Normally this would be a paid-only newsletter but I like it and so am sending it to everyone. Happy off-schedule newslettermas, all. Subscription button is below if you are so inclined but you can also just email me and I will put you on the list for free, itâs 100% fine.
I am not super engaged with Tiktok except when it bleeds over to Twitter, because it makes me feel old and it feels unhealthy to spend more time than necessary mad at 15-year-olds with moderately dipshit political opinions. But I do have an account and do check in every few weeks, because it is also the social network with the best stupid comedy sketches and I love stupid comedy sketches.
One of the folks I follow on there is this dude, who goes by @thelaserboi, lives somewhere in Alabama, and isâas I discovered after trying to find some proof of age in his videos so I could figure out whether I was violating some sort of Lawsâmy age. I got baked and went through most of his videos at some point and some of the immediately pre-Covid ones do show him doing something with lasers, so I assume his username is in fact descriptive of whatever his deal is. Some sort of engineer?
Anyway, I follow the dude both because heâs very funny (he did the âcome and take my gunsâ video that descends into weird gun erotica) and because he looks like what would happen if you trained an AI model on a data set of every boy I had a crush on through about age 20 and told it to make a fake person.
(My type is, apparently, âgod I hope heâs not a Libertarian.â)
So I was scrolling through Tiktok this morning and this video of his from a week ago came up. In it he makes a joke about how his job and life have been completely fucked by the governmentâs inaction during the pandemic, and how heâs now being evicted. He ends it with âcan I get a âwhoop whoopââ from everyone else whoâs been similarly fucked over and collapses onto his bed, whichâbased on the beige carpet in the backgroundâis in an apartment identical to basically every single one I and my friends ever lived in in Atlanta.
Someone in the comments asks if he can post his Venmo so folks can help out; the creator responds to say that thank you but heâs doing okay, he had family to crash with. The rest of the comments are, for the most part, âwhoop whoop.â Because, well, you heard the dude. Whoop whoop if youâve been fucked over.
It is truly wild to see human suffering bleeding into every single facet of any online platform where people can submit their own content, even on places that are comedy-focused, because the suffering has so totally saturated the entire population. Watching elected officials so completely fail to do even the barest fucking minimum at every turn is at this point genuinely unsettling on top of how enraging itâs been the whole time. We live in a broken gerontocracy that fails to fulfill even its most bar-on-the-floor obligations to citizens.
I want to end this with a âwhoop whoopâ because Iâm lazy and itâs an easy button, but of course the pandemic has managed to actually increase my net worth because I was lucky enough to stay employed and much of my money is tied up in the stock market, which is doing bonkers well, because all of this is fake. This year has been high-key the second worst of my life (first place still goes to the year I spent working full time/finishing college/crying in parking garages while I watched my mom die but you know honestly just barely) and I am still the best-case scenario!
I am so tired of living through the thing that I am very aware will fuck me up in some as-yet-unknown way for the rest of my life. I am tired of having to try to sort out which fucked-up global disaster is going to be the one that ends it all rather than the marginally more cheerful question of if one will. I am so tired of having to hope that my home state manages to overcome decades of voter disenfranchisement to allow our government to function because some dipshit dead slaveowners thought we needed an upper house and didnât think to add an age ceiling on that shit.
Anyway. Itâs nearly Christmas. I canât in good faith give a whoop whoop but I can give a long sigh and another voicemail to Mitch OâFarrell telling him I hope he gets primaried so badly he cries. Happy holidays.