A week ago, we awoke to a bedfellow who had stolen away all our blankets.  Without the cozy layers of comfort and certainty and hope, we were left shivering in a cold, moist adult diaper.  Bemused, we lay there, clotting in the aftermath of someone else’s nighttime alluvium.  How in the world could this happen?  The outcome seemed a lock cinch, a foregone conclusion.  In sum, the evidence was as copious as it was incontrovertible.  The FBI gave its imprimatur.  And, yet, despite the torrent of leaks and the lingering suspicions of investigators, the case was blithely tossed by the government’s own attorney. It’s bad enough that our notion of justice has been immutably disfigured, but now we must endure the commensurate gloating and barbed proclamations of innocence.

So here we are, fully unhinged by the fact that Jussie Smollett is preening about town rather than tossing Big Earl’s salad in the grey bar hotel.  Oh, yeah, and that Trump got off, too.  But as crimes go, I cannot cotton to the collective outrage over the college cheating scandal.   So a handful of rich white teenagers were displaced by their respective mirror images; how is that a detriment to society? Is anything markedly different?  Aggrieved sub groups still bicker over who is victimized the most, “privileged” denizens relentlessly flaunt all the shit that we want for ourselves and, regardless, Toys R Us, Kmart and Blockbuster are never coming back.

Moreover, it has been well documented that for years that the majority of Chinese students hogging up spots at Berkeley, Michigan and MIT have submitted fabricated transcripts, ghost written essays and augmented test scores. Meanwhile, Duke University was just caught falsifying research data in an effort to purloin $200 million in grant funding from the Feds.  That fraudsters get into institutions that themselves swindle is by no means disturbing; it’s rather fitting (recall:  Harvard’s cheating scandal of 2012).  Think of it as an apprenticeship.  Plumbers plumb. Masons lay.  Cheaters cheat.

Admittedly, some things have changed.  Women, despite the utter defenselessness implied by the #MeToo zeitgeist, are starting to find equal footing with men (see paragraph two).  They are running a plethora of Fortune 500 companies from General Motors to Lockheed Martin to Occidental Petroleum to IBM.  They comprise 102 Members of the House and seat 25 in the Senate. There are 2 ½ distaff Justices on the Supreme Court (Ruth Bader Ginsburg admirably clings on with most of one lung and only a small segment of colon intact) while women head up both the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA.  Today, women can be fighter pilots, firefighters and astronauts.

In point of fact, Anne McClain and Christina Koch were scheduled to walk out of the International Space Station this morning to change the batteries (a man’s job, no?) on the orbiting solar array, but NASA couldn’t figure out how to make two spacesuits that would fit the gals.  But here’s the silver lining for the rebuffed; recent studies have shown that space travel is causing herpes.   Scientists are blaming suppressed immune responses compromised by G-forces and radiation, and elevated levels of stress hormones spurred by confinement and a jumbled sleep cycle.  But they have it all wrong.  Back in 2011 I shared what rogue cosmologists theorized as spatial collapse wherein the extra spacetime dimensions that are required for string theory to hold are converging.  Parallel universes are unifying and, as such, we are at risk for melding into our doppelgangers.  It’s those fuckers who got into some dirty snatch with Han Solo at the Mos Eisley Cantina.  So for all you brave souls who volunteer to fulfill Mike Pence’s edict of returning to the moon, you can always blame that fulminating ulcer gnarling your genitals on that other you from Centarus A.