When I was a little girl, one of my favorite bedtime stories was It Could Always Be Worse. Basically a cautionary tale to prevent children from morphing into fatalistic assh*les after suffering a minor setback, the story reiterated again and again that no matter how tragic things appear in the moment, one must consider the blessings that still exist and remain aware that the sky could always open up and toxic rain could fall upon us like unceasing tears so we’d better embrace the positives in life as often as possible. Looking back, I realize that my parents were attempting to teach me the art of looking at misery through a lens of optimism, but now I think perhaps they would have served me better had they just whipped out their divorce papers and read me details about custody arrangements as I drifted off into a REM cycle. While my sleep might have been less restful than that of the average five year old, perhaps the knowledge that sometimes it can’t get any worse would … Continue reading →

We really can’t blame the Mayans. Back in those stark pre-Google/pre-proper hygiene days, they predicted the world would implode in 2012 and then they chiseled that prophecy on cave walls – or at least I figure they chiseled that sh*t, but I don’t really know for sure since I often cut Social Studies in high school and I think the unit on the Mayans might have been covered on one of the days I chose to go hang out in someone’s basement. Anyway, my point is that they could not possibly have known back then what would go down during forty-eight hours in November of 2016. Had they known, perhaps they would have pushed the expiration date of our universe forward four years. But how could those sweet Mayans even have imagined that there would be two sequential days in late autumn that would singlehandedly illustrate the potential and total collapse of rational society as we know it? How could they have even fathomed that on the second of those days there would be an … Continue reading →