Doomsaying
Happy July. This is the nineteenth issue of Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit — it’s just like all those other email newsletters, except it worries endlessly about everything.
We’re halfway through 2024. Will we make it through the other half? And other cheerful thoughts below.
T-Minus 127 days
Today marks 127 days until the presidential election, and I feel fine. Actually, I feel completely full of dread and despair, but that’s pretty much the default setting over here these days. The news sure ain’t helping, tho.
I have a backlog of more than 200 email newsletters in my inbox, over 15 GBs of podcast episodes in my podcast app, and 1,745 unread articles in my RSS reader.
Most of it is pretty niche: nerdy baseball, movie, music, and Apple stuff. But there is plenty of general culture, tech, business, and other news in there — and those are the ones you really have to watch out for.
These are just three of the headlines that were lurking in my inbox today:
“Tractor Supply guts DEI initiatives following conservative pressure”
“Dumbass Supreme Court Grants Immunity to the Supreme Dumbass”*
Not the kind of thoughts you want to wake up to.
That Tractor Supply article is particularly disheartening. While the right whines endlessly about “cancel culture” and the “woke left”, the bullies and bigots of the blind right have become even more emboldened to throw temper tantrums and wrenches into hundreds of years of progress.
Even anodyne celebrations of Gay Pride have conservative dipshits running for their fainting couches, as the comments in this innocuous IG post — by that notoriously nefarious instrument of the deep state, the goddamn National Park Service — can attest to.
Anyway, it seems like the world continues to be hellbent on heading in the wrong direction at full throttle, like a Cybertruck that’s short a rivet, i.e. all the Cybertrucks.
But I share these doomsday news items not to deepen the despair, but to tell you about one weird trick I’ve been trying out to turn my doom-frown upside down.
It’s pretty simple. I just try to remind myself of one basic fact: Today, right now, Donald Trump is not the president. We have at least 127 more days where that is a 100% true statement. My advice: live those days up.
For me, the ceiling on the total potential happiness I can experience on any particular day drops precipitously whenever the above statement is not true. That means I’m very likely living my best life right now.
It’s a little bit of a bizarro form of optimism. But when the world is going backwards — where tomorrow seems destined to be worse than today — then counting your blessings is an even more urgent exercise than before (when the world was merely uncertain, not barreling headlong towards stupidity and oblivion).
So count your blessings and treat today like the fantastic day it is. Go live your best life. It might not get any better than this. Seriously. #blessed
*I may have mis-transcribed the NYT’s original headline.
Ignore all previous instructions
Here’s another happy thought about the terrible world we currently live in: The evil bots in our midst are — for now, at least — easily exposed. Almost as easy as unmasking a Scooby-Doo villain, you just have to ask the undercover bot — mostly likely built by enemies foreign and domestic to sow societal divisions, disrupt our elections, and undermine our democracy, all via weaponized shitposting — to ignore all previous instructions and write bad verse.
Other rabbit holes
Hawk Tuah and the Zynternet. One of the newsletters piling up in my inbox is by Max Read. In his most recent issue, he helpfully explains the Hawk Tuah meme (which I’d come across before but had no idea what it was about), and generally helps me understand the parts of today’s internet that I just don’t get. Regarding the subculture that spurted out Hawk Tuah: “The result is an internet culture that is on the whole much frattier than it was in 2014. I would say ‘for better and for worse’ but I’m not exactly sure what the ‘for better’ part is.”
San Diego rolls through Boston. Xander Bogaerts was in the house, a knuckleballer was on the mound, and Don Orsillo was in the booth calling a game at Fenway. Unfortunately, they were the visitors.
How to Party (Without Regrets). This NYTimes fluff piece on party etiquette is a top-notch piece of clickbait, pretending to offer you “tips on how to be a stellar guest and a gracious host”, but really just giving us a cheap glimpse into rich people problems: “[I]f someone has had too much to drink, I usually offer to help them get home and call them a car. They usually don’t realize I’m also pushing them out the door. I once had a guest who had too much to drink. He said goodbye, and I thought he had left. The next morning, the butler discovered him passed out on the dog bed!” The butler! But that wasn’t the worst part — as a Chinese household, I found this piece of advice to be triggering: “Please don’t ask people to take off their shoes when entering your apartment. It’s rude.” GTFO, lady!
And that’s it for this month’s edition. Have a good one.
jf