From the moment I moved out of my parents’ house for good at the age of 21, I wanted a dog of my own. I had grown up with an assortment of strange and wonderful canine companions, and I quickly discovered that a life of un-chewed socks and vomit-free floors was simply not for me. I figured I would wait until I’d finished grad school and settled down somewhere before picking out a sensible, medium-sized dog with a good temperament that was relatively easy to train.

That’s not what ended up happening.

Pictured: a dog who is absolutely none of those things.

My youngest brother was two years into his undergraduate education when I started grad school, and apparently, he decided that being a 6’4 starting player on the varsity football team was just not making him popular enough with the ladies. So he quickly found a local animal rescue agency, and started fostering and rehabilitating abused dogs. His life and his Instagram story were taken over by pictures of all kinds of dogs in need of permanent homes, and I made half-serious threats to fly home and adopt each and every one of them.

Sir, step away from the corgi. I’ll take it from here.

My brother was in the habit of texting me photos of all his new foster dogs, because he found it greatly amusing to kick my “must acquire dog” instincts into overdrive, and in late spring, he reached out to let me know that he’d just taken in four very special rescue dogs on the same night.

“Four at once is a lot, even for you,” I replied.

Two minutes later, I was looking at a picture of four of the saddest, mangiest chihuahuas I’d ever laid eyes on.

My brother explained that a local chihuahua breeder had unfortunately gotten on the train to Dementia Town, and managed to get pretty far gone before anyone noticed that he was no longer capable of taking care of himself, let alone a gaggle of chihuahuas. The small, rural dog rescue operation my brother worked with suddenly found itself flooded with underweight chihuahuas, many of whom had neglect-related health complications. In need of a small miracle to deal with all those dogs, they apparently turned to the volunteer who bore the strongest physical resemblance to Jesus.

Suffer the little ankle-biters to come unto me.

The four dogs were named Bailey, Bianca, Beverly and Blue – because apparently the ability to choose decent pet names is the first thing to go when you start losing your marbles – and all four of them looked like underweight Furbys with mange. Bianca and Bailey were sisters from the same litter, and they were collectively in pretty rough shape. Even at their absolute healthiest, chihuahuas look like Beanie Babies that shrunk in the wash; the creatures that turned up on my brother’s doorstep were somewhere on the spectrum between “sewer rat” and “quite possibly a tiny chupacabra”.

I got on a plane to adopt one immediately.

Canadian Kennel Club-registered dog that retails for $3000, or mythological Mexican murder-beast? You decide.

Originally, I planned to adopt Bailey, the tinier of the two sisters. To this day, Bailey is possibly the frailest and most pathetic creature in the entire history of the canine genome. She has never been able to gain any significant amount of weight, no matter how many Snausages we feed her, and at any moment a strong gust of wind could send her parasailing on her own enormous ears. She lacks all of the necessary skills that a dog needs to survive – she has no idea what she’s supposed to do with the brown pebbles that are regularly placed in a bowl in front of her, she’s not quite sure what she’s expected to do with the squeaky toys that dot the landscape of the living room floor, and she can’t quite figure out how many of her feet should be on the ground when she pees.

I knew within moments of meeting her that she had no hope of surviving in New York City.

The other big problem that Bailey was facing was her horrible sister, Bianca. Bailey’s main goal in life was to enjoy all the human love and attention that she’d been missing out on. Bianca’s goal was to bite Bailey until the humans loved her instead. Bailey was a quivering pile of dog jello. Bianca was four pounds of straight-up bitch. When the chihuahuas were taken outside to play, three of them huddled close together and slowly stepped out onto the yard, marveling at the sensation of grass beneath their feet. Bianca, on the other hand, was already halfway down the driveway and picking up speed, having decided that she was tired of this “nature” bullshit and owed none of us any loyalty.

I knew immediately that Bianca was the dog for me.

Love at first sight.

So it was decided that Bianca would come home with me. Blue was adopted by a local family, and Jesus Brother had become so attached to sweet Beverly and poor, hinky Bailey that he decided to permanently adopt them both. And I took a dog that was barely emotionally stable enough to handle life in the Nova Scotia countryside, and I stuffed her into a dog purse and brought her to live in Manhattan.

For the first 24 hours, everything was fine. Bianca loved my roommates. She loved getting scritches and belly rubs. She loved curling up on their beds and getting her surprisingly abundant dog hair all over their pillows. And then after that first 24 hours was over, something deep within her little dog brain snapped, and she decided that every human being on the planet other than me was a hollow-eyed succubus determined to feast on our flesh. She will allow me to stuff her into humiliating dog tutus and drag her around the city in bright pink dog booties, but if anyone else dares to get within ten feet of me or her without her express permission, they are in for the ankle-nipping of a lifetime.

And if you happen to accidentally stand between me and Bianca, there is no man or God that can save you.

Bianca slowly, gradually revealed that she is absolutely terrified of everything. And when I say “everything”, I don’t mean that Bianca is afraid of normal dog things, like moving cars, vacuum cleaners and large animals that would like to gnaw her face clean off. Bianca is afraid of spoons. She is afraid of headphones. She is afraid of my guitar. If I pick up a book while she is curled up in my lap, she takes off running like her only natural predator in the world is a paperback copy of The Shining. When my glasses are firmly on my face, they’re fine, but the minute I take them off, they are optical weapons capable of causing mass death and destruction.

After spending half her life living in New York City’s East Harlem neighborhood she is more or less indifferent to loud noises, mostly because she learned that emergency sirens and car horns were a small price to pay to be able to eat stale Bodega french fries out of the gutter. Her enthusiasm for going outside decreased somewhat after the first time she accidentally put her foot through a subway grate, but loud noises were never an issue. With one notable exception – she will flee in terror if she hears the opening bars of Paul Simon’s You Can Call Me Al. 

She does not understand how ‘Al’ could possibly be a nickname for ‘Paul’ and it is freaking her out.

Bianca’s greatest passion in life is her large collection of toys. Every time I stop by the pet store, I get her a new $3 puppy toy from the bargain bin, because I am an indulgent parent and I am raising a spoiled monster child. But Bianca doesn’t play with her toys. She doesn’t cuddle them. Oh, no. She likes to pretend to murder her toys, and spends the rest of her time surveying their strewn corpses like the 6lb Barbarian Queen that she is. At any given moment, you can find her curled up on a giant pile of slain squeaky toys like she’s Smaug atop a dragon horde.

But despite spoiling my dog rotten with miniature stuffed penguins, I did actually make an effort to train her. I’d seen chihuahuas that were horrible feral purse-demons, and I was determined to make sure that my chihuahua was better than that. I knew that I was going to have a rough start, because I was adopting a 2-year-old adult dog with a brain the size of a Jolly Rancher, but I was optimistic that I could teach her the basics of ‘sit’, ‘stay’ and ‘lie down’.

I was too optimistic.

The only thing in the entire universe capable of motivating Bianca is food – like a moody adolescent, she loves me, but she could care less if I approve of anything she does. Unfortunately, food is too motivating for her –  even the thought that she might be in the same room with a piece of food that someone might give her is enough to turn her into a whirling dog tornado that understands neither her own physical limitations nor the meaning of the word “sit”. The closest I can get to making Bianca perform a trick is to alternatively offer her things she loves and things she hates to make her ears flap up and down like she’s trying to achieve liftoff.

But even though I’ve failed miserably as a dog whisperer, Bianca is not actually a badly-behaved dog. She understands that she is not allowed to bark at me or dig holes in the couch, and she knows that if she poops on the rug I will probably turn her into a furry coaster. She also enforces the rules on her own – I never actually have to scold her anything, because every time she’s bad, she slinks around the house like a guilty ferret until she feels that her penance is complete. Ultimately, the one thing that I’ve actually taught Bianca is how to experience a crushing sense of deep shame, which means I might have failed as a dog trainer, but I’ve accidentally given her an excellent Catholic school education.

I never saw myself as a chihuahua person. I was familiar with all the stereotypes, and I didn’t see the appeal of keeping a terrible, bug-eyed pom-pom of a dog crammed in my purse at all times. I’d been told that they were bad-tempered, over-protective and difficult to train. But Bianca has beaten the stereotypes – she is absolutely a terrible bug-eyed pom-pom of a dog who is bad-tempered, over-protective and difficult to train, but she strongly prefers riding around in backpacks over purses.

Take that, stereotypes.

Bianca may never learn how to obey basic commands or stop reacting to sudden movements like she’s a startled velociraptor in a Jurassic Park movie. But she knows how to be the best friend that a weird Canadian blogger could ask for, and ultimately, that’s the only skill she really needs.

To read more about the weird dogs I have in my life, check out this post about how my family came to own the world’s strangest designer dogs.

If you’re thinking about packing up your own anxious dog and moving to Manhattan, be sure to read my guide on blending in with native New Yorkers, even if you’re a bumpkin from the suburbs.

To follow my blog – or to see a truly excessive number of pictures of Bianca – be sure to check out:
my Facebook page
my Twitter
my personal Instagram
my blog Instagram

You can also sometimes hear Bianca bark in the background of my incredibly funny true crime and history podcast. 

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The post I am the Proud Parent of an Emotionally Compromised Chihuahua appeared first on All Wit, No Brevity.

So, I’m going to preface this thing I’m about to write by being as clear as I can be about this, so there’s no confusion or ambiguity on this score:

Trans women are women, trans men are men, trans non-binary folks are non-binary folks, and trans rights are human rights. I’m non-squishy on this. I know, like and care for too many trans people to feel otherwise, but even if I didn’t know, like and care for any trans people, I would like to think I would say the same, because the validity of their lives should not be dependent on whether I know them.

Moreover, and fully acknowledging my outsider status on this as a straight, cis man, it seems that any attempt to carve out trans people from queer culture runs smack into the fact that arguably there wouldn’t be a modern queer movement without Marsha P. Johnson throwing that shot glass (or brick, depending on who is telling the tale) at Stonewall. Trans people — and trans people of color — were present at the birth of the gay rights struggle in the United States. It’s their story as much as anyone else’s, as far as I can see. They can’t be separated out, nor should they be.

With that as preamble:

In the last year especially, I have noticed that a not-small number of my contemporaries, some who I like, some who I love, and some whose work has meant so much to me that I find it difficult to express my admiration for it in non-gushy terms, have settled themselves on an essentialist view of who gets to call themselves a man or a woman. Usually there’s some biological component to this, but however it gets put together in their heads, at the end of it is trans people being othered, and estranged from their proper identities.

And while one does not have to be in one’s mid-40s to mid-50s to have this essentialism as part of one’s worldview, I certainly notice it the most in that group of people — in Gen-Xers, that slice of the population curve that I’m part of. There are Gen-Xers who I otherwise find myself in alignment with in terms of issues of the rights of women, with (cis) gays and lesbians and with people of color, but then have a sharp break on matter of the rights and identities of trans people.

It might be that I notice this schism because I’m a Gen-Xer, and so statistically speaking more of the people I know are of my generation. But I don’t think it’s just that. I think it’s possible that — in very general terms — every group identified as a “generation” has a group that it, for whatever reason, still sees as an “other” in some significant way, and for cis Gen-X people, it’s trans people.

It’s certainly true enough that trans jokes other cultural othering were still acceptable in the media Gen-Xers grew up with: the plot of Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, of all movies, hinged on it (as did the plot of Soapdish, pitched to a different demographic). The Crying Game relied on its protagonist being surprised at someone’s trans identity. There was the recurring gag of Chandler’s trans parent in Friends. These are the obvious examples, which is why I name them, but there are a whole bunch of other examples one can name.

This isn’t to excuse cis Gen-Xers denying trans identity as valid, nor is it to make a facile argument that Gen-X trans othering is the fault of popular culture. We can’t blame it all on Friends. There’s a lot going on in the culture, and how we have built our identities as people, that I’m not touching on here, primarily for brevity. But it is to make the point that even as Gen-X had (arguably, and depending heavily on political/social background) understood itself to be racially diverse, and (again arguably and depending on political/social background) made the cause of gay rights its own civil rights struggle, there was still a culture frontier — an other, for its cis members: Trans people.

Millennials seem to me to be far less likely to exclude trans people from their cohort, and from what I see of Generation Z to date, they simply assume gender identity is fluid to a greater or lesser degree. It’s the cis members of Generation X who, it seems, have to do the real work of digging into their own biases and assumptions about gender — and their own discomfort with trans identity — and make the effort to change a worldview that implicitly and explicitly on the outside of it.

And it is work for us — look, folks, I’m gonna be honest with you: I didn’t get to being able to say “trans rights are human rights” and actually meaning it without some real work and effort. As (just) two examples, fifteen years ago, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have seen what the big deal was with deadnaming people, and it literally wasn’t until I saw a friend on Twitter being taken to task for it that I understood that “tranny” was an actual and genuine slur. I can’t think of a time when I was actively transphobic, but I certainly sucked in a lot of passive transphobia over the years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere along the line some of it came out of me, too.

(If somehow you find something out there where I’ve been transphobic: sorry. There’s no excuse for it. I’m not going to say I’m a better person now, but I will say that I’ve done work on myself to do better. And if I fuck up now, well, Jesus. Call me on it, please, and I’ll keep trying to be better from here on out.)

Some time ago I talked about sexism and I made the observation that if one’s understanding of what sexism is stopped in the 1970s, the 21st century was gonna be a real rough ride. Well, guess what: If your understanding of what sex and gender mean is stuck at the turn of the century, 2020 is going to come for you, and it’s not going to be nice about it (2020 isn’t nice about anything). Understanding one’s own sexism, or racism, or homophobia, or transphobia, isn’t about reaching some plateau and getting to stop. You have to keep working at it.

Which can be fucking tiring, you know? Now I get why so many people who were 20 or 30 years older than I was would tell me proudly that they marched with MLK or protested in the 60s: Because it was a way of saying “here’s my resume, I’m on the side of angels.” But the 60s were the 60s, and now is now. The fight’s not the same and sooner or later, generationally speaking, there’s always something to trip over.

I will tell you how it makes me feel seeing people in my age cohort — people I like, people I love, and people whose work I respect and admire — trip over trans rights and identity: It makes me feel old. It makes me feel like my generation has joined all the other generations who had a blind spot in their vision of who gets to be “really real” in the culture. And just as Gen-X looked at older generations and thought smugly to themselves “well, we’ll just wait for them to die off, and that problem will be solved,” now we’re the generation that younger generations will look at, shrug off, and wait to be launched into eternity.

And, yes, #NotAllGen-Xers, but you know what? Enough of us Gen-Xers to be noticable. The Gen-Xers I like, love and admire who are struggling (to charitably put it) with trans issues are all over the board. Some are rich, some are not. Some are educated, others aren’t. Some are famous, some are known only to friends and family. Some are white and some are people of color. Some, I think, might eventually get it. And some of them, well, won’t — either just because, or because eventually too much of one’s identity is tied up into their position on trans identity, and there’s no easy way back from that.

I don’t think it’s the responsibility of Millennials or Gen-Z folk to do anything about Gen-Xers who trip over trans issues or who can’t or won’t listen. Those Gen-Xers (usually) aren’t your parents; you don’t don’t owe them that service. I don’t think it’s the responsibility of the Gen-Xers who are better about trans issues either — but I do think there might be a better chance that the former might listen to the latter better than to anyone else, when it comes time to talk about these things. Because it’s often easier to listen to friends and to members of one’s own cohort, with whom you otherwise have things in common, and some lived experience.

So I come back again to the issue of the Gen-Xers who I like, and who I love, and whose work I honor, who resist the idea that trans women are women, and that trans men are men, and that trans lives are valid as they are. They’re wrong about that, and if it turns out they will listen to me say that — and then explain why, as patiently and with as much kindness as I can provide, to the extent that I as a cis, straight man can — then I will count myself lucky to be able to tell them, and to hope that they will think about what I have to say. It’s not my responsibility, but I remember the times when friends, with patience and kindness, explained to me how and why I was wrong on something important. It helped me then. Maybe I can pay that forward.

Until that time, and again: Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Trans non-binary folks are non-binary folks. Trans rights are human rights.

At a very early age, I decided that I wanted to be a paleontologist.

My parents were well aware that I was the sort of soft, round Indoor Child who was probably not well-suited to a life of scraping bones out of sun-baked rocks in the 40-degree-Celsius heat of an unforgiving Mongolian desert. Nevertheless, they supported my dreams by shuttling me to and from the local public library multiple times per week, until I’d read an almost unreasonable number of books about dinosaurs. By the tender age of six, I was a know-it-all monster child who would condescendingly correct you if you used the word “brontosaurus” when you meant “apatosaurus”, and I dissolved into fits of nerd rage if a movie depicted Stegosaurus and Ankylosaurus as having lived at the same time.

If ‘The Good Dinosaur’ had come out when I was a child I probably would have exploded.

My obsession with dinosaurs eventually faded, and I ended up going into a career that was more suitable for the sort of soft, round Indoor Person I became. But my encyclopedic knowledge of useless dinosaur information remains. Even as an adult, I just constantly went about my daily life knowing that Struthiomimus was capable of running at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour and that the Argentinosaurus is the largest animal with undisputed taxonomy in the history of the planet, while having absolutely no socially acceptable outlet for this information.

But then the 2020 global pandemic arrived.

Which has been pretty dull, as far as apocalypses go.

I’ve had a lot of spare time on my hands these last few weeks, staring at my own reflection in the shiny bottom of an empty Doritos bag, and I’ve come to the conclusion that, while dinosaurs may not have survived the K-T extinction event, they almost certainly would have survived the coronavirus pandemic. This is partially because they are genetically so far removed from every living species on Earth that there’s almost no chance they’d actually be able to contract coronavirus, but most importantly, it’s because they had an advanced understanding of social distancing that we could all stand to learn from. Don’t think you should be taking public health advice from an animal that went extinct more than 66 million years go? Consider:

The Tyrannosaurus Rex

The Tyrannosaurus Rex is the Elvis Presley of dinosaurs: it spent most of its existence in North America, it made a living mostly by scavenging from the work of others, and it’s been dead for so long that children aren’t entirely sure what it looked like when it was alive. Even if you were raised in a cult that believed dinosaurs were a hoax created by Satan to make gay people smile, there’s a good chance that you know what a T-Rex is. Standing roughly 3.6 meters (13 feet) tall at the shoulder, and weighing up to 14 metric tonnes, the Tyrannosaurus Rex ruled over the planet for 17 million years before being taken out by a rock the size of Rhode Island.

It’s just a hunk, a hunk of burning love.

So how do you social distance like a T-Rex?

Weighing fourteen metric tonnes is not a requirement, but I’m working on it anyway.

If you’ve turned on the news at any point during the Stay-Indoors-Wash-Your-Hands-and-Lysol-Everything-Stravaganza 2020, you probably learned that the novel coronavirus can survive on hard surfaces for short periods of time. Theoretically, it is possible to catch coronavirus by going to a grocery store, picking up an item that a person with COVID-19 just touched, and then sensually licking your fingers in an attempt to seduce the deli clerk until you are asked to leave the store. Getting through this pandemic requires that we all learn to resist our dirty, dirty primate urge to touch everything in sight and then rub our filthy hands on our faces, which is a difficult and joyless task.

But you know who wouldn’t struggle with that? That’s right. Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Mostly due to anatomical constraints, but still.

The next time you wash your hands, tuck your arms up against your chest so that only your fingers can move. You are no longer a small, meaty human, wandering to the kitchen to get your sixth Diet Coke of the day. No. You are a forty-foot-long theropod with teeth the size of Cavendish bananas and a stomach full of Edmontosaurus chunks, because even though you live tens of millions of years before ice hockey is invented, you’ve already decided that you’re more of a Calgary Flames fan.

But most importantly, as a Tyrannosaurus Rex, you are unable to reach anything that might give you coronavirus. Doorknobs? Impossible to grasp with your tiny, useless arms without smashing your face into the door. Faucet handles? Not happening, unless you plan on having a prehistoric wet t-shirt contest as you flail around in the sink. Your own face? Absolutely out of the question with those little noodle nubbins of yours. You can make it through a whole week on a single hand-washing, because the only thing you are physically able to touch is your own cold, reptilian heart.

Better stock up on bendy straws.

And best of all, when you are finally overwhelmed with frustration at being unable to scratch your nose or open the store-brand chocolate hazlenut spread you were forced to buy because the store was out of Nutella, you can let out a roar of rage and frustration that will remind everyone to stay at least six feet away from you. And you will be safe.

The Pterosaur

Pterosaurs – popularly known as ‘pterodactyls’ by people who have a lot more friends than I do – were a group of flying reptiles who ruled over the skies for nearly 200 million years. Despite their name, they are not actually dinosaurs, and despite their appearance, they are not the ancestors of modern birds – pterosaurs died out in the K-T extinction event, as they were apparently less suited to post-asteroid life than the creatures that later evolved into Costco rotisserie chickens. They ranged in size from an adorable 10-inch wingspan to a nightmarish 36-foot one, and the name ‘pterodactyl’ means ‘winged finger’, partially because their wings did indeed attach to elongated finger bones, and partially because people who scrub dinosaur remains with toothbrushes all day will take their revenge however they can get it.

A lesson I learned the hard way at the University of Alberta Dino Lab.

So how do you socially distance like a pterosaur?

One of the most important parts of social distancing is the requirement that we physically stay distant from each other. It’s right in the name. Coronavirus can be spread through respiratory droplets, and to prevent that, most experts recommend that we stay at least two metres (six feet) from each other at all times, just in case someone out there has powerful thunder-sinuses that let them sneeze clear across a standard-sized parking space.

Staying six feet away from other people is easy when you’re quarantined at home by yourself, watching Kitchen Nightmares re-runs with your dog, but it becomes considerably more difficult when you have to venture out into the world for essential supplies like toilet paper and off-brand gummy peach rings. One moment you’re alone and safe in the grocery store aisle, and the next minute, you’re being elbowed aside by a fellow customer who has decided that dying alone in a field hospital is a risk she’s willing to take if it means not having to wait four extra minutes to get to the frozen pizza rolls.

And that’s where pterodactyls come in.

Frankly, I was disappointed to learn that ‘social distancing’ did not mean ‘forget to answer texts until so much time has passed that responding would make things weird’, because I’ve already mastered that.

The next time you need to venture out for coffee cream and ketchup chips, grab a broom or a mop in each hand. Ideally they should be about the same size, but you can also try out different-sized ones for optimum crazy. The moment you grasp those broom handles in your hand, you are no longer a squishy, warm-blooded human in need of frozen egg roles. You are a mighty pterosaur, the size of a small Cessna aircraft, getting ready to swoop down on your prey. As you enter the grocery store, unfurl your powerful broom-wings and flap them furiously as you navigate the aisles. And when you have spotted something you wish to consume, let out a mighty screech as you close in on it, to warn the other predators away.

Will you ever be allowed back at that grocery store again? Almost certainly not. But will everyone stay the proper distance away? Definitely.

The Pachycephalosaurus

The name ‘pachycephalosaurus’ means ‘thick-headed lizard’, because these adorable genetic failures had ten-inch-thick skulls that they used to protect their shriveled, pecan-sized brains. They were relatively small as far as dinosaurs go, with most specimens standing roughly as tall as an average man; what they lacked in size, however, they more than made up for with stupidity and violence, spending most of their lives bashing things with their thick heads like living battering rams. They also happen to be my favourite dinosaur, because I have a soft spot for small-brained creatures with poor social skills that enjoy smashing into things.

These are basically the same animal.

So how do you social distance like a pachycephalosaurus?

As we’ve already established, a key part of social distancing is that you can’t touch anything. Ideally, you should be reading this on your laptop screen in large font from a reasonable distance while you scream with impotent rage because your little T-Rex arms can’t reach the Pringles cupboard. But unfortunately, the reality of the situation is that you are occasionally going to need to leave the house to stock up on Chex Mix and roll-on deodorant, and when that day arrives, you need to find a way to get from your bedroom to the store without touching doorknobs in between.

I think you know where I’m going with this.

Straight to the emergency room, most likely.

Instead of contracting coronavirus by touching a deadbolt and then absentmindedly jamming your finger up your nose, stand somewhere at the back of your home so you have a running start between you and the closed door. You are no longer a doorknob-using primate with opposable thumbs and a delicate eggshell of a skull. No. You are a pachycephalosaurus. You are strong. You are aggressive. You have the most underwhelming brain of any vertebrate in Earth’s history, and you are effectively an angry cinder block with legs. And you will burst through doors head-first like a prehistoric Kool-aid man, regardless of the medical consequences.

And the medical consequences will be dire.

You’re almost definitely going to put yourself in the hospital. But at least you won’t have coronavirus.

Also please don’t take medical advice from me because I’m barely qualified to draw cartoons, let alone practice medicine.

So there you have it. We can’t fix this pandemic, or predict when it’s going to end. We can’t say for sure if the early vaccines will work, and we can’t know when it’s going to be safe to hold important events like Creed reunion tours, and ill-advised weddings between people who met two weeks ago at Creed reunion tours. But we can all pretend to be dinosaurs until it’s all over. And that’s something.

For more advice on coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, check out my post on all the fun things you can do with a Ouija board and a bag of mixed nuts to pass the time in quarantine.

To find more of my comedy – or to track my whereabouts so you can contact-trace me – check out my Twitter, my personal Instagram, my Facebook page and my incredibly weird and funny podcast. You can also follow my brand-new official blog Instagram page, for maximum social media saturation. 

John Prine died today of complications of a coronavirus infection.

Let me be as clear as I can be: Donald Trump and his criminal associates who through incompetence and a criminal disregard of the clear and imminent danger in service of a campaign advantage opened the US to this virus. He and they share direct responsibility for each and every death that the US has suffered: they were and are in charge; they were warned; and they chose explicitly to fuck up.

So, yes, in my eyes, Donald Trump is an accessory to the murder of John Prine, as he is to each one we’ve lost, famous or not.

Fuck.

That’s it. That’s all I got. I hate the suffering that’s spread around the country. I hate the losses we have endured, are facing, will suffer. I hate those who have led us into such misery. I hope for my son and all of us that we will find a way to banish them to the outer darkness, so that we can mourn those who matter to us without constant rage corrupting our grief…

…and that we can then take their memories for a blessing.

Good night, y’all.

The post Fuck appeared first on Balloon Juice.