I won’t pretend I have the right or insight to speak for anyone else, but I need a break from bearing witness to the betrayal being committed against us by our current federal administration. All satire aside, it’s just unbelievable to me how unabashedly selfish and thoughtless and even cruel the behavior being exhibited by our current leaders continues to be. Everyday, I check out the news and some middle aged white man in a tie is either being terrible, defending himself for being terrible, or walking around with an inexcusably smug smile on his face because he honestly doesn’t have enough awareness to understand how terrible he’s being.
That last one is happening more and more all the time, and let me tell you, friends and neighbors, there is simply no excuse for letting these people be in charge anymore. Of anything. Not even the ice cream machine at Mcdonald’s that already never works.
Anyway, I require a short intermission from the larger terrors that are ripping us apart, so instead I’d like to present to you a few smaller travesties that I think we can come together to oppose and eradicate. Perhaps we could consider it a warm up for the next round of elections.
For example, I have quite simply had enough of this whole post credits scene thing happening in movies right now. It was neat at first, hanging out in the theater, making fun of funny names as they scrolled up the screen, looking around to see if anyone was visibly uncomfortable because of how bad they had to pee, and then having one’s patience rewarded with a five to ten second clip of people having a conversation, or doing a thing, or whatever.
It was great for a little while, but then, I don’t know, after the third or fourth one, it became a bit more like a scheduled encore, or like when you throw a surprise party for an old person, except you don’t want them to have a heart attack so you tell them ahead of time so they can maybe take their medication early and then just act surprised so they don’t die at their own birthday party.
Can we all just agree that from now on, every movie is just a prequel for another movie, and then move that scene to before the credits? Or, even better, release it separately online somewhere, to keep people interested in whatever franchise is being created, remade, or rebooted at the moment. It could give the audience something to look forward to besides seeing the same trailer recut and reissued like it’s a new thing every other week.
Ideally, of course, we could try being satisfied with the movie itself, but this is America, and satisfaction isn’t something we’re really familiar with anymore. Outrage and schadenfreude, sure, but we’re not so great with the contentedness.
Oh, and before we move on from movies and their trailers, I would like to take just a second to thank all those trailers that basically just show me the whole movie in a two minute span. It’s helped me to avoid a great number of terrible movies I might otherwise have done myself the disservice of watching.
Okay, now on to the next piece of petty pestilence; I believe we could come together as a society to denounce and ostracize all of these full grown adult people who intentionally cut in line. What happened to these people? Where were they raised? What kind of irresponsible maniac would raise a person to think they didn’t have to follow even the most basic rules? Coffee shops, grocery stores, bank lines, you name it. Just walk on up and cut right in, like no one else is even there. And then, if you try to call them on it, they get all defensive, like they’re not evil personified, which they are.
Obviously.
I think it’s high time we instituted a rule, or perhaps even introduced another constitutional amendment, stating that anyone who knowingly cuts in line can instantly be pushed to the ground and trod upon by anyone who was already in line. We could even make an app, wherein one could hire a nearby strongman to do the pushing and holding down.
It would be like Lyft, except we could call it Shyove. Or something better. Anything better.
I’m pretty sure that if all reasonable people could come together to extinguish these two petty plagues, we could also take care of a bunch of other little ones, like people who leave grocery carts in the middle of the parking lot, or people who can’t chew with their mouths closed, or those ridiculous few who think it’s fine to replace all adjectives with curse words.
Look, cursing is an art form, people, and forcing others to listen to you do it so poorly is basically the same thing as insisting everyone needs to hear you sing “Danny Boy”, even though there is no music playing, and you’re in a movie theater, and the movie is really engaging, and you’re simultaneously playing the bagpipes for the very first time.
So once we manage to eliminate these small but important inconveniences from our lives, I think we can move up to more weighty things that people still somehow do or believe in, like the absurd notion that the Earth is flat, or the idea that creamy peanut butter is better than crunchy. I know it seems a farfetched goal at the moment, but honestly, aren’t we getting a little tired of all the advocates of acrimony we see everyday, doing their level best to keep us at each other’s throats? Like I said before, I know I can’t speak for everyone, but personally I’d feel a lot better if we could, just for maybe a week, come together as a whole and just agree on something.
Who knows, maybe we could one day, finally, in the not so distant future, stop “American Idol” from rebooting.
-John
