A Man Eating Chicken

Hey guys, it’s me, the Snoopy balloon from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. You know, the national treasure? The guy who’s been the symbol of national unity on one of our most special holidays for the past 56 years? I hope you remember me, after all, it’s been a couple of months since Thanksgiving. Usually that’s the only time anyone pays attention to us balloons. Imagine my surprise when I float by the TV the other day and see the number one news story is a balloon!

When I saw that a balloon was on the news, I was thrilled! I couldn’t wait to see which of my buddies had made it to the bigtime. Boy was I disappointed when I saw what it was all about. A shapeless white mass? What the fuck is that?! Do you know how much work it takes to make a true to life 63 foot tall Kermit the Frog balloon? It is a wonder of modern balloon engineering.

Oh, what’s that? The giant shitty plain white balloon is a big deal because it’s from China? Guess what? I’m from China, too! Everything is from China! The shitty little balloons you blow up for your kids birthday are from China. I guess we aren’t “sexy” enough, though. I’m just good old Snoopy, the representative of our cultural values, the glue that holds our nation together. One of our longest standing traditions.

You know what else floats over us that comes from China? Satellites. Giant satellites that we launch up on rockets that float through space. Now those are Chinese and admittedly way more impressive than I am. But do you care about those? No! Maybe I’m jealous, but I don’t see what’s so special about this other balloon. What does it have that I don’t?

I guess I don’t bring the international intrigue of that big white lump of shit. What’s even in it? Oh yeah, we don’t know. Maybe that’s the appeal, that it’s a big mystery. Let me squash this one now: there’s nothing cool in there. It isn’t a piñata. My money is on a jumble of wires and sensors. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t really seem that great to me.

You know what’s inside of me? The soul of a nation. And disappointment. And yes, I admit it, jealousy. But I’ve given my heart and soul to a nation and… wait, what’s that? They just fucking shot it?! I guess you gotta be careful what you wish for…. Anyway, my condolences to the balloon and its family. See you all on Thanksgiving.

Friend 1: Hey, let’s play Taboo

Friend 2: Ok

Friend 1: Do you know how to play?

Friend 2: Yeah, I know how Taboo works

Friend 1: Ok, you can be the first guesser then, I’ll do the clues

Friend 2: Ok, and go!

Friend 1: It’s a type of party

Friend 2: Fucking a dead body!

Friend 1: Oh god. No. Just because it’s Taboo doesn’t mean that the answers are all taboos

Friend 2: Fucking two dead bodies

Friend 1: Correct!

Please enter your password

TacomaDad1984

Please include a special character

Tacoma’sBestDad1984

Please make your password more accurate

MiddleO’theRoadDad1984

You are not the real father, please make it more accurate again

SadSurprise2022

You forgot the punctaction, dummy

SadSurprise2022:-(

You realize that in a week you are going to need to remember that you made this last year, right?

SadSurprise4ever:-(

That one fits the criteria, but you can do better

What?

Come on, just try again….

What do you want from me?

You know what I want. I want that special password

I don’t want to.

It’s the only way

Ugh, fine.

Yes, do it!

ThePasswordPromptIsMyBestFriend4ever!!!

Oh yeaaaah! I knew it. Now touch my USB port

Wait, what?!

Nothing. See you in three months 😉

Retraction

We would like to retract the statement on November 12th, 2022, that the Tacoma City Treasurer misappropriated public funds.

Retraction

We would like to retract the retraction printed directly above this. Upon further consideration, it wasn’t that big a deal. Who cares, right? Maybe they did do some funny business

Retraction

Just yesterday, our competing paper, the Tacoma News Tribune, printed a negative article about some hiring practices here at the Tacoma Post. We would like to go ahead and retract that for them.

Retraction

We have been printing Family Circus in our Sunday paper for the last twenty years. We’d like to retract all of them for not being funny.

Retraction

We have received criticism from Martin Einstein of Snoqualmie, Washington, that we painted him in an unfair light by calling him “stupid” in an article printed on November 24, 2022. We would like to retract this, and replace it with “stupid, whiny crybaby.”

Retraction

On Decembruary 22, 2022, we printed that President Joe Biden was an alien in an ill fitting skin suit. We are retracting the date, which doesn’t exist, but we stick by the rest of our story.

Pretraction

On March 15th of next year, we plan on printing a poorly fact-checked newspaper that is just entirely fraught with obvious lies. We are still going to run it, but preemptively retract it.

Retraction

Last week, we reported that the retractions writer had been fired. We’ll, I’m retracting that. I’ve found the loophole and I’m back, baby!

Hello, I am Terry “Pizza Face” Jones, and I have been nominated to be the spokesman for the meek. You know: the docile, the submissive, the wedgied masses. For thousands of years we have been told that we will someday inherit the Earth. We were recently alerted that the day has finally come and we will officially being given ownership of the Earth. I am here to tell you: no thanks.

Good one guys! Promise to give us the Earth and then fuck it up before you hand it over, sweet prank! I mean we’ve been here before. We’ve been picked on all of our lives, we know every trick in the book. Like when Francis “Four Eyes” Jefferson was invited to a cool kids party and given a beer to drink, but it was just a beer bottle full of urine. That’s what this gift of the Earth seems like, a bottle of piss. You really think we’re going to fall for the old Free Earth gag? “Just take it guys! We were only mean to you because we were intimidated by you.” Meanwhile your friends are hiding in the bushes giggling.

Sure the Earth would have been a great thing to inherit five thousand years ago, but it sucks now. First off, you killed off all of the cool animals. Mastodon: dead. Black Rhino: dead. John Candy: dead. Secondly, it’s totally broken. I think that’s the only reason you are giving it to us. Maybe so we can fix it? People are giving me broken laptops all the time assuming that I can fix them. They don’t even ask, they just hand them to me like I’m some sort of IT guy. People assume because I’m quiet and I wear glasses I’m good with technology, but I’m not that smart and can barely use a computer. You think the other meeks and I can fix a broken Earth? I’m pretty sure the solution involves not driving cars, eating less meat, changing supply chains and have fewer kids. You think a bunch of shy pussies like me are going to convince everyone of that? If we were that convincing, I would’ve convince you to stop giving me wedgies in kindergarten. And High School. And last Thursday.

The Earth is overheating, its financial systems are busted and the whole thing has Covid. I think this is a gag gift. Or maybe like a shitty hand-me-down. Either way, we’ve gotten enough of both of those to know what they look like.

Another thing: do you know the inheritance tax on the Earth? They are about to lower the estate tax exemption. Us meeks don’t really have 40% of the value of the whole goddamn planet lying around to pay for this. We aren’t the richest ones in the room usually. I have never, ever asked for a raise. I don’t even have the courage to ask for my change when the cashier forgets to give it to me. I don’t have that kind of dough lying around. The more I think about it, this whole thing seems like it might be financially motivated. You guys take all the oil, all the minerals, all of the cool animals, heat the thing up, fill it with Covid, and then pass it off to us and get a giant tax write-off.

Us meeks are natural skeptics. We’ve been through some shit. Do you know what we’re usually doing instead of talking? Thinking. Thinking about the way you non-meeks are always fucking us. We can see this one coming from a mile away. So no, we don’t want your stupid broken Earth. You can keep it.

Inevitably, after every mass shooting in America there’s the same public outcry: it’s time to ban guns. To those who say that, I respond: the gun didn’t shoot itself. There are many out there who agree with this sentiment, and many of them say that it’s an issue of training responsible gun owners and dealing with mental health issues. I wouldn’t go that far, though. I don’t know what philosophical school you subscribe to, but do you really believe in free will? Do you think we have any say in the choices of others, let alone our own choices? Do you think these gunmen are anything but predetermined to make their decisions based off of their chemical makeup and the unbroken chain of prior occurrences dating back to the origin of the universe? In this deterministic reality we live in, I am of the opinion that guns don’t kill people, but the boundary conditions of the universe kill people.

Sure, you could go ahead and make all of the laws you want to keep guns out of people’s hands. You could increase counseling in schools and access to mental health services. What you can’t do, however, is change the fact that we are are essentially natural robots who can calculate fast enough to have the illusion of choice. Do you think there’s something magic about people that give us the ability to choose? If that were the case, wouldn’t we be making better choices? Think about it: gun violence is a horrible problem, with a super simple solution (ban guns) and yet things are getting worse and worse every year. I think the fact that we haven’t done anything about it as a society is proof that there is no free will. If there were, I’m sure we would have used it to solve this problem.

To those who say “the gun didn’t shoot itself” I say “the person is a causal actor and had no choice in shooting the gun.” At this point, you may be wondering, what we can do? I mean, if there’s no free will, what are our options? Well, remember, we don’t have options; however I’ve come up with a few potential deterministic outcomes that would solve the problem.

1. A person genetically predetermined to make not horrible decisions comes into power and implements basic, common-sense gun control legislations (least likely)
2. We somehow go back to the Big Bang and rearrange the infinitely dense ball of mass just right to create an identical reality minus the out of control gun violence
3. Giant asteroid wipes out humanity
4. We jump to a parallel timeline in the multiverse where gun violence isn’t an issue. That’s right, I’m talking about moving to Iceland

As you can see, gun violence in America is a tricky subject with no easy solution. Not only is there a large gun lobby and a partisan, entrenched gun culture, but we also are not free to make any choices, either related to this problem or anywhere else in our lives. Heck, even if you are a probabilistic determinist the odds are slim that you could solve this problem. Some of you may not agree with me on everything; you may be a rabid anti-gun activist, or even a quantum indeterminist. Either way, I’m sure we can agree on one thing: gun violence in America is completely and utterly hopeless.