Real World Mad Libs

I've dabbled with the notion that we're living in a simulation as a thought exercise from time to time. Even wrote about it in these here pixels a while ago. Thought about it a lot more recently, and I've come to what seems to be an inescapable conclusion.

We are, in fact, living in a simulation. But it's more than just a garden-variety matrix. That'd be too simple. No, my friends, we're actually living inside the Mad Libs of a smart, slightly-deranged teenaged god. Think an adolescent Mark Leyner with the power to control an entire universe.

Leyner himself (or perhaps the ur-Leyner that's pulling the strings) has alluded to the reality of our existence in his work. For example, this quote from The Tetherballs of Bougainville: “We have nothing in this life of suffocating obligation but our motherfucking impudence!” Or this bit of worlds within worlds wink and a nod, “Even those who consider all this total bullshit have to concede that it's upscale, artisanal bullshit of the highest order.” 

I could go on. Okay, one more - this, from The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, “fate is the ultimate preexisting condition.”

The case is pretty solid. And our teen god overlord has been on a heater of late. George Santos is a particularly inspired bit of comedyparodypathos. Classified documents strewn across the various living quarters of a succession of senior political leaders, a nice touch, especially the back and forth to the point of stereophonic barking of the partisans on both side. Tucker Carlson going after M&M's for being gay and getting Mars to change the characters' costumes and roll out Maya Rudolph in what has to have been a bit where all the principals dutifully played their parts. Fucking balloons that might be aliens engaging in dogfights with F-22 aircraft all over the North American continent!

The mass shootings, though, that'll bring you back to "reality".