Fake News

I never thought buying a pink Himalayan salt lamp could change my life. In fact, I had laughed right in the faces of my friends who had purchased their own salt lamps, thinking that somehow having a warm hunk of salt in their room would improve their overall health. What idiots! I would say. I promised myself I would never be one of those people, one of those goddamn fools falling into the empty promises of pseudo-science. 

But then I was at T.J.MAXX (what can I say, even skeptics are Maxxinistas), and I saw a salt lamp for half off. And I thought, okay. It’s $15, it’s cute, it’ll be a nice little somethin’ somethin’ for my apartment. So I bought it, surprised at myself as I held the 20-pound box in the check out lane. I had never done something so boujee with such little irony before. Was I growing? Was I taking chances on the scientifically unproven, but hippie-white-girl approved? Was I falling into the empty promises of consumerism, which, for a certain amount of hard-earned dollars, is now going so far as to promise a holistically better lifestyle?

It didn’t matter because before I knew it I had owned the salt lamp for two weeks…and, let me tell you, the results have been significant.

I noticed the changes almost immediately, when I calculated a tip one night without consulting my phone’s built in calculator. Was I becoming a math genius? Was it because of the salt lamp I had in my room ever since I bought it? I concluded a resounding yes to both questions. You might be thinking, that doesn’t sound legit! But to be fair this is a super low-stakes claim to make so I decided to roll with it.

Not only did I become a math genius, but I also became a sex god. A week or so ago, I noticed a very handsome young man completely checking me out at the local coffee joint. After a while, he even came over to me to say hello! He had been looking over, he said, because I had crackers literally all over my face from eating them as I was reading and he wasn’t sure that I had noticed. So he didn’t get my number or anything, but he came over and talked to me! And get this…the crackers I was eating? Saltines. Saltines. Get it? It’s uncanny.

My life is so much better since I got a salt lamp. The only downside is that I now own, like, a huge hunk of salt that I will have to physically carry with me throughout my adult life, and deers keep coming to my window because they can smell it. But I can live with that. I mean, I can live with anything. I’m a math genius and a sex god now. Thank you, salt! And a special thank you to T.J. Maxx. Please sponsor me.

Just when you thought health care in America couldn’t get more wack, a new study was released that said almost, if not all, of snitches cannot even afford to get their proverbial stitches. 

Because snitches have been unable to pay for the medical fees involving stitches, those who would have been responsible for the snitches getting stitches have held back on their administration of justice.

Ray Brandbury, a man who has been proudly putting snitches in their place since ’87, sadly told us that he no longer “feels right about it.”

“Nothing, and I mean nothing, feels better than showing a snitch what their place is in the world. It’s never a good place, neither. Cause where a snitch belongs is behind a Rumpke, or doing something inane like eating at a TGIF’s on a Tuesday,” Brandbury passionately said.

He continued.

“But I’m a good guy, besides my whole snitch-complex. I want to give these kids justice. I don’t want to have them bleeding all over the sidewalk and making a mess for somebody else!” Brandbury gave a jovial laugh.

With the costs of stitches for snitches being what they are, Brandbury has taken to leaving strongly worded notes on cars, putting sugar in the salt shaker at restaurant, things like that.

“Just because snitches can’t get stitches, that doesn’t mean justice should stop!”

We reached out to several snitches for this interview, but they were all taking notes off their cars, sending their sugared-foods back, etc.

Just when you thought you couldn’t annoy anybody else, you annoyed an area woman while you were grocery shopping this Sunday afternoon. You were standing in front of the bread aisle for like, ten minutes, overwhelmed by the amount of different sorts of bread there is in the world. You thought to yourself, why is there so much bread? Why am I so bad at making decisions? Is my inability to choose a bread in a normal amount of time a reflection on my absolutely lack of maturity? Why can’t I make small decisions on a day-to-day basis? Isn’t it insane that the United States is considered the breadbasket of the world? I wonder what sort of bread we made for the troops in the world wars. They probably had wheat because that’s so healthy. I should be healthy, maybe I’ll get wheat today. If I choose this wheat bread, the one with the little pieces of grain stuck on the sides of the crust, will I see that in my poop the next day? Is that going to gross me out? 

You were so involved with your own thoughts, you weirdo, that you didn’t realize there had been a woman standing behind you trying to get to the bread the whole entire time you had been deciding what bread to buy. You only noticed when she coughed for what must have realistically been the umpteenth time in the last several minutes. You said, oh, sorry, and she gave you a curt nod, but you saw it on her face that she hated you then more than she’s ever hated anything in her life and probably would hate anything, ever.

With a sigh, you grabbed the whole grain bread you had been staring at for ages, and made your way to the cheese aisle. You resigned yourself to the reality that you would do the same thing with American versus cheddar, and said a little prayer to all the area people at the grocery store who would have to continue to put up with such inane bullshit for at least another half an hour, forty-five minutes tops.

When I went to take a nap this afternoon, I fully expected two things to happen by the time I woke up. My first expectation was that I would wake up feeling refreshed, revived, relaxed, basically like a million bucks. My second expectation? I fully believed that by the time I woke up from sleeping that somehow in those two hours when I was unconscious that the universe would have corrected itself, and Donald Trump would no longer be my president.

Listen, I know what you’re thinking. Wait, he’s still President? I thought we impeached that bozo last month! 

And it’s true! Mr. Trump is like one solid urine-related scandal away from impeachment. Which is why I thought taking a two hour long nap would be enough time for him to stop being President. 

When I woke up, I checked my phone. I looked at the news, certain that in the duration of my afternoon nap that something would have happened, the final straw, if you will, and Trump would once again just be another angry orange man that does not have control over my reproductive rights or if my international friends are allowed to return back to the country when they visit their families over winter break.

I was shocked to find that the news was the same as always. CNN had an article about how we might be entering a third world war. MSNBC had a little ditty about how there is substantial political theory to support the idea that in 30 years’ time our world could look a lot like The Handmaid’s Tale, and so on.

I’m planning on taking a three hour nap next time to see if that changes anything. Maybe that’ll do it?

After calling your mother to get her opinion on a particular ailment that has been developing at a somewhat alarming rate over the last several days, your mom, talking to you with her phone on her shoulder while she makes dinner for the rest of the family, tells you that she thinks you should keep an eye on it. She does not seem to think you are dying, and although you don’t exactly think you’re dying, you are also not entirely sure that she understands the potential gravity of your particular ailment. Once more you stress the details of what you have noticed either on the outside or inside of your body. You give so much detail that she is left only to reply “mhm” and “sure” for several minutes as you outline the nuanced and special way in which you believe yourself to be suffering. You decide to spare her how you thought you saw a black dog when you were catching a bus the other day, and how that’s exactly what happened to Harry Potter in the hit children’s series Harry Potter and no one believed him, either. You spare her this last detail, even though it’s really been the driving force of your worry, because you have given her a lot to ruminate over, after all. Your mom coughs, and even though you’re talking over the phone, you know, instinctively, that she is rolling her eyes at you. You hope that she’s going to tell you that you actually had an uncle who had the particular bump/headache/allergy that you believe yourself to have, or else recommend you to perform a variety of tasks to put an end to the ailment, because Lord knows you will take no action unless explicitly directed to do so.

At press time, your mother still thinks you should keep an eye on it, and to stop worrying so much. You’re doing fine.

A public safety announcement.

1. While deeply uncomfortable, many people will experience it during their lifetime.
2. It’s awkward, but necessary, to discuss.
3. If allowed to fester, it can create serious problems.
4. There’s always something white doing something it shouldn’t be doing.
5. Has really general symptoms, so it can seem like it’s something else for a while. But nope, it’s a yeast infection. Or white nationalism.
6. You always forget how much it sucks until it happens again. And then you’re like, fuck, I thought I dealt with this already.
7. When you get around to researching it, you think it’s amazing that such a simple imbalance can be such a pain in the ass. An imbalance of the microorganisms living in the vagina? An imbalance of cultural diversity and political rhetoric that results in an over-compensation of white supremacy coupled with a desire for racially-fueled nationalistic pro-America regime? Tomatoes, tomatoes.
8. You know it won’t help, but it makes you really, really want to take a long shower.
9. And it’ll keep coming back if you don’t treat it properly.
10. Weirdly makes me itchy.

After mounting pressure from family and friends, local woman Lisa Williams has, albeit reluctantly, agreed to take up space. Like many of her gender, Williams has felt the agonizing pressure of needing to fit into teeny tiny spaces. For most women, this pressure manifests itself in crossing of the legs on trains, immediately moving to get out of the way of men, and apologizing even when they were the ones who were ran into. But for Williams, this pressure manifested more intensely. Without the moderation of reason, Williams sought to fit the social constraint by obeying it as literally as possible. It was truly terrible. She was frequently known to curl herself into a ball and roll across the floor in order to avoid the daily confrontations that women face when they seek to stand and move across a room. Her anxieties, though tremendous, were somewhat calmed by her loved ones’ assurance that she does, in fact, have the right to take up space. They just urged her not to be obnoxious while doing so, out of fear that she might overcompensate, and manspread.

Sitting on the toilet with his pants at his ankles, Tom Hickerson cried out to the emptiness of his apartment in anguish. “Is anybody home?” He asked, knowing the answer was no, that he was the only person in the two-bedroom rental, and that he alone would be the only human alive to hear his own desperate pleas for someone to hand him another roll. He knew help wasn’t coming. This realization sank in as the toilet became cold on his thighs, and a little sticky. He was highly uncomfortable with that feeling, and also with the fact that this was his comeuppance, his smelly, lazy, quasi-planned comeuppance, because his roommates had both seen that the toilet paper needed to be replaced, and they both thought that they’d make Tom do it this one fucking time. It was only a matter of time before he did a sad little half-waddle to the cupboard in the hallway to get another roll; but that would be giving in, and Tom, being a stubborn little bastard, held on a moment more.  At press time, Tom had his pants up again and there was still no roll of toilet paper in the bathroom, because Tom is an asshole, and he used a Kleenex.

“If I watch this show again, maybe I’ll understand something I didn’t understand the other five times I watched it,” said local man, Brad Smith, who has not left his apartment all weekend. “My sister has been on me about doing something with more meaning–finding a hobby, doing a small weekend trip, somewhere nice like Poughkeepsie. But I’d rather not do anything. I think if I re-watched this show that I’ve spent hundreds of hours on already, I can grow and develop the same amount as if I, I don’t know, hiked the Grand Canyon.” Smith said he was aware that with the literal weeks he has spent watching and re-watching this show that doesn’t even have great reviews on Netflix, like honestly it’s very much the epitome of trash television, he could have legitimately learned another language. Probably only a love language like French or Spanish, but still, he could have been on his way to bilingualism. “And I know all this, I do,” Smith said. “I’ve thought about this in between episodes. I have bouts of terrible existential anxiety because I am able to accurately quantify the time I have wasted on my shitty life. I know all of this, but am I excited, truly excited, to see what happens at the end of season 7 the sixth time in a row? Definitely.”

After saying something serious that didn’t go over well, a boyfriend told his girlfriend that he was just kidding. He wasn’t going to say he was just kidding except she fell silent for several minutes after he said the serious thing he said and he was getting more and more nervous. Before he said he was just kidding, he asked her, “What, are you mad?” To which she replied in colorful language that yes, she was indeed very, very mad. She started to say something too–replying to the thing he had said seriously–but the boyfriend realized instinctively that the best time to backtrack would be at this point in the conversation before the conversation spiraled beyond his control. The boyfriend thought that the best way to retract his serious offense, and say he was just kidding, was by saying that the was just kidding loudly, and over and over again over his girlfriend trying to talk to him about the serious thing. After another long period of silence, he offered to buy her ice cream and things were looking better.

At press time, he had made another joke about the serious thing and she told him it was too soon. The girlfriend is currently telling her sister she’s thinking about ending things. Carl has absolutely no idea.