Global collapse, but I knew all the words

 
 
The world is melting and I’m aging at a constant rate. There’s a new scientific theory here, if only I could figure out what it means…
 

• For me? One of the great things about getting older is that, suddenly, every birthday party is a surprise party.
• So good, so good. I took a cruise a few weeks ago, and it was an adults-only voyage, which sounds a lot more risqué than it turned out to be. One highlight was all the cheesy stage shows with singers who would be equally at home if we were all in a retirement village. Whatever song they chose, I knew all the lyrics from the days when I was young enough to understand the words.
• You make what? I really owe Sleep Number Beds an apology. At first, I mocked their corporate identity as pathetically bland and totally lacking in imagination. But now that every company is coming up with comic-book names like Boomface and Shasaflix, their branding looks much smarter. Unlike Boomface and Shasaflix, nobody has to wonder what they sell over at the Sleep Number Bed store. 
• Butt exposure. Forget The Rock, Seal Team Six, and all those keyboard warriors who threaten the rest of us from mom’s basement. The toughest guys in today’s world are cigarette smokers, end of story. I’m out on the street in fifty layers of flannel and there they are, maybe in a light jacket or a long-sleeved shirt, braving the cold outside the restaurant or bar or office, taking a puff and enjoying the brisk air. No coat, no gloves, no hat, just them against the elements, and they keep going until the last puff. These are America’s true heroes, underappreciated by the ignorant and respected to the extreme by the bravest among the brave.
• Turn left!! As winter settles in, I hate my grandparents more and more. There they were in Poland, where it gets really cold, and they had the choice of where to put down stakes in the States. Did they opt for warmer weather and move to Florida, or Arizona, or one of our many Carolinas? Nope, they decided to plop down in Chicago, where the weather was just like Sokolow Podlaski and the heating bills were even higher. What were they thinking???
• Befriend me. I absolutely need more Facebook friends. I was an early adopter and sent out the usual friend requests to everyone I knew 15 years ago, but then the suggested contacts were more and more distant and it started to feel creepy to reach out to some woman I last saw in third grade. Fast forward, though, and my entire feed consists of clickbait for online gaming sites, cheesecake pictures of long-dead femmes fatales, and ads for walk-in tubs. Maybe I need to click on every friend Facebook suggests, whether I have any idea who they are or not. What could possibly go wrong?
• No, you didn’t. Everyone says hindsight is 20/20, but everyone is an idiot. Does anyone actually know what happened with the 2024 elections, with Covid, with Mrs. Carter’s snub at the CMAs? In the immortal words of Rudy Giuliani, we’ve got lots of theories, but we just don’t have the evidence. We’re supposed to use our perfect hindsight to avoid the mistakes of the past, but we can’t even agree on what happened. Another aphorism bites the dust.
• Eternal entropy. Every day, I read that the world is falling apart, but we never quite get there, as if we’re in some form of catastrophic stasis. We’re collapsing at some stable rate that is always lethal and never quite bad enough for us to give up on Wordle. It reminds me of the guy who falls out of a window and, as he passes the fifth floor, concludes, “so far, so good.”

Stay tuned, and click here to subscribe, because next week is our 2025 Year in Review, and you won’t want to miss all the crap you’ll wish you’d missed when next December rolls around.

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