This foul year of two thousand and twenty. This year could be the start of a fantastic decade of human evolution, and 2020 will still leave a bad taste in my mouth throughout. Oh, to go back to New Year’s Day, living in naivete, and drinking at a packed watering hole. Excited for the coming decade, which, all things considered, seemed promising. Now it seems to be another example of a mandatory expansion to one’s preconceived notions of “how bad could it really get?” Bat soup, lockdowns, lock ups, riots, distrust in elections, distrust of one another and worst of all, distrust in oneself. 

I no longer feel at ease in the presence of anyone I am not intimately familiar with until I study their habits and more importantly their patterns of migration. COVID-19 is on the rise again — who knows who will be blamed this time. Just in time too for what I suspect will be a long, cold, and miserable winter. 

Flash back to the beginning of this fiasco. The biggest hindrance was a lack of toilet paper and the absolutely despondent state of liquor stores. Totally barren and void of all liquid spirits. Looking back, that was not realistically so bad, conditions that could be dealt with — assuming one had access to a bread knife and some paper towels. Indeed, desperate times call for desperate measures. That old adage rings true. Things are different now, and they are about to get a lot worse. 

Lockdown has brought about a sense of fear. This fear is certainly palpable, particularly on the funhouse known as the internet. Absolutely insane conspiracy theories rose from unidentifiable sources. Q-anon: how could anyone forget that? Adrenochrome is harvested and laced with an extremely infectious upper respiratory disease for no apparent reason. Trust the plan! Trust. The. Plan. I can’t even remember how many times I’ve seen this. If 2020 has taught me anything, which it has, it’s that anything goes. No matter how insane something sounds, we are apparently living in the alternate reality where the carnival madness happens relentlessly, and the crazy train has lost its brakes prior to even leaving the station. 

Now, properly terrified with the prospect of ritualistic satanic behavior being committed just behind closed doors, what did America do? Did it wash its hands more and wear a mask? Did it stay inside and social distance? No, it did not. We did what we always do, we bought guns, ammo and more liquor. 

Election season! How exciting! Support your candidate, make fun of and decry the opposition. It is right and just, and proper discourse. Unless it’s Donald — Orange man is, after all, bad. The rules of civic engagement have been muddied like never before. So what happened? People started to hate each other. Supporting the president openly is akin to being openly Communist in the 1950s.

Now here we are, post-election. Looks like Biden took it somehow; no one really saw that coming for unknown reasons despite insane pre-election poll numbers that were once again completely wrong. The important thing is that Trump acknowledges he has been beaten. This would be on the normal timeline, not the dystopian timeline. Here we are — back in court again over a possibly fraudulent campaign. Let’s invoke another adage. Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. Let’s examine the prospects of both possible outcomes. 

Possibility number Uno: This election was stolen with a supposedly inadequate vote counting software called “The Dominion.” Incredibly cryptic in nature as well as stunningly comedic. Who signed off on this? Even worse, they find out most of these votes are illegitimate through means other than a strange cryptic software glitch will totally disenfranchise all trust we hold in our electoral process, and our fellow Americans. Riots will absolutely happen in this eventuality. Now we are all drunk, armed, delirious, and ready for violence. Truly frightening. 

Possibility Number Dos: they find absolutely no voter fraud whatsoever. There will be a large group of people who will refuse to accept this eventuality and will remain strongly of the opinion that Biden somehow stole this election and destroyed all of the evidence prior to the investigation. If an insane conspiracy theory like PizzaGate can influence people to quite literally bear arms against a pizza shop in DC, can you even fathom what this will lead to in this country? No matter how incredibly concrete the foundation of this decision is reached, it will not matter. So yet again, more violence, more riots, and just general tomfoolery. 

My only advice that no one will heed is that you must stay out of it, dear reader. I suspect we are about to embark on perhaps the most vile chapter of human history. My advice is to make a peanut butter sandwich and bunker down. Emerge when the trees begin blossoming again. Surely a consensus will be reached then! 

All things considered… 

Probably not.