I stumbled through the front door, still rattled from whatever ungodly odyssey I had just endured. My skull felt hollowed out, like someone had taken an ice cream scoop to my frontal lobe and replaced it with static. The night had been long, too long, and I had no memory of how it ended—only flashes of vibrating walls, phantom voices, and the vague sensation that I had survived something I wasn’t supposed to.
I needed answers.
Slumping into the chair, I fired up the laptop. If I had seen anything worth remembering, it would be waiting for me in the form of a digital fever dream. The news would fill in the blanks, or at the very least, remind me what kind of lunacy I’d willingly subjected myself to.
And there it was.
The speech.
I clicked play.
The audience looked like a thrift store rummage sale—one guy with a cane, people waving what looked like oversized auction paddles, flapping their signs like deranged bidders at a bankrupt estate sale.
Ah, there’s Cane Guy again. And over there—Jesus Christ, they’ve got a whole uniform for this freak show. A sad cavalcade of self-owns and unhinged petulance, as John Fetterman so eloquently put it. Hell, I like the guy. Said he should run last week. The Democrats are so completely lost at this point that watching them flail around has become its own form of avant-garde performance art.
And then—Jasmine Crockett.
I thought she was a big-shot leader in the party, one of their rising stars, a high priestess of the delusional. And what’s her grand statement, her rallying cry? “This is a terrible nightmare! Somebody slap me and wake me the fuck up because I’m ready to get on with it.”
Get on with what? That’s the real question. What the hell is it? And why does this sound like something a half-baked podcaster would mumble into a microphone between bong rips and lukewarm takes on the Illuminati?
Imagine Obama talking like this. Can you picture it? “Oh man, dude, this shit is whack. Somebody slap me, man, I’m over it.”
No. No, you can’t. Because there used to be some kind of barrier between politics and an open mic night at a dive bar. But that barrier is gone. Now it’s just flailing arms, bad improv, and the slow-motion implosion of whatever was left of their dignity.
The flamingo was still there, watching.
I bought the super model tall rainbow flamingo as an act of faith. Not in the bullshit way, not in the church bells and hallelujahs, but in the desperate hope that the cosmos knew what the hell it was doing when it threw me into the whirlwind of this particular madness. I don’t like the gay propaganda—Christ, who does?—but goddamn it, I needed a flamingo. It spoke to me in a dream, or maybe it was a trip, hard to tell these days. Either way, it found its way into my living room dead center, watching, waiting, judging.
I pounded a shot and squinted at the screen. The news was a mess, but the world was always a mess, and that’s what keeps me watching.
And then—there she was. Jasmine Ratchet, the embodiment of loud, pulsating ignorance, sat there on MSNBC like some deranged, self-congratulatory chihuahua, eyes beady and smug, yapping about something that could only be called intellectual suicide.
“It’s not a criminal violation to enter this country illegally?” she spat, her voice like an electric cheese grater against my ears. “It’s not criminal… it’s crime… it’s not a crime!”
What the hell was this? A congressional stroke in real-time? She twisted her hands in the air like she was conjuring spirits, performing some kind of supernatural dumbassery for the masses.
“It is a goddamn crime,” I muttered, the bile already rising. Title 8, United States Code 1325. Signed, sealed, delivered—by the very same people she’s crawling through the muck with. The law she’s pretending not to understand was written by her own kind, enacted, enforced, and upheld. Yet there she was, flapping her arms like a malfunctioning animatronic, trying to redefine the goddamn dictionary.
I took another shot. The flamingo was still watching.
“Say something, you gay bird,” I grumbled. “Do it with a lisp if you have to.”
It remained silent. Smug. Maybe it was judging me for still having the TV on, for letting this parade of the damned burn another hole in my brain.
I wanted to look away, but the spectacle had that grotesque, freeway-wreck quality—pure carnage wrapped in bad makeup and a worse argument. The pundits, the zombified mouthpieces, the bureaucratic swamp creatures—each one trying to out-moron the other. And all of them acting like the President didn’t have the power to shut down the border, like 8 U.S. Code § 1182(f) wasn’t sitting there in black and white, daring someone to read it.
The Supreme Court had ruled on it. It was law. But logic doesn’t matter to these people. They gorge on misinformation, gnawing at the bones of legal reality like rabid hyenas, screaming that America has no right to protect itself.
I sighed, rubbing my temples.
The flamingo shifted.
It hadn’t moved before. I knew that. I would have noticed. Right?
My breath caught.
Holy shit.
The bird moved.
It wasn’t just a bad trip anymore. The goddamn thing was alive.
Larry. That son of a bitch.
Once a month, like clockwork, Larry dosed his terrible pizza with magic mushrooms—a little incentive to keep the burnouts and goblins coming back. I had known this. I had accepted this. But somehow, I still let it happen.
The room blurred. A shift in gravity, a slow tilt into the unknown.
I ripped my clothes off and starfished onto the floor, overwhelmed by a new kind of fear, the kind that doesn’t gnaw but invites. The flamingo loomed over me, pulsing with unseen energy.
And fuck it, I was ready.
