The Critical Drain - Part I

It's getting wild out there. But why?

You feel it, don’t you? It’s been nagging at you, more and more, little by little, mounting by the day like a small but awful whining tune in your ears gradually reaching a fever pitch. Most of the time, you can ignore it, shove it to the back of your mind as you distract yourself with your mundane routine, but it sits there in the dark - festering. Worst of all - and usually when you least expect it, or in those quiet lapses of activity and stimulation, you feel it creeping back up on you, like a wave of nausea, or a large, sinister predator.

It’s a suspicion you just can’t shake. That nagging sense of something you can’t articulate that won’t leave you alone, and refuses to be quantified. It’s like bad Chinese food - one way or another, it always comes back.

If you’re reading this, if you somehow found your way to this minuscule corner of the internet, I assume you feel it, too.

Online, offline, and through every medium in between, I’ve recently encountered strange discussions pertaining to the same question -

This goes beyond typical generational hand-wringing, head-shaking, and tut-tutting, though, I will admit, these concerns have been levied by all generations and often do have a flavor of this. It’s difficult not to; I think it’s just a quirk of the human condition for one generation to look down their immediate, younger counterparts, if not with hostility than befuzzlement.

I wish I could find this image, but Google search results are for shit, these days, so I have to do it myself and recreate the image as I remember it.

I’m willing to bet the Babylonian equivalent of boomers were sitting there watching scribes write on clay tablets with reed styluses, shaking their heads and lamenting, “Ye, so it were in the times of mighty Sargon that we had only need of our fingers to record grain ledgers. Today, it is sweet figs and dates and bread dipped in honey upon which the youth dine so fondly - they do not know that when we were but children, it was naught but raw flour and bitter wine which we consumed daily.”

Boomers don’t get Gen X. Boomers and Gen X think Millennials are insane, which is kind of funny, because that’s like a pair of abusive pet owners beating the ever-loving shit out of their dog and then wondering why it’s angry and distrustful and generally of a poor disposition. Yet, for all the inter-generational animosity, if there’s anything that the Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials can all largely agree on, it’s that Zoomers are insane and retarded.

This is speaking generally, of course. When I encounter members of Gen Z that still have functional brains, they tend to have a pretty good grip on reality, more so than most people older than them.

Likewise, if anyone embodies this radical decline in good sense, good taste, and general self and situational awareness, it would be the Millennials who are getting to the age where they should be easing gracefully into their middle age that are still trying to stay young, hip, and with it, and the results are both unflattering and bereft of dignity.

There’s a profound sense of desperation in this poor woman’s eyes on the left. A need to be accepted that wracks the mind like a sucking chest wound of the soul.

Like, lady… you gotta know when to fold ‘em, y’know? Just get the mom jeans and be done with it.

And, really, I don’t fault Boomer rock guys for not cutting their hair and getting a sense of fashion that extends beyond t-shirts they bought at a Rush concert twenty years ago and cargo shorts (though they probably should), or Millennial pop punk devotees for not getting their ink lasered off (though they probably should), because at least that was their cultural aesthetic, intrinsically tied to their cultural moment as the it thing of the zeitgeist, and them as a people. Like the lingering indentations of words erased from a piece of paper, it was their thing that time still can’t quite blot out in full. The whole look still works for them because the look is them, in a weird way.¹ There’s a sort of authenticity to that lived experience that can’t be captured by someone who wasn’t there. For instance, you can slick your hair back with nautical tons of pomade, wear leather jackets, and bump Elvis from your classic muscle car, but you’ll never have lived a life that made these guys who they were:

I think that’s why these people always seemed so funny to me.

I always felt like guys who subscribed to the Rockabilly aesthetic and subculture would have gotten their asses beat by actual greasers, just like the women would have been laughed out of the room by women in the 50’s for their trashy tats and clown cosmetics. Maybe I’m being a bit too harsh - the scene did produce some solid music - but, still… it’s a little corny.

Except for the Japanese greasers. Those guys are cool.

Hell yeah. ロックオン, ヤンキース.

Greasers, e-girls, and Babylonians aside, I think this sense that the general public is mentally regressing goes deeper than just the usual kvetching of wow, young and/or old people are so dumb, bluh bluh bluh. It’s much more profound and much more disturbing than that. I think dumb is not really even the right word. You can live with a certain threshold of idiots. Hell, I’m of the belief that we’re all idiots in somebody’s eyes, or at certain times. For instance, if we dropped a Khoisan bushman into the middle of Times Square, he’d probably look like a bumbling rube, but I’m sure if he saw my white ass stumbling around the badlands of South Africa they call home, he’d think I was an mouth-breathing moron. And he’d probably be right, since I’d last a hot minute in the Namibian bush before a lion jumped me, just like he would make it a block or two down the street in Manhattan before getting jumped by some Dominican gangbangers. The term situational stupidity is an apropos name to it. Just plain ignorance, taken as in its most base description, might be a less negatively charged and more polite way of phrasing it. The 1980 South African comedy, The Gods Must Be Crazy, is a pretty solid movie on that very topic.

New Soyjak variant idea.

But, again - that’s not what we’re here to discuss. Because the thing is, like I said, I don’t think it’s that people are getting stupid so much as increasingly dysfunctional and different, down to the most base level.

Bear with me, here.

You’ve noticed it yourself - anyone with their awareness still intact, even slightly, has. You go out, and you see so many people in what appear to be a stupor. They shuffle about, gormless, vacant-eyed, unaware of their surroundings of the people around them. They bump into things, hold up foot traffic as they aimlessly waddle forward, totally ignorant to the fact that someone is trying to get around them as they walk down the middle of the aisle, with not enough space to maneuver past them.

Just the other morning, I walked down to a coffee shop down the street and, as I tried to enter the door, a pair in their late fifties, I’d assume, were exiting. The woman barrelled past me without so much as a glance, but the man… he just stood there. He stared at me as if he wasn’t sure what to make of me, the same way I’d gawk if I walked into my kitchen after a long day at work and saw a dalmatian on two legs making a sandwich there² - that kind of confusion where you can literally hear your brain making dial-up noises as it parses out external stimuli to tell you how you should feel about what you’re seeing, because it’s so strange you don’t even understand it. I kept waiting for him to move, but, for a good thirty seconds or so, he didn’t. So, I gave him a small, uncertain wave and one of those tight-lipped, uncomfortable with an expectant stare smiles. Comme ça:

“It gets bigger. Right?”

He, in turn, waved back, still clearly puzzled but rooted firmly where he stood, door still propped open against his shoulder. Now, it was roughly Eight AM on a Saturday - I had not slept well, I felt as if I should have still been asleep, given it was Saturday, and my need for something caffeinated was bordeline crippling, which is all to say I was not a happy camper, and my patience for this guy’s antics had expired the second we locked eye-to-glassy-eye. So, I made a waving gesture to the side, as if to say, Could you, y’know - step aside.

Yet, he remained unmoved. The light in the attic was just out. It wasn’t until his hag wife said something that he finally reactivated him like some lagging computer program snapping back into action, which was good because I was about to just push past the guy if he stood there a moment longer.

Now, this guy was in his mid-fifties, if I had to hazard a guess. Too young for the kind of severe cognitive decline that would leave you standing there in the doorway of a public place, gawking at a stranger for a solid fucking minute. And, sure, you know what? It was early on a weekend, and it was a coffee shop, so maybe the caffeine had yet to kick in, but most people I know - myself include - are just a bit grumpy and taciturn without their coffee; they don’t just outright 404 on you.

This is, of course, one anecdote, but I have many others. People crossing the street, only to freeze up like deer when I stop at the sign on the other side of the intersection and sit there, waiting for them to pick their jaws off the ground and continue. Employees at various places, staring off into space, with no idea there are customers waiting for them to snap back to reality (oh, there goes gravity). Just the other day, my friend was accused by a woman he estimated to be forty or so for trying to steal her purse while at a local beach. Apparently, she’d left it sitting there, unattended, while she went to her car, and when she came back, she just… didn’t see it. And she jumped his shit because he was standing nearby. Fishing. As if someone standing there knee-deep in the water off-shore would or could steal a bag left unattended on the beach and… hide it in the water, I guess? He said the woman was hysterical - she went from, in his words, zero to sixty and didn’t stop. Even when someone this woman was with tried to calm her down and pointed out her bag was, apparently, exactly where she left it, she was so twisted off she started yelling at this other woman, too.

You see this a lot these days. People go around angry. If they aren’t witless, they’re fucking pissed. Every week you see some new video of a Karen going viral, and, while I really, really dislike that term, and think that it’s a psyop developed for… reasons we’ll save for another day, I’ve seen enough of these Karen videos to see that ninety-nine percent of the subjects are people acting completely, totally, and unjustifiably unhinged over trivial slights that could be easily explained by ignorance rather than malice.

You often see outbursts of anger and aggression like this with the demented. As someone who had a close family member who suffered from Alzheimer’s, I can tell you that there’s a certain type of awful flavor to the aggression of someone who’s confused, frustrated, and scared. It’s sudden, it’s violent, and it seems to come out of nowhere, most of the time. You could sneeze and, suddenly, your grandma, who could barely string a sentence together most days, suddenly turns into fucking Rambo. It’s unmistakable. If you’ve never experienced it first hand, you only have to look to the White House to get your daily dose of a senile geriatric flipping a nuclear shit over basically nothing.

I think that these anecdotes are borne out by more concrete numbers. There are too many statistics to quote here, but a cursory search will turn up numbers that show traffic accidents and fatalities are dramatically increasing. Road rage incidents that result in physical altercations, as well. You’ve probably experienced some of this yourself, as I can’t remember the last day I didn’t see someone blow through a red light or nearly merge right into another car, if not myself.

Burn out and brain fog have become every day terms. Psychiatric medication are being so heavily prescribed that there are regular, nation-wide shortages. One is every four people in the United States are prescribed a stimulant. I see the number 13% when researching how many Americans are on SSRIs, but that simply doesn’t seem right, especially taking anecdotal evidence from myself and many others.

Worse still, if people aren’t psychotically pissed or totally out to lunch, they’re changing. And rapidly. There are people I’ve known for most of my life who became strangers in a little under two years, if not less. People I considered brothers that I rarely, if ever, talk to, and when I do, they sound like total strangers, down to living entirely different lives that, apparently, I never knew about, despite having grown-up with some of them. Now, of course, people change over time, no one’s going to deny that, and I’ve been in relationships where it felt as if I woke up next to a different person one morning, but intimate relationships are always subject to violent shifts in direction by their very nature, and now, it seems to be widespread issue, if not endemic.

A good friend of mine from New Jersey has spent the bulk of 2023 working on the east coast, in particular his native West Jersey and Camden/Philadelphia area. He’s returned to town twice over the past month and is (hopefully) coming back for the long haul soon, but, last week, we spent almost a full day palling around town before dropping him off at the airport. He told me, in so many words, that everyone feels like a stranger. His old friends, his family, almost everyone he left behind - they’re all strikingly different than they used to be. Of course, he’ll tell you that he’s changed as well, but not in the same way people back in New Jersey have. I don’t want to air his dirty laundry, but, suffice to say, none of these people have changed for the better. Lust, greed, general depravity - the stories he told of what these people are doing and routinely excuse are shocking, to say the least.

So, it isn’t just that people seem to be actively losing brain power - people seem to be regressing all around. They’re viciously angry. They’re easily distracted. They freeze up and can’t think. They forget things the second they’re no longer right in front of them. They’re succumbing, more and more, to their base instincts - violence, debauchery, gluttony, and lust. Think I’m kidding? Domestic and sexual abuse, infidelity, obesity, drug use, all of these metrics are up precipitously.

Another major gripe I’m hearing is people’s shrinking attention spans. This doesn’t have to do with the fact that a psychopath can drive a truck through a parade in downtown Waukesha and flatten some Wisconsin grandmas or a lunatic in Nashville can murder kids in a church in cold blood, only for the general public to forget any of it ever happened within three days or less - though that is part of it - I’m speaking in a more broad sense. For years, I’ve read psychologists ringing the alarm bell of shrinking attention spans and increasing reaction times, especially in the youth, but now, the fate they’ve been warning us about it readily apparent. Most of us suffer from it ourselves. I know my own attention span is pretty butchered and battered. Now, I’ll admit, I always had difficulty focusing on things that I don’t give a shit about - a trait that have made school and work quite grueling experiences, at times - but, when it comes to stuff I do care about, or at least found enjoyable or interesting… well, there’s a reason I have several unpublished novels worth of fiction, and if you ever saw how much time I put into Pokemon: Sun Version, you’d probably puke.

“C’mon! Just another hundred hours and you’ll get to go to the Pokemon world for real!”

But that’s not really uncommon. Of course you find it easier to focus on things you like over things that you don’t, because, I mean, yeah. But now, people are openly admitting they can’t focus on anything anymore. They can’t just sit down and watch a movie - they have to be on their phone, scrolling through social media, focusing on that with one eye and watching the TV with the other. I enjoy listening to podcasts and music while I work, but some people absolutely need them just to function. There’s a whole meme circulating at the moment about how it feels to try and eat a meal without also watching YouTube on your phone at the same time.

Bro tried to eat without YouTube…

Reading? Good fuckin’ luck - 50% of all American adults report not having read a book in the past twelve months. I’m sure if you cut out books like this -

Rated as a Thrill-a-Minute Must-Read for the average r/Starwars user.

And discount the scads of 45 year old women still reading young adult fiction, that number probably skyrockets into the 70-percentile range, if not higher. We’ll get back to that, though.

To that point, it’s demonstrable that culture continues to circle the drain and become increasingly debased and dumbed down with every passing year, music especially. I’d really rather not go on about the near total destitution of popular music and it’s effects on the public, because that would be an entire multi-article unto itself, but if you want to see the pop music apparatus actually melt brains in real time, just go look up Swiftie on Google and bask in awe at the sheer insanity that Taylor Swift has driven young women and homosexual men to. Young, hormonal women acting like deranged freaks over musicians is nothing new, I know -

But Taylor Swift is apparently Helter-Skelter-ing an entire generation of young people.

Weep for your fave. They could never.

The Swifties make even the most dedicated K-Pop stans look like pillars of stability in comparison. And, to be perfectly fair to Ms. Swift, I don’t think that she, herself, is weaving some auditory witchcraft in the notes of her music that possesses people to absolutely lose their shit and act like freaks, or even really doing much of anything besides be a run-of-the-mill popstar - I think her publicists and marketing teams are capitalizing on vulnerable individuals and, through the pernicious influence of social media, creating an army of babbling lunatics underneath the Banner of Swift.

Now, again, I must reiterate - I do not think this is solely due to cognitive decline in the population. But I do think that plays a factor in these people’s behavior, not because they’re becoming dumber, but more impulsive, irrational, emotional, and, in general, base.

Even I’m not exempt from any of this - the spotty memory and short attention span bit, not the whole Taylor Swift Messiah part. Personally, if I was gonna stan anyone, it would be the Vtuber Calliope Mori for single-handedly putting a stop to the whole Vtuber turned Pop Star trend before it got started in earnest through sheer cringe. Her bars were so bad that it strangled an entire genre in the crib and spared us from having a proliferation of thirty-something year old white women rapping from behind the virtual facades of big-breasted anime bimbos. With jiggle physics.

You don’t know it, but you owe this woman a debt of gratitude. And if you don’t believe me, just imagine living in a world where the hot new thing in the music world is this. Thank you for your sacrifice, based queen.

Now, speaking of bad bars, poor rhymes, and incomprehensible gibbering, let’s move on to the deterioration of language. It’s undeniable. You see it and hear it everywhere. When I worked in the service industry in 2021, I worked alongside many Gen Z individuals. When I say that these kids - the boys in particular - had a vocabulary that mostly of consisted of four words, I’m not exaggerating, even in the slightest. No cap, for real, like, and, of course, bro made up 90% of their speech, peppered in between almost every constituent word as verbal filler. For instance, Yo, like - bro, we need, like, more drinks n’ shit, bro, like, for real, no cap, bro, like, the customers want more n’ shit, bro, for real.

Now, verbal filler is not uncommon, or a mark of a simple mind. In fact, sometimes, it’s quite the opposite. Studies show that more increased verbal filler can be a sign of both high and low intelligence - the former because your brain is moving faster than your mouth can process the words, causing a stutter, and the latter because there just ain’t much going on up there to begin with, and it takes time to find those pesky thoughts hiding in the dusty corners of an unused mind. Then, there’s, uh - President Obama, who, uh - well, I, uh - I - I think he, uh - I think he, uh - fakes it. For the bit.

Excessive slang, too, is not inherently a bad thing, but talking to younger people, I find myself physically ill when I hear it’s a vibe, which apparently has become the default response to just about anything.

I could rant and rave about how them youngin’s are, more and more, adopting the vernacular, speech patterns, cadences, and, unfortunately, attitudes that they see proliferated through the media. White women emulate the vernacular, speech patterns, cadence, and mannerisms of gay men, who in turn are emulating the vernacular, speech patterns, cadence of the most intolerable kind of black women. White men emulate the vernacular, speech patterns, cadence, and mannerisms of hood rats and thugs.

These days, whenever I have the displeasure of encountering content made for the public, I feel like this:

It all sounds like this to me now, which is kind of funny because words like Baby Gronk the New Drip King just make me smile from the sheer absurdity of it, but also kind of scary, because now people with names like Lil Da Baby Mayne or Sluttee Jimbles are apparently trendsetters and tastemakers and, call me crazy, but if your current cultural icon is this dysgenic clown-afro’d freak and her pack of degenerate mulatto hood hussies:

Your country might not be going to good places.

Oh, she also is “recieving backlash” for having a twerking minor in one of her videos that came out this week, by the way.³ In case you think I’m just picking on her for no reason.

This is to say nothing of the second violent riot that stemmed from a TikTok influencer in New York this last week. As of this writing, there is currently a third brewing in London, stemmed by the very same piece of filth that started the first. TikTok was also blamed by French authorities for playing a part in encouraging the street violence that gripped France this summer.

And make no mistake - it’s no coincidence that TikTok and the sociopaths that stand as the platform’s most notable personalities are a common factor here. At this point, we’re probably a few month out from an army of impressionable twelve year olds staging a military-grade coup in a major American city and trying to install, like, MrBeast or someone as the leader of their playground junta.

Just consider the old adage - garbage in, garbage out. When you have people like this who are your main cultural ambassadors and lynch-pins:

Don’t be surprised when you get garbage out.

Now, this isn’t a Struggle Session for Miss Lizzo (though, I’d say she deserves it, if the allegations are true), so I must move swiftly along, like a hare in the night with a hungry fox behind me, before I succumb to the temptation to speak more trash about her. So - emojis. They’re another sign of our intelligence implosion. Think I’m being hyperbolic? I’m never hyperbolic.

I never was a big fan of emoticons. Sure, when I was younger, I dabbled - I sent some :P’s and XD’s in my time, but I did not inhale. But those are emoticons. I had grown out of my middle school phase by the time emoji’s became a thing. And I’m not saying the use of emojis make you inferior to my scintillating intellect and immaculate taste. Really, I’m not. Like anything, they’re fine in moderation, but overusing them, as other people are wont to do… well, let’s just say if you feel the need to add fifteen laughing emojis instead of one, you might have an issue.

I’m not the only person who thinks this.

Again, I don’t think emojis are bad in and of themselves. I understand why emoticons were developed. Even though I like to think that I’m articulate enough to get my point across with my tone intact, sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just come off sounding a bit dry. Maybe like a dick, even. So, you slap a :) at the end of that bad boy, just so the other party knows you aren’t trying to be an asshole. Same thing with things like lol or lmfao - it’s just a way to lighten the mood. Hell, the text smiley face is a tried and true technique that can trace its history back further than you’d think.

The above image is from an article published in 1881, in the American satire magazine, Puck. Though ahead of their time - and joking - it would take another century for the concept to catch on, when, in 1982, when computer scientist Scott Fahlman of Carnegie-Melon University sent this:

Little did Professor Fahlman know what he was unleashing…

(*≧ω≦*)

Emojis, however, are a different beast altogether. I really don’t like them. Never have. Well, except for those weird, ugly blue ones. They have a certain charm to them.

Very nice.

I have been known to send one or two emojis in a text as a comedic jest, but I swear, some people fucking only communicate with these things. They’ll send you a string of them and leave you to decipher the interpretation like they’re hieroglyphics, which makes me feel very (；￣Д￣). Like, if you text me [Lady Dancing] [Lady Dancing] [Monkey] [Gun] [Eggplant]… what the fuck are you trying to communicate? Use your words, you fucking troglodyte.

I had a linguistics professor who explained that, with the rise of the internet, there’s now a theory among linguists that we will revert to a more pictographic form of communication, which is to that rather than send strings of characters that create words and sounds in our mind, we really will devolve to just sending drawings to each other. And, since we aren’t carving these things into stones, they won’t need to be as simple as hieroglyphics, and since we aren’t writing them with an ink brush, they won’t need to be as abstract as characters in languages such as Chinese or Japanese, which are both pictographic in nature. This is to say, in the future, instead of emojis, you’ll just send an AI generated image of you bashing your friend over the head with a boat oar if you’re mad at them instead of [Boat Oar] [Seething Face] [Angry Face] [Expletive Face] [Middle Finger] [Silly Face] [Kissing Face]. And the emoji of a pile of shit - just for good measure.

Not me, though. I’ll just be sending you this if you piss me off.

Now, this may not sound like a problem in and of itself. I mean, you can say a lot about the Japanese and Chinese languages, but you can’t say they aren’t sophisticated. Hell, Japanese is so complex that they had to dumb it down a bit for the us baka gaijin (stupid foreigner, for those who didn’t consume as much anime as I have). The Chinese never got the memo, or, more likely, just didn’t care, because the glorious Middle Kingdom (all glory and honor the People’s Republic of China) is Heaven’s chosen land, and no one and no other place matters. But give this article a quick skim to see how complex their characters can be. Hieroglyphics aren’t exactly just crude carvings on pyramid walls, either, nor was cuneiform senseless scratching on clay tablets.

But, this linguistics professor also explained that they still involve literacy skills in order to interpret, and a pictographic script is still a far cry from just sending pictures. And, the more we rely on pictures to communicate, the less we rely on written word, and the less literate we will be as a result, which, as someone who is both a writer and quite enjoys reading, this is bad news for Bonzo.

Σ(°△°|||)︴

To be fair, we do live in a historically aberrant period of absurdly high literacy where even the most thick-headed, knuckle-dragging rube has the opportunity to learn. In the 1830’s England, at the beginning of the Victorian age, the literacy rate was only 60%. In the jolly days of the colonies, New England had a staggeringly high literacy rate of 90%, though, this was mostly due to the Puritans insisting that everyone (with a Y chromosome) needed to be able to read the Bible. For women, the rates were only 48% at the most liberal estimates, but, hey - that’s still pretty good for the time.

But, today - and it was surprisingly difficult to find this information - American illiteracy rates are at 21% and growing. That’s pretty high. It makes me feel quite Σ(°ロ°)

I’m sure this has something to do with it:

Though, I suspect that’s only part of it. Like many skills and abilities we will discuss later, reading is a use-it-or-lose-it kind of thing. The less you read, the more difficult it will be to start again. Given that most Americans get their reading done on the McDonald’s Dollar Menu and Minion memes made by borderline illiterate boomers on Facebook, it’s no small wonder that 54% of Americans read beneath a sixth grade level. I’d venture to say that the number of functionally illiterate people who can’t read more than four letter words is probably more than we’d like to think.

Hilarious.

Which probably excludes a lot of them from reading Substack, so we can confidently and safely talk all the shit we want about those dumb fucks without fear of retribution. Oh, and speaking of talking about shit…

Nothing says comfort like a warm turd.

Have you noticed that poop merchandise is everywhere, these days? That’s weird, right? Am I weird for thinking that’s weird? Because I think it’s really fucking weird, actually. There’s a staggering amount of fecal-themed merchandise out there. Most of it targeted to children.

And, yeah, look, I was a little boy once - I remember gross out toys like the Garbage Pail Kids cards and those little rubber things that came in a garbage can and literally smelled like diarrhea, they were around, and even then I never got the fucking appeal of playing with an ugly little lump of plastic that smells like vomit or a decaying corpse. Like, I remember this kid brought one to school when I was in second grade, and, yeah, you get what you pay for - I can vouch that the things smell like literal unwashed ass. I also remember they were banned because he sprayed a girl in the face with one and she promptly vomited on him. Charming, right?

Yeah… real cool.

Now, though, this poop stuff is being marketed more to girls, which is concerning for a variety of reasons. Much of it crosses over with unicorn imagery. Like, a lot of it.

If you’re familiar with esoteric symbolism, the constant presence of the unicorn might concern you just a little… but I don’t know if y’all are ready for that conversation, yet.

In 2020, poop-themed toys were the most popular toys on the market.

I may sound like a prude, but, just… hear me out for a second. Let’s just take all this as it is. Kids are blasted with imagery of defecation and doo-doo from a very tender, very impressionable age. They get toys like Doggy Dumps-a-Lot and Stink Blazters X-treme (REALLY SMELLS LIKE FUCKING SHIT) and sleep on pillows made to resemble piles of shit. They’re basically desensitized to it. Then… look, I have to go any further to explain why this is not good in a world where various perversions and paraphilias are purposefully being exposed to children in order to groom them into the sickest and most depraved acts possible, then I have a super cool emoticon for you - ┌∩┐(◣_◢)┌∩┐

The cult of feces worship that’s totally a joke bro haha is a sign of public debasement, in and of itself, but it deserves a deeper dive along with the sinister and malicious unicorn symbolism⁴ that pervades consumer culture, but, suffice to say, if you spend actual, hard-earned cash to buy your kid ugly, diapered unicorn toys that literally shit and barf rainbow goo:

You might just want to reevaluate what your exposing your kids too. It’s not all fun and games. Today, it’s Poopy-Doopy the Shitting and Farting Unicorn. Tomorrow, it’s Salo: 120 Days of Sodom.

Just sayin’.

┐(︶▽︶)┌

So, this begs the question - if there is some sort of brain drain happening across all strata of society, who - or what - pulled the plug. For a moment, let’s just assume it is, so I don’t have to waste a bullet-point on It’s not and we’re all just schizo. Because, I mean, c’mon; we may be schizo, here, but we’re not wrong. Conspiracy theorist literally just means Three to Six Months Ahead of the Curve, these days. But, we’ll still explore the possibilities I’ve both read about and pondered on in order descending order or likelihood and increasing proportion of esoteric, schizoid paranoia and preternatural elements.

Next week.

Because I already finished this article and lemme tell you - it’s an absolute unit. A real heckin’ chonker as the animal abusers on Reddit who stuff their poor kitties like feline fois gras for upvotes might say. But, really, the total read time was over an hour, so rather than overwhelm you with a solid brick to the face, I’m graciously dividing it into two easily digestible and delicious entrees.

Next week, we’ll be discussing everything from cyberpunk dystopias, trace element deficiences, demons, infrasound, the Saturnine Dragon, TikTok, lead poisoning, and a whole lot of psychology, so, come hungry, come prepared, and tape those tinfoil hats to your head, ‘cuz -

1. I’m not advocating for the e-girl/e-boy aesthetic to last this long, however, because unlike other subcultures, it is not, never was, and never will be cool, and a sixty-year old granny trying to keep the e-girl look going will look ten times more embarrassing than your grandpa wearing his leather jacket from the 50’s.

2. I don’t own a dalmatian, by the way.

3. What she and her entire creative team should catch is a one way ticket to the interior of a prison cell.

4. I’m not kidding.