Apathy Barbie

Sorry if I seem down, it’s just I saw Lady Gaga’s Nurtec commercial yesterday against my will for the second time. Once you see that ad unplanned, there’s no reason to believe things are going to be okay. She’s not the only celeb to tap dance for Pfizer, of course. Khloe K, Taylor Swift’s boyfriend have collected their pharma doubloons. I am a tried and true Lil’ Monster, though. My paws have been up since ‘09. I guess I expect more from Ms. Gagz, which is unfair of me.

Lady Gaga: Actual Patient

If you expect anything of a celebrity, you are probably mentally ill. You could say the same thing about Los Angeles. You can’t count on it. It is a city without an identity, where everyone is living parallel to each other; toddlers on a playground. LA is a lava lamp; Angelenos bump off each other in a holding pattern. LA doesn’t commit. It doesn’t exclude. It just is there, a background city. And that’s a beautiful thing. More cities should aspire to be an amoeba of formless dread. You can’t be disappointed by a place that doesn’t care. LA doesn’t care in a different way than how New York doesn’t care. New York throws egg on your face, then apologizes while trying not to laugh. It offers you a hug that you accept stiffly. Its apathy is wry and knowing. You’re in on the joke with New York. You can’t help but smirk back. LA’s apathy is cosmic. It is an uncaring God.

Gaga doesn’t care that her migraine ad scares me. And she shouldn’t. She needed another house. Good for her. We need to stop caring about these things. Hillary Clinton should not be tweeting about Barbie as an allegory for her losing the election in 2016. You see, Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig didn’t get nominated for Best Actress and Best Director Oscars, respectively, and people in all four corners of the Earth are mad. Mad as Hell! That’s when Hillary (whatever gay working for her) decided to weigh in with arguably the worst tweet in years.

I want to be excluded from this narrative, Hillary! You lost! Sorry, doll. We voted for you and you lost! This tweet has Big Loser Energy. Don’t be a loser! Be cool. Go smoke weed out of an apple in the woods of Chappaqua, please! Go to a casino in Connecticut with Mary Steenburgen and spend $6000. Have your driver do donuts in the empty parking lot of a HomeGoods while you listen to Martha Wainwright. This is what I want for her! That’s what I expect from her. But I guess I’m a loser for caring about Hillary tweeting about Barbie, or having expectations of her at all. Just like I shouldn’t have faith in Lady Gaga not doing ads for big pharma, just like I shouldn’t have faith in Los Angeles; I should also not have faith in celebrity politicians not taking an opportunity to make something unrelated completely about them. I hope Hillary doesn’t read this. Please don’t have me killed. I’m kidding. I don’t think she has killed. At least in a while. I’m kidding again! I really am.

We have to laugh! There is no more laughter. There is hope in laughter, and I have to try to have hope. It’s hard to be optimistic when you see things like this:

Brain worms is used too much these days. I think lead poisoning vibes is better. Isn’t that how Rome fell? Everyone got lead poisoning and made shitty decisions? We are in our Lead Poisoning era. Only three weeks into 2024, and it already feels like the year is over. I’m not surprised. 2024 has already been written off as bad. Let’s just fast forward through it, people say. When did we start personifying years? Giving them personality disorders? We ascribe power to numerical years now. Neoliberal medieval regression. We all need to grow up. Let’s just assume every year from here on out will be worse than before — fascist elections and en masse death included — and then maybe it will get better.

There are far too many atmospheric rivers for optimism, anyway. San Diego flooded earlier in the week. I saw a video of a pair of young people fleeing from their family home in waist-deep floodwater. One of them took the opportunity to film their escape on their phone and post it to social media, as any reasonable young person does in 2024. And why wouldn’t they? No one is talking about flooding in San Diego! More people talked about Ellen’s horses being evacuated during the Great Montecito Floods of 2023. More people talked about Hillary Clinton’s tweet about Barbie. I am more people. If you don’t post a phone video showing a freak, unprecedented flood washing away your neighborhood in San Diego, did it really happen?