imagine yourself back in 2009. it’s a great year. soulja boi is finally on a decline and obama is rubbing his balls all over the oval office. we’d only been in the middle east for eight years and we are definitely getting out soon.

you and your friends go out to The Club(tm). you’re sipping an $8 water ’cause you’re the designated driver and that shitstain customer-fucking app UBER hasn’t been invented yet. your friends are getting pretty… what was the cool thing to say before “lit”? fuck. your friends are getting pretty turnt? whatever, you get it.

you’re yelling into the ear of some girl at the bar who’s trying to get the attention of the bartender from out of field goal range. you’re explaining how it’s bullshit that you even have to take geography as a lower division course, you’re an american. your friends have long-since abandoned your sober ass, no one wants to talk right now. the music’s loud enough to make you sterile. and then it happens:

the dj plays “shots” by LMFAO featuring lil’ jon.

time slows around you as your words trail off. you turn and see your friends with their drinks on the dance floor, dancing next to the “no drinks on the dance floor” sign. suddenly, lil’ jon is screaming. does he have any delivery besides screaming? “if you ain’t gettin’ drunk… get the fuck out the club. if you ain’t takin’ shots… get the fuck out the club. if you ain’t come to party… get the fuck out the club.”

your friends turn to you during lil’ jon’s verse and sing the soulful poetry directly at you and your $11 water (supply and demand at work). now what do you do? you were supposed to drive these numb fucks home, and now they’re siding with mr. jon? are they telling you to get the fuck out the club? you DID come to party, but you’re ain’t takin’ shots. you ain’t gettin’ drunk. is there leniency for fulfilling one of three of mr. jon’s requirements for being in the club?

suddenly hostile, this once peaceful club is now a battleground. your ears ringing, you turn to order a shot of anything at the bar but the bartender is napping and the girl you were yelling into is now trying to use a ouija board to place her drink order. you and your water are no longer welcome here. you stumble out of the club, fearful for your life. your friends are forced to drive home drunk and are abducted by aliens. they are never the same.

now i ask, would any of this happened if mr. jon had practiced some inclusivity? would it really be so hard to scream, “if you are having fun / stay the fuck in the club”? we need to have a serious discussion about gatekeeping. unfortunately, we’re all out of time for today, so we will be postponing this discussion until further notice. until we have mediated the proper legal boundaries, please stay the fuck in the club.

[SCENE OPENS. ESTABLISHING SHOT: SOME BEACH, IDK WHEREVER IS EASIEST TO GET TO IN RUSH HOUR]

[DETECTIVE DUDE shreds gnar on a sick wave before riding the tide onto the sand where he steps off and unzips his wetsuit to reveal a smart, professional suit underneath. He sheds the wetsuit with the board and walks a few feet to the crime scene.]

DETECTIVE DUDE: so what have we got here detective?

[DETECTIVE BRO pushes his shoulder-length dreads out of his eyes so he can read his notes]

DETECTIVE BRO: looks like a homicide. this guy was walking his labra-doodle on the beach when some gnarly homeless person probably stabbed him with a needle when he wouldn’t venmo him some change. there’s no way this guy died of the cold, he’s dressed perfectly for socal in the winter.

[SHOW: STYLISH CORPSE. YOUNG WHITE MALE, MID-20’S. CULTURALLY INAPPROPRIATE RASTAFARIAN BEANIE SITS PERFECTLY ON HIS BLOND HAIR. HE WEARS A BILLABONG T-SHIRT COVERED BY A HALF-ZIPPED LIGHT JACKET, RVCA BRAND. HIS JEANS OBVIOUSLY WERE PRE-RIPPED AT PURCHASE, NOT LIKE THOSE GNARLY HOMELESS WHO RIPS THEIR JEANS ACCIDENTALLY BECAUSE THEY ONLY HAVE LIKE, ONE PAIR. HIS FLIP FLOPS ARE HIGH QUALITY TOMMY BAHAMA, NOT RAINBOWS LIKE ALL THOSE OTHER POSERS.]

DETECTIVE BRO: it had to be one of those gnarly homeless guys, only homeless people and minorities commit crimes.

[DETECTIVE DUDE TAKES LIT JOINT OUT OF CORPSE’S MOUTH AND TOKES IT]

DETECTIVE DUDE: but why would a gnarly homeless not rip this grass?

[STYLISH CORPSE WAKES UP FROM NAP]

NAPPING GUY: bro not cool, get your own.

DETECTIVE BRO: nah brah it wasn’t me, it was dude.

DETECTIVE DUDE (HITTING THAT SHIT ONE MORE TIME): it looks like our guy was… (PUTS ON RAY-BAN AVIATORS) sleeping.

[“YEAAAHHH” THEME SONG]

one of their new ads is just a guy screaming at 1.5x the volume of any song they have available for streaming. well played, you fucking anarchists. and thanks for recording that interview with interpol so quiet that i had to hook up my speakers to a megaphone. that was a good way to introduce me to your new screaming ad campaign. that ad took 14 minutes off my life. i’ll remember that when i’m dying earlier 14 minutes earlier.

do you think if the roman empire had online fillable forms that required you to fill in your country, that they’d put the “aaron republic of aarons” at the top of the dropdown menu? FUCK OFF, they’d put “the goddamn roman empire” at the top of the list because they’re the fucking shit and they know it. so why is it that when i’m filling out shit on this website of my very specifically california institution of higher education, i go to fill out my country and goddamn afganistan is the first choice?

you really think i have time to scroll all the way down to the “U’s” to find the united states of america? don’t fucking fuck me like this, university. i’m trying to fill out this form so i can pay almost THREE-HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS FOR A SEMESTER OF PARKING and you wanna TEST me like that? fuck you, I’M from afganistan now. i’m wasting four seconds scrolling through countries that i honestly don’t even think exist. a country called “chad”? that’s not real.

now you’re probably thinking, “wait, i know you peter and you only love two things: inclusivity, and a well-documented, alphabetically ordered list”. well guess what fuckstick, i guess you don’t know me then. if i hadn’t dumped thousands of dollars into this university already, i would quit out of protest. and you know what the worst part is? there’s probably one fucking student at my university who’s actually from afganistan and has a car that they need to register for a parking permit, and i don’t even get to see the joy on their face when they go to fill out their billing address and their home nation of “afganistan” is the first available coutnry for selection. show me that joy, and MAYBE i’ll stop yelling.

“oh good” you say to yourself, reading this blog. “another white male mansplaining feminism.”

well FUCK you ’cause apparently if i don’t care, then i’m considered to be “part of the problem”, but when i speak up i’m “uneducated,” “ignoratn,” and “primary knowledge of women comes from watching scarlet johanson as black widow.” there’s no pleasing you motherfuckers. so instead of applying my unique skills to yet another mansplanation, i’ll be applying my flawless logic knowledge to calculate the trajectory of feminism, using music and pop culture.

so without further a dudes, let me pull up wikipedia and start researching as i write this: back in the 50’s and 60’s music was made by primarily white males (crazy how far we’ve come) who all sang about forcing some young poor girl to dance with them or not-so-vaguely threatening them with physical harm should they not love them back. buddy holly (RIP), the beatles (RIP), and elvis (RIP?) all wrote songs of this kind, and teens of the 1950s ate that shit up because men wore tight pants and apparently it was perfectly acceptable to backhand a woman if she didn’t agree with you? christ.

well along comes aretha franklin singing “respect” in 1967 and getting all the tight-pants men fuming. i must admit, i owe my 100% success rate spelling “respect” to aretha. i googled “songs for women by women” and all 1,784,960 results were “respect” by aretha franklin, so it’s safe to say that it’s an important song. BUT THEN. disaster struck in the form of bonnie tyler and footloose. what have you done, bonnie. ol’ bon sings the song “holding out for a hero” seemingly as a direct atttempt to retcon all the positive social change that aretha made, like disney did when they bought star wars and melted all the gold of the expanded universe to make a solid gold cock ring for kathleen kennedy.

now “holding out for a hero” never reached the popularity or timelessness that “respect” did, and thank fucking god for that. but it definitely put it into the minds of incels everywhere that women, in fact, do need a white knight to save them. as footloose faded into “shitty 80s movie that started a much better acting career” obscurity, “holding out for a hero” disappeared into the dark, anti-empowerment night… that is, until shrek.

no one really expected a terribly animated movie starring mike myers, eddie murphy, and fart jokes to change the trajectory of modern culture, but maybe it’s part of the reason why we haven’t been allowed to make contact with intelligent life in the universe. so shrek was a runaway success that spawned an international musical (yes, really), a wikipedia page dedicated to shrek video games, and most importantly, a fucking sequel. and believe or not (i didn’t either) shrek 2 was the highest grossing animated film of all time until toy story 3 came out. and what fucking song did shrek 2 use for the final rescue scene? yeah, it wasn’t aretha franklin.

so the highest grossing animated film of the time revitalizes “holding out for a hero” like a necromancer raising a corpse from the dead, but the corpse was buried in a manure field. and now it’s the mid-2000s and you’ve got aretha vs. shrek fighting for the fate of women of everywhere for all time. pitting shrek against a song from the 1960s certainly seemed like an unfair fight for the time, but shockingly… shrek didn’t hold up well over time. huh. so the title goes to ARETHA FRANKLIN EVERYBODY, GIVE IT UP FOR ARETHA. fuck you, shrek.

so aretha franklin and “respect” won out over shrek in the end. good news, women: you’re free. this white male says so.

0: this is off. in southern california this is where my wipers remain for 98.65% of the year until the desert sun melts them and they become one with my windshield.

1 click: this is for light rain, aka drizzle (fun fact: also a word invented and patented by snoop dogg). the wipers will “make an appearance” like you did at your coworker’s birthday party before dipping out early and getting on with your life. it will then check in same time next year, never really doing its job but i guess they’re trying.

2 clicks: we now go live to our weatherman on the ground. chad, how are we looking out there?
OH TODD WE’RE FUCKED AS ALL HELL OUT HERE, SHIT IS FUCKED. THESE CATS AND DOGS ARE BLOWING SIDEWAYS AND FUCKING EACH OTHER ON THE WAY DOWN FROM THE CLOUDS. IF YOU HAVE A HOME THAT SITS ON GROUND, PUT YOUR KIDS IN THE HAMPER AND GET TO PADDLING ‘CAUSE SOLID EARTH IS BUT A MEMORY IN WATERWORLD. BACK TO YOU TODD.
thanks chad.

3 CLICKS: DESIGNED TO CLEAR WATER FROM YOUR WINDSHIELD IN THE EVENT THAT YOU DRIVE INTO A WAVE POOL AT YOUR LOCAL WATERPARK.

4 CLICKS: BREAKS YOUR WINDSHIELD IMMEDIATELY.

flan. people eat this terrifing dessert like its not a gelatinous puddle that you’d find in a pothole in denver. someone presumably found the aliens from invasion of the bodysnatchers and baked the slime with some pumpkin or some shit to make it look like other, actually edible deserts. how people enjoy this shit is beyond me. how we haven’t made flan illegal yet is beyond me.

they can’t even bother to spell it like it sounds. flon sounds like a noise that an ET-type alien would make in another godforsaken paint by numbers stephen spielburg family fuckfest movie, and then the kids would name the cute little slime “flan” but pronounce it flonn because they spell like idiot kids. and then the mom would find flan and scream and hide in terror but the kids, finally outed, would explain to their mom that they found flan in a pothole in denver while riding their product placement bikes, and that its harmless and can do a fun trick, like squirting flan juice down the back of your throat or some shit.

then the mom falls in love with flan and helps the kids hide the flan from the FBI when they show up inexplicably. but the mom hides flan in the oven and accidentally cooks flan. and now i’m forced to try some when people come over and bring this bullshit like it’s acceptable party food. have you people heard of brownies? everyone likes brownies, and they don’t sit in a puddle of their own alien juices either. fuck outta here.

remember when you were young and had everything figured out, and death was a concept that seemed so foriegn until tony stark died in endgame and you were like “oh so THIS is pain?” yeah, i don’t really remember that feeling either, or even what the fuck i was thinking the last time i had things under control because, spoiler alert (yes, after the endgame spoiler, fuck you) i didn’t actually have things under control. but i’ve noticed that young people’s flippent attitude toward death and all things precious in life can be directly tracked by how they treat the things they have around them. specifically, how people hang out with their friends throughout their lives.

so in order to get an idea of what your mental age might be, i created this handy guide to hanging out with friends:

ages 0-13: what are consequences? at this age, i wanted to see how hard i could hit my friends with sticks during our swordfights, or alternatively, how hard i could throw rocks at them during our rock fights. if we weren’t at school, we were at home either fighting via video games or fighting via fighting.

ages 14-20: holy shit we can have experiences. drugs actually make you cool? you mean some drugs aren’t actually dangerous when used in moderation? well fuck moderation. if you’re hanging out with friends primarily at school before going to a house and meticulously stamping out every detail you learned at school that day with video games and weed, you might be in high school. and yes, until you turn 21, you’re still in high school, because ALL YOU NEW FUCKING KIDS IN COLLEGE STILL ACT LIKE KIDS. LIFE DOESN’T REVOLVE AROUND YOU.

ages 21-25: WOO! WHAT? I SAID WOO! SORRY, IT’S JUST SO LOUD IN HERE. I KNOW RIGHT, WHY ARE WE EVEN TALKING?
at this point in life, your “friends” are just the people who consistently show up when you’re ready to get adult wasted. loud noises. dancing in clubs and bars. going to raves, if you’re into accidentally hitting on underage chicks (looking at you, sean, you fucking freak).

ages 26-39?: all of a sudden, your best friends who survived high school and whatever you did after are married and/or pregnant. you probably are an uncle or godparent, and you still don’t have shit figured out. you start contemplating death like a weird mannequin that seems to move a little closer when you look away but you’re still like “nah, that ain’t real.” hanging out with friends probably comes in the form of coffee shops and low-key bars (“i can’t stand clubs, like all it is is loud music and sweaty douchebags grinding each other.”)

age 40? until you sit in front of a TV 24/7 and shit yourself: “friends” are now those people who live in close enough proximity to you to share activities with. maybe your kids’ friends’ parents are nice enough to tolerate for more than an hour, so you smile at them from time to time. hanging out with friends mostly involves running into each other at the grocery store and talking for 40 minutes, all the while BLOCKING THE BRAND OF BAGELS THAT I LIKE, THIS IS WHAT REALLY FUCKING PISSES ME OFF YOU ASSHOLES GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY, THESE AISLES ARE NOT THAT WIDE FOR ALL YOUR FAT ASSES AND CARTS TO BE PARKED SIDE BY SIDE. ALL I WANT IS TO GO DOWN THE AISLE AND GET RIGATONI AND GET THE FUCK OUT ‘CAUSE I HATE ALL OF YOU. I DON’T CARE WHAT BRENDA DID AND GOOD FOR JIM FOR LEAVING ANNETTE BECAUSE SHE WAS JUST SO ICKY, FLIRTING WITH THOSE CHURCH USHERS EVERY SUNDAY. SHUT THE FUCK UP. MOVE. I NEED ALMOND MILK. FUCK.

i can’t really be mad at every good band ever for using gildan brand shirts, they’re cheap and god knows you can’t afford high-quality merch when spotify literally pays you with three pennies that they just sucked on. but GODDAMMIT can’t i just rep some dope-ass bands without my bellybutton catching wafting pollen on a summer breeze? gildan’s slogan should be “forcing you to fix your farmer’s tan one wear at a time.”

one halloween when i was a wee lad fresh out of high school, my friend and i bought cheap white tees from target and covered them in corn syrup and red dye for our zombie costumes. what we didn’t realize was that the syrup, wehn dried, created a hard surface not unlike plate armor worn by virgins who cosplay their life-consuming warhammer 40k cosplays at the convention center in victorville, california. this plate of dried corn syrup was such an atrocity committed upon our teenage nipples that people were asking us how we got that dripping blood effect for our costumes and how spooky it was. that is what its like wearing a gildan brand t-shirt.

i’ve worn a cardboard stormtrooper outfit that fit better than my brand new descendents t-shirt. i wore that thing once and then it shrunk until i gave up and donated it to a goodwill specifically for small dogs. i wish it were some deep, punk statement about the fleeting quality of material possessions, or the follies of capitalism, but TBH i think it was just an embarassing quality shirt that shrank even as i took it off and threw it in the hamper. fuck you gildan, you’re the reason i have trust issues. that, and my dad bailing when i was 11, but mostly it’s your fault.

before we begin, let me just say that THIS IS NOT a rant about how everyone seemingly has anxiety nowadays (although i would venture to say that y’all need nihilism more than jesus, get yer fuckin’ life in perspective people, fuck). but i need you to position yourself so you can see yourself in a reflective surface when you read this. and IF and/OR WHEN this post applies to you, i need you to look at yourself in said surface and say out loud, “i’m a twat”.

now that you’re within mirror distance, let’s move on. so what is it with every dumbass who is even slightly organized identifying as OCD? organized desktop on your work computer? “oh hee hee i’m so OCD.” put your shopping cart in the corral in the parking lot? “sorry, i’m just so OCD ha ha.” you have NO IDEA WHAT OCD IS.

and i know what you’re thinking, oh shit, peter do you have OCD? NO i fucking don’t but i CAN use google and don’t use hyperbole to excuse my cleanliness to acquaintances by pretending to have a life-altering disorder. yeah, maybe me defending OCD is akin to mansplaining or a white guy getting pissed that IT’S 2019 AND WE STILL HAVE PROFESSIONAL SPORTS TEAMS CALLED THE INDIANS AND THE FUCKING REDSKINS, but it pisses me off so here i go competing in the 100m Rant in the Angry Olympics.

anyway, this isn’t really a fun rant like we usually share. i’ll get back to fun rants the next time someone almost kills me while driving. so yeah, give me about three hours.