Good riddance.

 Some people fantasize about playing major league baseball, others imagine what it would be like to cheat on their significant other with the cute barista. Me, I often think about doing a Platypus Man. Now calm down, dear, I'm not going to do it -- it's ideation, not intent.

It's not, like, a clinical depression thing, either. I think I'm fairly balanced, emotionally and psychologically. It's just that while some people are affected by time, I get affected by the weather -- and sweet fucking Christ, does the global forecast call for showers. 

But I assure you, hitting a home run for the Dodgers or banging nineteen-year old Olivia from Starbucks (behind Nadia's back) is far more likely to happen than blowing my brains out in the bathroom. Because first and foremost, I am fortunate to have a loving family, and I pity those not related to genuinely decent people who they actually like to spend time with, because that is not my situation. Sure, they drive me up the fucking wall sometimes, but they're good people, supportive people. They are also cursed with an unconditional love towards me that I don't understand, but I'm not going to question it and I'm certainly not going to rain on their affection parade with a bill to my funeral. 

And second, to X myself out of this planet would be to deny myself the remote possibility that I will live long enough to see at least a couple of the people responsible for causing so much misery in this world -- to say nothing of my formerly United States -- face some kind of terrible end. 

It could be the cosmic justice of a fat senile member of the Epstein Files club succumbing to deep vein thrombosis; or it could be the poetic justice of a round of .30-06 perforating the throat of a man who openly admitted to being fine with innocent lives being sacrificed for the Second Amendment; or it could be the HA HA HA HA SUX TO BE YOU justice of an ICE agent growing to a ripe old age, unacknowledged by their Orange fuhrer, ignored by their embarrassed families, and now they sit there weak and lonely, trying to fool themselves that they did the right thing, but eventually the guilt gets to be too much for them, and so they take out their government issued Glock 19, chamber a round of Speer Gold Dot 9mm jacketed hollow-point, put the barrel into their mouths, and squeeze the trigger. 

Jokes on them -- now they get to burn in Hell forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and... 

It's the possibility of any and all of the above that makes dealing with the Mean Reds worth it for me. Some people call it "hope".

So yeah, I'm good, this isn't some kind of call for help. Do not email me or DM me with "Is everything all right?", that's not what emails and DMs are for, they're for buttering me up with how much you like the podcast and that's it. Besides, most of us with any hints of empathy, traces of integrity, and a tiny bit of something resembling a soul, well, we're all feeling The Big Sad nowadays. And I am but just another one of us telling another one of us: Yeah, me too. 

I'm OK and I hope you are OK -- relatively speaking, of course.

I get it. Lighten up, Francis. Cheer up, you. And so I decided to do just that by spending my Sunday watching four movies to brighten my darkened state-of-mind: The Day After, Threads, Testament, and When the Wind Blows. I'm only going to discuss the first two, because I think you can only stand so much long-winded happiness. Plus I'm lazy.

 

 

When I was a very little kid, the USA Network used to air a program on the weekends called "Night Flight", which showed movies, short films, animation, and music videos all night long. I loved watching it, and there was a segment called "Atomic TV" that blended music videos with footage from atomic tests and civil defense films, and that was my introduction to a little concept called "nuclear war". 

At seven years old, I was too young to be frightened by nuclear war -- at first -- and so I was fascinated by it. I used to draw colorful mushroom clouds looming over neighborhoods, and I started looking up anything about nuclear war at my local library, where I was finally able to make scary sense out of it. I found a book for kids called "Nobody Wants a Nuclear War" by Judith Vigna, which was intended to calm children's anxieties, but it kinda had the opposite effect on me, because it introduced me to what such a war would entail: The End of Fucking Everything.

I had to know more. I found grown-up books at the library about the subject, and I then went to the video section, where I came across a video tape of something called The Day After, which had an intriguing cover featuring a woman standing outside her house, looking up at the sky, as missiles launched in the background. I turned over the box and wow there was a big mushroom cloud on the box. And if that weren't enough, as someone who was well into becoming a Trekkie, I recognized the name Nicholas Meyer as the director. The director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was behind this? Of course I rented it. 

I think my parents were OK with me renting it because I was a precocious little shit. More importantly, they knew there was no sex in the movie -- which would probably explain why by the time I was 16, I knew how to handle firearms and ready to kill a motherfucker if need be, but absolutely frightened to talk to a girl. 

For those not familiar, The Day After is a made-for-TV movie from 1983, aka the most dangerous year of the Cold War, with tensions between the United States of America and the Soviet Union not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Produced by the American Broadcasting Company and aired on the ABC network, the film's premise was "If the USA and the USSR were to get into nuclear conflict, it might go a little something like this." 

It takes place in and around Kansas City, Missouri and Lawrence, Kansas, where we get to know a number of people from different parts of these different parts -- before those parts get vaporized, blown apart, and incinerated. We follow characters like Dr. Russell Oakes (Jason Robards) watching the news with his wife, getting updates about NATO and the Warsaw Pact waving their dicks around with alarming frequency. It feels like 1962 all over again to Mr. and Mrs. Oakes, but cooler heads prevailed back then, and the Oakes are sure they will cool down today as well. 

That's the attitude shared by everyone else in the film during this section: Of course neither we or the Russkies will go all the way, that's madness. In the meantime, all we can do is continue to live our regularly scheduled lives, or at most, hit the nearest supermarket for some good ol' panic buying.  

But the nightmare becomes reality, and the missiles go flying, hallelujah, hallelujah. It's left vague as to who shot first, because it really doesn't matter, does it? Once the nukes are launched, the game is over. There's a character named McCoy who works at one of the many Minuteman silos in Kansas, and once he and his boys have launched their entire stockpile, he tells them there's no point in standing by to follow additional orders when they know they're as good as dead. Rather than stay at the silo with the others, McCoy makes a run for it, in an attempt to get to his wife and kid before the end.

He doesn't make it in time. We watch as his wife and child turn into living X-rays, going from flesh to bone before our eyes, with only a millisecond to scream. We watch as countless people in the city all get vaporized and it's *really* unsettling; men, women, children, animals, every trace of them erased from existence. 

They're the luckiest of the lucky ones, though, they go out quick. The second luckiest either burst into flames or are engulfed in the firestorm. Each of these deaths are seen fleetingly; being unable to fully register what just happened to them somehow makes it even more horrific. There are impressive shots of mushroom clouds on the horizon, and some scary special effects involving flashes in the sky and walls of fire covering the screen. 

There are also very cheesy uses of stock footage from atomic tests that take away from the impact, it's all the public domain stuff you've seen elsewhere, including that shot of the trees being hit a shockwave, moving back and to the right -- back, and to the right. (You've seen that very same shot at the beginning of Mad Max: Fury Road and Furiosa.) Of course, James Cameron topped all of this with his nuclear holocaust sequence in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But this is still very frightening stuff, especially for a tv-movie from the 1980s. 

The second half of the film deals with the aftermath, as the survivors make their way through the rubble during nuclear winter, searching for food, water, and medical attention, which are all in scarce supply. Long lines are formed, but order can only last for so long. People fight and eventually kill for these things, and the President of the United States has the unmitigated gall to put out a radio address about how "America has survived", as if such a thing even matters anymore. 

We see the fallout-caked corpses of an old man and a young boy sprawled across a war memorial that reads "In Memory of Our World War Veterans", which goes to show you how well those sacrifices paid off. We do occasionally see something of a military presence, but they are far more successful at executing people than they are at helping them. 

Dr. Oakes finds himself having to make the harshest kind of triage, as an exodus of the barely living and almost dead shamble their way to the front doors of his hospital. With supplies low and little in the way of working equipment, on account of the electromagnetic pulse from the nuclear air-bursts having fried most electronics, the good doctor and his colleagues are faced with more patients than they can handle. One of them is a pregnant woman (Amy Madigan), who later in the film gives a little spiel about why she doesn't have hope; Dr. Oakes admits that he can't find any argument against what she's saying, and she responds with "Argue with me, please. Give me a reason. Tell me about hope" and I was like "That's me! That's me!"

Because believe or not, I am not a pessimist, deep down I'm a hopeless optimist -- emphasis on the hopeless. I want to be so wrong about what I see on the horizon, that a year from now you can all laugh at me for how wrong I was. God, that would be so fucking awesome, to be laughed at for being wrong about this country -- to say nothing of the entire world. 

But I fear I will be laughed at for the wrong reasons by the wrong people. I'll likely be laughed at by ICE agents as they fire their AR-15s at my feet while making me dance: "Give us one of them there Messican hat dances, boy! Yeeeee-haaaaaw! That's what you git fur takin' our jobs, ya lazy beaner" and coward that I am, I'll be dancing along all like "Si senor, blessed be joo and da King Dictator for Life Trooomp!" Because that's how bad things might get, it might be legally required for people of my ethnic handicap to speak in a thick accent, regardless of how well we talk English good. 

Anyway, at the University of Kansas, Professor Huxley (John Lithgow) and some of his students are sheltered in the science building, communicating via ham radio to those who are listening to stay indoors until the radiation levels have dropped to a safe enough level. It was through his character that I first heard Albert Einstein's quote about how World War IV would be fought with "sticks and stones". 

After my first viewing way back when, the film definitely did its job in properly putting the fear of the worst case scenario of the Cold War straight into my seven-year-old soul. I wasn't sick with nightmares about it, but it definitely infected me with something. The days, months, shit, years that followed were most interesting, to say the least. My nuclear anxieties were always in the morning, for some reason. I'd walk down the street to the school bus stop, and I'd look up at the sky, hearing the sounds of jet engines and wonder if those were fighter jets off to war? I'd look at the vapor trails and wonder -- did the missiles already launch?  

Oh, silly naive me. Of course those weren't vapor trails. They were clearly chem-trails. 

It wasn't until a couple years later, 1989 -- the year of Batman! -- that the anxiety began to wane with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It finally went away in July 1991 at approximately whenever it was in Terminator 2 that John Connor asks why the Russians would nuke us if they were our friends now.

The version I watched on video back then was a director's cut that ran about five minutes longer than the one that aired on television; this cut also played in theaters in Europe. There are currently multiple uploads of this cut on YouTube, but for this revisit, I wanted to go with the television cut, because I wanted to see the very same movie that 100 million people saw during its premiere on the ABC network on November 20th, 1983. 

(I can only imagine the conversations families had about this movie the following week over Thanksgiving dinner.)

I found a Blu-ray that features both cuts of the film, but of course, it's out of print, which means I'd have to pay anywhere between $70 to $140 U.S. dollars for a copy. Thankfully, I managed to find one upload of the TV cut on YouTube, which means it's probably gone by now. The video quality of this upload wasn't the best, but it was sourced from a VHS recording of the November 20th showing on an ABC affiliate in Philadelphia, which meant I got to see it exactly as one would've seen it that night, complete with commercial breaks, making for some brief hits of nostalgia to take off the apocalyptic edge. 

But I'm sure that for those who watched that night, the viewing experience was nothing but edge. I'm sure people were too busy freaking out about the possibility of World War III to enjoy the advertisements for Commodore 64, the Minolta Talker camera, English Leather cologne, Dexatrim, and the Dodge Vista. I mean, why bother dancing to K-Tel's Dancing Madness (featuring songs by The Kinks, Naked Eyes, Human League, and Eddy Grant), or jamming along to K-Tel's Hot Tracks (featuring songs by Michael Sembello, Eurythmics, Styx, Bryan Adams, Def Leppard and Rick Springfield) when you're too frozen in fear of fallout. 

OK, sure, John Carpenter's Christine comes out this Friday, but will there even be a Friday? We might as well go to the movies tonight to watch Sean Connery return as James Bond in Never Say Never Again, because we'll likely never see another movie again! And I suppose we can't do worse than go to Denny's for their New York Steak dinner with onion rings and a baked potato for only $5.49, but to be honest with you, I think I've just lost my appetite watching Steve Guttenberg lose his hair due to radiation poisoning. 

Oh, yeah, the Gutt is in this, credited as "Steven" Guttenberg, because this is a serious movie. His character is a college student named, uh, Stephen, and he ends up sheltering with a bunch of hicks in their basement out in the middle of God's Country. It's a good thing these cracker assholes only asked Stephen for his first name; if they found out his last name was "Klein", they'd probably blame him and his people for somehow being the reason the world ended and end up making Jew Stew out of him.

Anyway, the idea is for Klein and the crackers to stay down there for an extended period of time until the outside radiation has subsided to a safe level, but that doesn't stop the oldest daughter from being a typically irrational young woman, screaming about how it stinks down there -- which, yeah, I get it -- and running outside so she can roll around in the now useless farmland, with dead animals strewn about the contaminated topsoil. Stephen follows her outside to bring her back downstairs, which is quite the sacrifice, because as he tells her, at that moment, where they stand, deadly radiation is having itself a good ol' time zapping right through them. 

I was surprised by how much this film holds up, not just as a two-hour PSA that Nukes Are Bad, but as an ensemble drama. It does feel like a miniseries cut down to feature-length, but it doesn't come off feeling lop-sided, either, it remains a very well-structured film. And none of the characters are given short-shrift; we're given just enough to get to know them, care about them, and pity the fuck out of them once the radiation sets in. 

Something interesting about the broadcast version that I watched is that there are ad breaks throughout the first half of the film, but once the bombs drop, the film plays out uninterrupted. There are still fades to black here and there, moments that were clearly meant for commercials to come in, but I can only guess no one wanted to be the asshole who follows up a scene of a woman violently hemorrhaging from her nether regions with ads for Certs and the next episode of "The Merv Griffin Show". 

Most of the film's music is taken from Virgil Thomson's score to the 1938 documentary The River, about how over-cultivation caused the Mississippi River to wash away all the precious topsoil needed for crops to grow; in the end, they solved that problem by building dams, and farmers were able to grow again. By the end of this movie, the topsoil is fucked and to get food growing again, it's going to take time and resources of which the survivors have little to none. It doesn't look good. 

There are no happy endings, not even hopeful endings for our characters. It's Game Over for everyone sooner or later. I appreciate that the film doesn't cheat, it commits to getting its point across. The final disclaimer before the end credits even goes as far as to say that what we just watched is actually a better-case-scenario of what would really happen, and that it would actually go down a whole lot worse in real life. 

The upload that I watched also included a special live episode of the ABC panel discussion program "Viewpoint", which aired immediately after the film. Ted Koppel hosted a debate between guests Carl Sagan, Henry Kissinger, Elie Wiesel, Robert McNamara, George Schultz, Brent Scowcroft, and William F. Buckley Jr.. Lady and gentleman, watching these men of science, politics, and letters, debate each other's point-of-view on nuclear weapons in such a reasonable and well-spoken manner, was enough to make me break down into tears. Even the Republicans speak like intelligent human beings! What used to be, lady and gentleman, what used to fuckin' be! 

 

 

And so it was time to watch how they did made-for-TV nuclear armageddon on the other side of the pond, with the 1984 film Threads, written by Barry Hines and directed by Mick Jackson. 

I knew of this film back in the day, I found it at one of the many video stores my family and I frequented. This particular shop was located inside a Latino supermarket. I would've rented it, but Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach had just come out, and I was only allowed to rent one movie at a time. It was the right move in retrospect, I enjoyed the further adventures of Jones, Hightower, Tackleberry, Callahan, and Hooks while chowing down on some of the most delicious freshly-made churros that supermarket had to offer. But the video store soon closed down for good, and Threads became out of sight, out of churro-addled mind.

Threads' reputation is of a film far more grim and scary than The Day After, and they weren't kidding. The first thing we see is a close-up of a spider -- Aiiiieeee! Spider! -- and a couple minutes later a woman is telling her boyfriend that she's pregnant -- Aiiiieeee! Pregnant girl! -- and so I buckled up for what was to follow.

Instead of the American heartland, this film takes place in the city of Sheffield, located in South Yorkshire, England. It looks like all the locations of The Day After -- city, suburb, and country -- were all pressed together. The first half kinda feels like a Mike Leigh-style kitchen sink drama; we're introduced to a young couple, Ruth and Jimmy, who are too busy figuring out their next steps as expectant parents to pay much attention to hostilities between the Yanks and the Russians. At one point, Jimmy changes the radio station just as it was reporting breaking news, just so he can get the latest sports scores. I don't think Jimmy's trying to avoid the news, he doesn't know any better, he probably figures it's the same old stuff; someone's always fighting someone, but that's someone else's problem. It's not like it's going to affect him, right? 

I can't judge the guy or anyone else like him, because it's not like I'm effectively doing the same thing by keeping my news and social media intake to an absolute minimum. I guess the difference between me and Jimmy is that I know things are getting worse, I guess it's just better for my mental well-being to not see the bullet coming.

Meanwhile, Ruth and Jimmy's families are following the news, and after finding out about a nuke going off in Iran, they begin to prepare for the worst. This brings to mind another difference between this film and The Day After; in the American film, many citizens continue to go about their regular day right up until the bombs go off, you see some people at the movie theater, attending school, going to a football game, even having a wedding ceremony. (To be fair, that last example might be more about how irrational a Bridezilla can be.) 

But in Threads, we see the gradual breakdown of the norm over the course of a couple of days; the radio and television begin to broadcast instructions on how to plan and prepare for disaster. They're told how to set up bomb shelters in basements, or if they don't have that, to use mattresses the way kids would use them to make forts. It's bad enough to hear instructions on what to do with dead bodies and how to dispose of them, it's worse when these instructions are preceded by really eerie tones and odd melodies. They're real nightmare fuel, those death jingles.

People also begin to panic-buy food and supplies, and of course the prices have been marked up to nearly twice the cost. I gotta hand it to the Brits, their version of panic buying appears far more reserved and respectful compared to the Yanks in The Day After, where they're racing each other down the aisles to be the first to pull cans off the shelves as if they were on "Supermarket Sweep". No one is fighting each other over stuff. Nope, over in the U.K, they save their violence for football. 

Boy, is this a gloomy movie! Even the style of the film is dark; shot on grainy handheld 16mm, looking very much like a documentary catching events on the fly as they happen, with most of the shot compositions taken from cramped, uncomfortable angles. Nicholas Meyer's intention with The Day After was to make everything look as plain and un-cinematic as possible, but compared to what Jackson pulls off, Meyer's film might as well be an epic Hollywood spectacle.

There are inter-titles that add details to what is being shown; we learn about the area, the population, and their proximity to military and industrial targets. Later, those stats take on a disturbingly detached and clinical tone when they begin to inform us on things like the cataclysmic aftereffects on the environment, the crops, the loss of food and water, how many people have died, how they died, and how the survivors will eventually die. There's also a narrator who pops in every once in a while, and by a certain point, I felt that I was watching a documentary from the future, produced by a higher form of life from another part of the galaxy about how once upon a time there were these stupid savages called "Earthlings" who eventually destroyed themselves. 

Speaking of which, when we get to the point of the film where the Doomsday Clock hits midnight, it shows that the filmmakers clearly had a smaller budget than The Day After, but it's certainly no less effective, it's just as horrifying. Like The Day After, there's scary imagery mixed with stock footage, but to be real with you, those public domain shots of atomic bomb tests make for a brief relief from the shots of kids crying and middle-aged women pissing themselves. 

Something that this film has that The Day After doesn't is the sound of people screaming in the background while all of this is going on. It sounds like like a preview of Hell, that's really the only way I can describe how those screams affected me. There are also plenty of close-ups of charred human beings, twitching cats, dead dogs, but I think the worst of it is the poor son-of-a-bitch who was in the middle of a shit when it all went down. It horrified me to think of being in such a compromised position, unable to wipe my ass before kissing it goodbye.

The aftermath is more gruesome than its American counterpart, you're immediately hit by the pain and anguish, rather than gradually introduced to it. We're talking about mums with half-a-burnt face crying out to their dead sons while slowly succumbing to effects of radiation exposure, the local government's attempts to bring some kind of order to what's left of their city and failing miserably at it, and just like The Day After, among the survivors is an absolutely useless young woman who can't get by without her man. 

As per emergency orders, the surviving members of the local city council are given full power of the internal government; leading them is chief executive Sutton, who has to make the hard choice of denying care to people in high radiation areas, because to do so would be to send able-bodied people to die in a futile attempt to help the dying. We watch as Sutton and his people smoke cigarettes while they work, because they might as well, they're all as good as dead anyway -- if it's not radiation, it's the lack of air in their underground shelter that'll kill them, might as well smoke 'em while they got 'em. 

We see that all the preparation by the government and the citizens of Sheffield for such a life-changing event was all in vain. There are simply not enough resources to make a worthwhile difference, only enough to extend the misery. Even with food and water, good luck finding a proper place to relieve yourself, because there's no sanitation. There's no use disposing of corpses, and so they're left to rot out in the open. It's a paradise for cholera, dysentery, and typhoid.

There is still something of a police and military presence, but they're only good for shooting looters and then looting the looters' bodies. Or they're assigning people to live in homes, whether the homeowners want them there or not. Can you imagine that? You work hard all your life, finally get a place of your own where you can dance naked in your living room, listening to music while sticking things up your ass, and KNOCK KNOCK, here come the pigs to tell you that you have to house some fuckin' family, you have to share your rooms, your toilet, the things you stick up your ass, with these total strangers who smell like shit. Sure, you smell like shit too, but it's your smell, it's your shit, you can deal with it. But not these stinky fucks. Get the fuck out of my house.

It had me feel rather justified in that all the disaster preparation I've done in my life so far is buying guns and ammo and Clif Bars and water. I just need to get a hockey mask now, and I figure that will be just about enough to get me by while I go around the wasteland, gathering followers, using my guns and ammo to terrorize and pillage those who were thoughtful enough to prepare properly.

But based on what I see happen to the people in this movie, I probably wouldn't live long enough to indulge in my fantasy of becoming the Lord Humungus. It's for the best, really. I wouldn't want to be among these "lucky" people who survived the blast just to spend the rest of their days in an absolutely miserable existence surrounded by death, destruction, no medical care, very little in the way of water and food, and the growing realization that if there is a God, either He doesn't give a shit or He has a hard-on for you. It would be like living in Gaza nowadays. 

The Day After has a very bleak ending; Threads somehow ends even bleaker, flashing forward another ten years to show us that the next generation of survivors have regressed to dumb-dumbs who communicate in monosyllabic grunts; it's almost as bad as the way kids today communicate with each other. At least the kids in Threads go outside to play, loot, and rape each other, they're not on their phones all day. 

When it comes to nuclear war, there is no such thing as preparation, only prevention. That's the message both of these films share, getting said message across as clear as Crystal Pepsi. When it comes to scaring the shit out of you while delivering that message, Threads is superior to The Day After. I still think The Day After is a very good film, though, and should absolutely not be dismissed. If anything, I'd compare the American film to a strong drink served straight up with a water or soda back, while Threads is the same drink, only served neat with no chaser. But don't be mistaken, they're both very strong drink.

Man, I miss alcohol. 

 

 

After Threads, Barry Hines continued to write stories about the working class, while Mick Jackson went on to have quite the eclectic career as a director of film and television. One wouldn't expect the director of Threads to also call the shots on the Steve Martin film L.A. Story and the Kevin Costner & Whitney Houston vehicle The Bodyguard, and yet he did. He also was behind the adaptation of the best selling memoir Tuesdays with Morrie (which aired on the same network as The Day After) and the HBO movie Temple Grandin, for which he and star Claire Danes won Emmy awards. I think its safe to say that Jackson has now fully atoned for bumming everyone the fuck out with this feel-bad movie.  

If I had managed to see Threads during my single-digit youth, I think it would've had about the same effect on me as The Day After, no better or worse. And while I missed seeing Threads back then, I did get well acquainted with other post-apocalyptic features, mostly Mad Max ripoffs, but also funky fare like A Boy and His Dog and Radioactive Dreams. If it featured a mushroom cloud or the radioactive symbol on the box cover, I was in. 

But I think it was the 1988 film Miracle Mile that messed me up the most, more than The Day After or Threads, because it took place during the final hour before it all goes down, there was an increasing anxiety throughout the film that at any moment, mass chaos would break out, followed by fiery death. If any of the nuclear apocalypse movies ever came close to giving me nightmares, it was that one. Because I think it's the buildup to the end, rather than the end itself that freaks me out. Like I said earlier, I'd rather not see the bullet coming. Maybe that's why I've been feeling the way I've been feeling this past year.

Early in The Day After, Mr. and Mrs. Oakes are watching the news and they recall their younger days during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but they look back at that shaky time with a wistfulness, as if to say "those were the days" you know? And I hate to say this, but nowadays when I think of 9/11, I get filled with a similar sense of longing. The thought of 9/11 always made me sad, but now it makes me sad for a completely different reason. 

Dare I say it -- I fucking miss 9/11. 

I miss what felt like the whole goddamn world coming together after that tragedy. I miss that feeling that we had all been taught some kind of painful lesson, and we'd learn something from it, and we'd become better people as a result. We'd take a step closer to becoming an even better version of ourselves. 

Of course, that didn't happen.  

Knowing what I know now, if some magical being gave me the choice of reliving the year 2001 over and over again until I died or continue living in the present, where each new day gets increasingly absurd, shit, I'm picking Door #1. See ya everybody, I'm off to simpler times. 

What can I say? 2001 was a pretty good year, barring a particular month. I know this for sure, I certainly never entertained any thoughts of punching my own ticket back then -- not intentionally, anyway. See, once I gave auto-erotic asphyxiation a try. It was really stupid in retrospect; not only was the juice not worth the squeeze, I almost died doing that shit, and the idea of Death actually sounded terrible back then.

It might seem like a selfish thing for me to go back in time to live the 4x3 television lifestyle, leaving the rest of you behind to enjoy fascism and late-stage capitalism, but I'd actually try to do some good for you people. First, I'd write a letter to Illinois state senator Barack Obama and tell him that should he ever find himself in the position to make a public joke at the expense of that asshole real estate developer from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, for the love of God, don't. 

 Then I'd write a second letter to the very same Orange shit-stain himself, and I'd spend ninety percent of the letter showering him with pure uncut praise. Then I'd spend the final ten percent informing him about a really cool solo method towards achieving the greatest orgasm possible. 

I like to hedge my bets.