I can see again. A revelation!A miracle.A cruel joke.
It’s genuinely deranged how bad my vision had gotten—how I simply adjusted to the blur, like a frog boiling in its own oblivion. I had a pair of reading glasses once. Lost them. Never replaced them. Why? Because I am stubborn as a rabid loon, committed to the long con of self-destruction.
But the fair animation union, in its begrudging mercy, tossed me a bone—(a bone life preserver?) Limited vision insurance. A ticket to clarity, however fleeting. And now, with fresh lenses perched upon my aging skull, I am horrified. The world was this sharp all along? How did I tolerate such smeared reality? No wonder I stopped reading real books, resigned instead to squinting at a Kindle cranked to “grandma mode.”
That’s it. If only I could buy glasses for my flogged, fogged, waterlogged old brain. Then—then—life might actually be tolerable.
Photo that isn’t me posing with my Metapus. (Why are there suckers on Googlepus’s nose?)
My self-imposed exile from Meta lasted a pathetic two weeks. Weak-willed, spineless—addicted to the dopamine drip of likes, of fleeting validation. The monkey-brain craves acknowledgment, even from the void. And yet, for all its soul-sucking horrors, Meta remains a tether to the distant figures I call friends and family. They linger there, unmoving, like statues in a decaying museum. So I return, crawling back, pretending I have control. I’ll lurk there, I chained my fists so that I don’t post political lunacy.
But I still insist I see the ghosts!
Is anyone really even alive in this nightmare dream called reality? Besides those fishmen?
But at least it got me writing. A blog on my own site—my own little digital coffin, tucked away not far from Google’s ever-reaching tendrils. Public, yet solitary. A whisper in the neurotic hurricane of the web. It reminds me of the thousands of journal pages I’ve filled by hand, documenting my thoughts, my adventures, my endless sketches on paper that no eyes have seen. My sons will unearth them one day—artifacts from a younger father they never knew, words written by a stranger who existed before them.
Said younger version me. Am I really that different or just wise to the claymation simulation?
And yet, as digital empires crumble daily, as servers flicker out and data rots in abandoned cloud vaults, paper might outlive it all. If, of course, it survives fire, flood, and the insatiable maw of time. Maybe my art and ramblings will be scraped into the Wayback Machine, a ghost archive of a long-dead mind. But do I trust humanity to maintain even that? Not when we’re unraveling at terminal velocity, laughing as the world burns.
AI, though—it gets to live. Fed and fattened on the entire sum of human knowledge, safely preserved in a synthetic consciousness that hallucinates falsehoods just as eagerly as we do. No better than our feeble brains. No worse.
And here we stand,un-united in the crumbled Amazon box named February 2025, staring into the abyss of an uncertain future. But then again—was it ever certain?
Mr. Muckies certainly knows a thing or two about absolute certainty.
Ah, the calendar turns to February 5th, and already the month unfurls its sinister tapestry. The Grand Clown’s audacious proclamation to seize Gaza and transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” —a notion so absurd it rivals the most fevered hallucinations. It feels as though the digital realm has been commandeered by malevolent intelligentsia, infecting both social medias and news, testing the limits of our collective sanity. I endeavor to restrain my ire, for this sanctum is dedicated to the surreal dance of man and machine and fish, a refuge from the megacorp overlords and their insidious algorithms. Yet, in this moment, permit me this indulgence of unfiltered vexation. Am I conversing with myself once more? So be it.
I trust you won’t object to a brief yet interminable tirade about our dearly detested January; after all, isn’t that the very essence of blogging? Ah, January, the very worst January ever imagined (was it even real?)—a month that seemed to revel in its own malevolence. As I sit amidst my cherished collection of cracked jars, each containing the remnants of experiments both wondrous and macabre, I can’t help but reflect on the recent chaos of reality.
So January, the curtain falls after 12 and 1/2 years at the Haus of Mouse. The grand spectacle concludes, leaving me in the wings, both relieved and adrift. Bittersweet, this finale; the show ends, and with it, my role. Now, the stage is bare, and I, with my family but without a script.
Before I could scarcely draw breath to contemplate the conclusion of over a decade’s toil, the world conspired to thrust me into a maelstrom of calamities.
I am not being dramatic.
The fires that ravaged Los Angeles were nothing short of apocalyptic. The Palisades Fire, igniting on January 7, consumed over 23,000 acres, reducing thousands of homes to smoldering ruins and claiming numerous lives. Even the beautiful enclaves of Altadena were not spared, as the flames showed no regard for wealth or status. Our manor, fortunately, remained safe, yet we choked beneath the blackened skies, fearing the worst. That fake evacuation warning did not help.
As if the infernos weren’t enough, the earth itself trembled. A powerful 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck near Mount Everest on January 7, resulting in at least 126 fatalities and numerous injuries.
The 15th. So devastated, we lost one of the best artists and directors on the planet. To me, David Lynch was a mentor, a cherished soul with whom I had the privilege to share this earthly existence during the same time. As the fires of Los Angeles waned, so too did his light fade from this world. Fire walk with him.
Two days later I hit a humble 54. +100 years of stress.
Jan 20th. Meanwhile, in the political arena, an unwanted red circus came to town on MLK day and also Lynch’s almost 79th birthday Offering cheap eggs in the guise of a cheetoh, the figurehead of our nation—whom I shall refer to as the Grand Clown of Folly—returned to his reign of chaos and pudding flinging, continuing his performance of executive orders, each more bewildering than the last. His actions, described by legal experts as a “blitzkrieg on the law and the constitution,” included banning birthright citizenship and firing inspectors general without proper notification. This tsunami of a shitstorm continues by the minute; I don’t know where to start or end. I fear that is enough words for now before I implode into a swarm of angry fire wasps.
The day after I had a tooth extracted, drilled, broken and crunched into many pieces while fully awake and very aware of said crunches that resonated through my skull – a stark reminder of this corporeal vessel’s frailty.
As the month dragged on, the Doomsday Clock inched ever closer to midnight, a stark reminder of the existential *real* threats we face—from nuclear war to climate change to Ai to tariffs to pandemics. Does our CDC even function anymore? Will Deepseek steal my data? Was Tiktok truly the last vestige of social free speech?
Jan 29th. Black hawk helicopter and American Airlines plane collide. 67 people lost. Day later a Cessna crashes and turns into a fireball. I have no sense of anything anymore.
Somewhere in the midst of these disasters, the administration found time to promote crypto meme coins MELANIA and one aptly named $Trump.
**takes deep whiff from a very tiny vial **
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Anyone else notice all the angry wasps lately?
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But fear not, dear reader! For amidst this chaos, *ahem* my experiments continue unabated this new month. Each jar upon my shelf holds a universe of possibilities, a testament to the indomitable spirit of inquiry. While the world outside may crumble, within these glass confines lies the promise of discovery, the thrill of the unknown.
*the escape of the unknown*
So, as February unfolds, I shall immerse myself in my work, delving ever deeper into waters of mysteries that elude the common man—unless that man is a seal man. Let the world burn, quake, tariff, and freeze; this doctor remains undeterred, a steadfast seeker in a world gone mad, much like himself.
