Can I Return My Fuck For Store Credit?

I made a huge mistake. I started to care about the world again.

Blame Star Trek. With all its planetary cooperation, gender equality, and the constant protection of basic human rights. Apparently, we have to turn to science fiction to see these things. You start to fall in love with humanity when you hear Captain Jean-Luc Picard defend the human race.

Picard: “Oh, I know Hamlet. And what he might say with irony, I say with conviction: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god!”

A God: “Surely, you don’t see your species like that, do you?”

Picard: “I see us one day becoming that. Is it that which concerns you?”

Take me now, you beautiful balding bastard.

I’ve recently been looking at the world with a big smile on my face. The space programs are gaining traction, renewable energy is charging forwards, and we’ve even started paying attention to untreated mental health. Great!

Then COVID-19 happened.

With every fear-spreading news story, employee-exploiting company, coughing-on-grocery-store-produce asshole, it was like the Instagram filter peeled away from the world, and the ugly came back.

I gave a fuck, but now I’d like to return it for store credit. I say store credit because there’s no other place to spend my fucks. We only have one store. One planet. One chance. Now I’ve started looking at the world with a disappointment equal only to accidentally dropping one of my AirPods down a sewer grate.

The world lately makes me feel like I’ve just walked into my bathroom to find the bathtub overflowing. Elon Musk and Bill Gates are bailing out the water with buckets, but it’s just making the floor wet and leaking into the apartment downstairs. Everyone else is standing in the flooded tub saluting the flag and whistling the Star-Spangled Banner, hoping to God that their hoarded toilet paper will soak up the problem. And normal people like me are just popping Xanax and waiting patiently for the plugged-in toaster to heat up so we can end it all.

Maybe once we get rid of the coronavirus, we can make headway on the plague that never seems to go away, stupidity.

This “I gotta get mine” mentality needs to die. And I think Mother Nature agrees.

Reporter: “Can I ask you about your decision to go to church, to be inside that building?”

Idiot: “I wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

Reporter: “Aren’t you concerned you could infect other people if you get sick inside? People that don’t go to this church.”

Idiot: “No. I’m covered in Jesus’s blood.”

This is a real conversation. From a real human being. Who votes. WHO. VOTES. Fuck everyone else, right?

I’m no saint, but I’m also not the type of asshole who sees people dying globally from a pandemic then decides to hold the church service anyways. Or, arguably worse, be the type of asshole who attends it.

I’m not someone who pretends to be good because I’m worried about my mortal soul finally giving S&M torture a try in Hell for eternity. The reason I act like a decent human being is that I like my sleep at night. Anything I did that’s bad enough to keep me up for longer than 30-minutes is off the table. Who knows, maybe these politicians peddling fake medications and lies, fly up into the rafters and sleep peacefully at night, hugged tightly by their giant black bat wings. If the day ever comes when we decide to eat the rich, we’ll need to be careful we don’t start another pandemic.

What if the next president used to be a university professor who had decided to quit to run a bookstore. Or a former intensive care unit doctor who had to retire because they cared too much. I’d even take a president shouting down the hall to postpone the briefing by five minutes so they can finish this game of Mario Kart with their kid. You know, real people. Not these hollowed-out human husks were stuck with who look around the room to see when everyone else smiles so they can emulate the emotion.

Everyone I’ve ever met has been a decent human being. Not perfect, but certainly not someone who might launch a nuke out of anger or drone strike a helpless village. We’re all people who just want to live well and maybe travel the world once in a while. Or so I thought.

The same people who are praising grocery store employees for being on the front lines are the same people who will complain next month that the minimum wage is too high. I’m sitting with groups of people nodding my head as we complain about how rampant unemployment is, then staring wide-eyed with concern as everyone starts shouting down the idea of U.B.I. I feel like I’m on crazy pills, and it’s not just the Xanax.

Call me an optimist or an idiot, but I picture a world of the future. Livestreams are all E-sports and shuttle launches. This week on Moon Walkers, astronaut Sally Daniels uses her seven botany degrees to try and grow pomegranates in a crater, while the rest of the team mines an asteroid made entirely of fucks for the world to give. I’m sitting at home writing my book and sipping a coffee, while my neighbor paints on her balcony because all our jobs have been automated. Capitalism just sort of died off because people started working on themselves instead of making money and now the government just takes care of us. Anything better than the dumpster fire of a society that we’re living in right now.

Who haven’t I attacked yet? Tiny dogs. Fuck tiny dogs. How did we get from a wolf to this eye-bulging little shit? In all seriousness, what the fuck are we doing lately?

The world’s on fire, we’re being ravaged by a pandemic, and everyone’s walking around with a scowl on their face because their team didn’t win this year’s Super Bowl Election Cycle. Can we all just be nice to each other?

I’m just a guy watching Star Trek reruns with a toaster and a full prescription. I don’t have all the answers, but I don’t need a license to know when someone is driving down the wrong side of the road.

Get your shit together, humanity.

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If you’d like to read more from the guy with the toaster:

24 Songs You've Never Heard of To Get You Through an Isolated Day

The Best Things About Being a Quarantined Introvert Abroad