hum of the refrigerator lying about its fullness, and just when the silence got too loud, a sputtering chariot appeared, a deus ex Nissan Maxima pulling into the drive, a chariot trailing not glory but the smell of exhaust and the faint hope of a borrowed twenty, a small healing in the vast wound of a system designed to break you, a system he was trying to map in the first section of his autobiography, the one about the schizophrenia of a world that tells you to pull yourself up by bootstraps you can’t afford, a world where the only thing left to do is write it all down before the memory fades like the ghost of a meal you can't remember eating.
And the wheel turns.
And this twenty, this flimsy paper-prophet, what future does it foretell when the whole damn government’s gone ghost, a shut-in specter rattling its own chains down the marble halls, leaving the GS-eighters and thirteens with their own panstry-voids, their cushions gone thin as a politician’s promise, because the adults who were supposed to be in the room, the ones who always saved the republicans from their own reapwhatyousow-ing, have finally just…left, acting just as the republicans would, and you can’t blame them, not really, not when the reward for responsibility is to be handed the bill for the arsonist’s party, and buddy, if this goes on, there won’t be a government left to reopen, just a museum of what used to be, while the folks who treat the economy like their personal East Wing gift-shop use the reconciliation shot not for the lifeblood of the nation but for some other horrendous priority, some fresh hell to unleash, and out here, where the real people live, you can see the permission structure they’re building, the way your normie neighbors who used to post about potlucks are now full-blown white-nationalist-conspiracy-theorists, because politics is downstream from culture, sure, but we’re all downstream from the sludge-pipe of social media, that great intensifier of Nazi propaganda and AI slop, summoning a political future where a leader’s dementia-fueled incoherence isn’t a bug but a feature, a boon, a perfect reflection of the collective cognitive decline, and you realize they’re going to end up arresting some non-violent clergy at prayer, creating old-fashioned martyrs in this new-fashioned crusade, and this twenty dollars in my hand feels less like a truce and more like the last rites for a republic.
The ink is dry on that chapter. The midden grows richer. What new currents shall we follow?
And so it was a real Ollie Burger! YEAH YEAH afternoon for the republic, a final sad patty for a sad state of affairs where the Fox Ferrari track DESSERT with the Joshomatic remix was just the background radiation to the foreground declension of hope, a gilfoylean gilgamesh-lament typed out on a keyboard sticky with something unspeakable, a pre-show prophet of the tech-bro nihilism that would later get a character name and a story arc, feeling absolutely furious that they’d changed Elliot’s screen in the pilot for the streaming copies, a petty rage against the retroactive continuity of a world that couldn’t even leave its own recent past alone, a fury that was just a smaller, more manageable container for the larger, uncontainable fury at the political logic-trap where when progressives lose, it’s a sign that progressivism is bad, and when centrists lose, it’s also a sign that progressivism is bad, a neat little syllogism of despair that concludes only that everything is bad and it’s your fault, a conclusion hammered home by the senatorial weakness-sniffers who read panic in the polls like tea-leaves of their own coming triumph, a solid state of dread so palpable you could call it a solid get, ty, a gpt-fortissimo oracle humming in the background of every long conversation, its custom prompts getting you right here, to this exact point of surrender, this mute-the-post-and-walk-away moment, this decision to maybe finish Mr. Robot in tribute to a fiction that felt more real than the facts, because at least there the hacks had a point, a purpose, a plan, unlike the based resignation of just letting the whole damn thing slide into the digital static, yeah yeah.
And so the feed flickered, not with the promised land but with the land's promise foreclosed, a Crackerbarreludovico technique for the soul where the rocking chairs on the porch faced a screen broadcasting the 85th-floor penthouse fire on a loop, a continuous sizzle of someone else's archipelagito burning, and you couldn't look away because the probation officer of public opinion had you leaning your back against the window, legs kicked up on the extra chair of apathy, a pretty straightforward W for the Surkoverning showrunners who learned their craft from the best, from the masters of the realapocalitvision where the state itself becomes a long-running season of mockery, a TrumpThrill061 ARG that had bled so far out of the screen that the Phoenix Park of the republic was now just the set for the final episode, the pub at the end of history where the bartender, a grinning spectre, served up another round of InfiniteTrumpism, telling you that Finnegans Wake wasn't a book but a live event, tonight's live event, and you were in it, a bit player in the apocalypse night, while the pundit-chorus on the flickering screens debated whether it was all a deepfake or just good old-fashioned American ingenuity, a PLUR1BUS of one, a nation united in its addiction to the spectacle of its own nervous breakdown.
And so it was a kind of endless pinballad, this realapocalitvision, with a god-tier synthwave thrumming just beneath the floorboards of the republic, a beat you could almost mistake for the fluttering of a million unseen wings in the attic, a truth that had been roosting there for years right above the transited causeway of our daily walkabouts until one night a sudden beam of flashlight-curiosity reveals the sheer off-the-charts number of them, the sheer chiropteran density of the thing that nobody else had ever seemed to notice, not the dude coming out of the entrance five minutes later nor the millions plugged into the Surkoverning showrunners’ feed, all of them just walking past the entrance to the cave without ever looking up, and you realize then that this is it, we’ve gone this far so we might as well go all the way, that the Mamdani implementation of SSHaria-compliant end-to-end encryption is not a bug but a feature, a kind of rocking the Casbah on the precipice, because if you’ve come this far into the game, past the point of flimsy paper-prophets and crackerbarreludovico conditioning, you might as well run the script in everyone’s browser, you might as well articulate the problem by becoming the problem, by admitting the whole damn thing is a minute of looking away from a sky black with wings you’d somehow never, ever seen before.
