“A red sun rises, blood has been spilled this night.” – The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
I knew my kid was creepy when she asked for an Edgar Allen Poe-ny.
Today we were at the local diner having a brulinner. It wasn’t just brunch, because it also included dinner. Regardless of what we call it, it was in the back room of the diner because we had a larger party, and still wanted a table rather than a booth. The Mrs. never lets me pick a booth because I always ask the waitress if it’s the John Wilkes Booth.
It makes me cry inside when the waitress cannot get the joke.
Pugsley noted that the room was in some disrepair, having last been remodeled about a decade ago. Of course, it would be easier to shut that room up and remodel it. Or, better yet, leave it for posterity 100 years ago, complete with packets of Sweet ‘n’ Low® from 1999 that I may or may not have managed to throw into the diner’s light fixture to amuse The Mrs. (It’s amazingly easy to throw a packet of Sweet ‘n’ Low™ into a low hanging fixture, even in a room filled with people. It just takes timing. You should try it.)
But faced with the idea of being walled up inside the room?
When your parents ask where your third-grade teacher went . . .
The Mrs. and I both thought of the same thing, that they would probably wall us in just like in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.
We discovered early in our relationship that we both have Amontillado as our go-to Poe reference. There’s nothing more fun than the idea of a person being walled up in a dungeon forever. How to make that better? Being walled up in the back room of a diner forever.
As much as we both enjoy The Cask of Amontillado, I think that there’s a more appropriate Poe piece for today: The Masque of the Red Death. Whereas Amontillado has all of the great humor of a man chained to a wall being walled up inside another wall, The Masque of the Red Death (I read the comic book version when I was seven) has a different setting:
Partying while the end of the world is taking place outside. Spoiler alert: it’s Poe, and the mystery guest at the party? Death.
The Masque of the Blue Screen of Death.
Right now it feels more than a little bit like Poe’s party.
What are some of the data points on what’s going on outside the party?
Many “vaxx” deadlines are coming up. Police are not taking it, firefighters are not taking it. Nurses and doctors? Not taking it.
The result? Emergency services are operating at an even lower level in big cities. Sure, that’s exactly what New York City or Chicago needs, since the residents there are already so perfectly behaved and rarely injure other people or incinerate themselves.
Oops.
I never made it past the interview stage in my firefighter interview. “Fight fire with fire” is apparently not the answer they were looking for.
In Modern Mayberry (so far) there are no mandates. If you need an ambulance ride, you get one. It’s hard to get pulled over here, because (for the most part) cops don’t spend a lot of time sitting in the 25 MPH zone to give you a ticket for doing 28 MPH.
- Plane flights? These are being canceled by the thousands. Why? Pilots don’t want “the jab” either. Companies are dropping Federal contracts so they don’t have to comply.
- Illegal aliens temporarily separated from family at the border? Biden wants to give them more money (up to $450,000 per person, tax-free) than is given to a soldier killed in the line of duty who has paid-up insurance.
- The Secretary of Transportation says . . . that disruptions in supplies won’t end until everyone is “vaccinated”. Strangely, no one said, “falsely claimed” or “claimed without evidence” since both of those would apply.
- Inflation? Happening everywhere, and with everything.
- Political collapse? FJB and the phrase that everyone can say, “Let’s Go Brandon” are showing a direct rejection by over half of the populace against a deeply unpopular president with no real support – i.e., there were exactly zero votes for Biden, only votes against Trump.
Poe only had seven rooms at the party, so I’ll end with six bullet points.
As much as Poe’s work was fiction when he wrote it, if I were to have suggested any of these a decade ago (with the exception of inflation) in a fiction novel, people would have called it unrealistic. This isn’t the script for a happy ending. This is the script for a collapse.
I’ve long predicted (you can check) that COVID would provide a script where the ripples of the ‘Rona would reverberate through the economy and political world for years, if not decades. Those ripples are here and now. Energy prices have whipsawed from historically low to high.
Energy? More on that in a future post, since energy alone has a special place in the fate of humanity. But high energy costs in the short term are devastating.
He must be fun at parties.
I keep looking for happy things, but reality seems to keep intruding. While we haven’t seen the darkest moment of this cycle, most of the things out there seem to be tracking downward. This reminds me of the seventh room in Poe’s story. That’s where Death joined the party. To me? That sounds creepy.
I’d prefer to skip The Masque of the Red Death. I’d much rather be walled into the back dining room at the diner in The Cask of Wilder’s Brulinner. At least they have infinite refills on iced tea and coffee.
I think Lars has the right idea. It’s just his viewpoint that needs adjusting. Take out that troublesome “un” and I could go along with it, at least in his case.
That sounds like a good start . . .
Actually, “Let’s Go Brandon!” is a dedication to ISIS. Who knew?
https://summit.news/2021/11/01/cnn-analyst-compares-pilots-lets-go-brandon-quip-to-declaration-of-support-for-isis/
Ha! Yes, One cannot make fun of his pootulancy.
I looooove Lars McMurtry’s idea, and I sincerely wish the CDC would adopt it.
Because then, I’d have unequivocal crate blanche to kill every one of those m*****f*****s without any compunction of hesitation whatsoever, and then pay Lars the visit he so richly deserves after that.
And then we would get back to normal life.
Without him or without him.
And then he’d be a Good Communist, just like Che.
And someday, I could join my fathers, in whose mighty company I would not feel ashamed.
It was for people like Lars that helicopters were invented.
At least they suspended Lars, you know it has to be egregious to get the Twitter Stasi to act.
Yup. Well, egregious with Leftist opinions . . . .
Aesop, save some for the rest of us. Don’t be greedy. 🙂
I don’t want all of them.
I don’t have that many bullets.
I just want to make sure that once the party starts, I don’t miss out because they’re all gone after the second volley.
As Captain Sherman noted in Operation Petticoat, “That’s like a beautiful woman dying an old maid“.
Lars is dead. The tweet is a little ironic.
Is he? I can’t find a reference on that one . . . I do know that Twitter suspended him.
John, there comes a point at which dictatorships (which is certainly what it feels to me that we are in) have more and more difficulty papering over the increasing gaps that impact people in their daily lives. Fortunately for us, the Current Occupants are going down the road that most dictatorships do when faced with reality: prevaricate, blame, make grandiose statements. Things like “Inflation is temporary”, “we will just have to wait for that treadmill”, “we are working to resolve fuel prices” – and my now personal favorite “The supply chain issue will continue until vaccinations improve” – all of these advertises their incompetence to a larger and larger audience.
Things have to get much worse before people will finally act to make them better.
As obvious as your good points are to those of us who already see it, there is still a distressingly large group of people that just continues to refuse to get it…..
Poor Joe – he didn’t even get his Hugo Chavez years.
“It makes me cry inside when the waitress cannot get the joke.”
Maybe it’s just because she’s not Abe-l.
I blame the author. When waitresses don’t get a joke told 4 score and 7 times, it’s not the joke it’s you.
Ha! I agree with Norm Macdonald. “A joke is when something unexpected happens. If you tell a joke and no one laughs, that’s unexpected.”
I don’t tell ’em all for other people.
Nice. I see what you did there.
With COVID mandates walling people in to rot a la Poe, it’s a good time to review this article on freedom vs. liberty, positive vs. negative rights, and how widespread acceptance of French philosopher Rousseau’s flawed take on all these topics has fueled not only the 18th Century French Revolution but also the “political logic” behind vaccine passports that are well on their way to kick off the 21st Century American one.
https://ammo.com/articles/freedom-liberty-difference-understanding-negative-vs-positive-rights
An excellent reminder . . .
The only weapon we have (short of actual violence) is mockery…
Let’s Go Brandon!
I love how this is spreading everywhere. It’s delicious in so many ways: it’s clean; it came from the Left themselves; and it’s driving them insane. I don’t think it will ever stop until **Brandon** is gone, and it might just live on.
That said, mockery alone won’t fill the larder, or end the Ro hysteria, or restore the Rule of Law. We’re living in Post-Constitutional America, and we’re pretty much effed.
But today? Today wasn’t so bad.
Nobody is addressing the primary problem here.
Brulinner? No my friend. Put the term down and back away. No good comes from this.
The slamming together of up to two meals is inevitable. Therefore, careful thought must be given to the occasion.
The dorks may call it lupper, lunch and supper.
But the cool kids call it linner. Lunch and dinner.
Combining all three has no name, and means you may need more sleep.
Y’all can thank me later.
Well, it was all I had that day. So, should I call it Lea or Coffa?