RuPaul is building a bunker, and Kate Middleton has gone missing. One of these things is definitely confirmed. RuPaul is taking things to a place of societal collapse. He said so while promoting his forthcoming memoir “The House of Hidden Meanings.” He’s fortifying his compound in Wyoming for him and his hot rancher husband with morally ambiguous wealth to ride out the civil war he believes is imminent. Everyone is always mad at Ru for something. He exists in contradictions, from the fracking to his searing pessimism for the future, despite his tireless crusade to register young voter, drenched in 2018 neoliberalism; voting for what, at this point, I don’t know. He probably understands that. His winking positivity has always seemed to mask a weary, almost supernatural melancholy. I can appreciate that conflict. We don’t have many mysterious celebrities left. Ru has always been a mystery, at least to me. When I first saw him in The Brady Bunch Movie, glistening poolside in the California sun, I remember thinking, This is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know what drag was then, but I knew Ru was cosmic. I felt the same way when I saw him waiting for a smoothie at Whole Foods, a few months after I’d moved to LA. He wore a camo green jumpsuit and sunglasses and everyone around him, including me, kept their distance. It was the only thing you could do, aside from offering him some sort of gift.
I imagine in the next decade we’ll watch more and more of our stars slip into the expanse, away from all of us, away from the weather and gore. And people will take to X formerly known as Twitter to complain and tattletale while walking to work waist-deep in floodwater. What are we expecting to them to do? Wait around with the rest of us in solidarity? No one in the Middle Ages could have anticipated how scaldingly annoying the apocalypse will be. At least Ru told us her plan, which was also her mistake. She was maybe too honest. Most who can are building their bunkers in silence, save for Mark Zuckerberg, whose subterranean condo building in Hawaii was leaked to the press a few months back. Billionaires are cashing out on their stocks, buying farmland in Northern California to build utopian cities. I won’t miss them. Good riddance, I say! But I will miss Ru when she and her cryptid-tall husband finally leave us to go live out the rest of their days on the Plains, preferably with no internet.
Hopefully wherever Kate Middleton is right now, she doesn’t have internet, either. I pray her reason for exiting society is not as dire as it now seems to be. The speculation that it was some sort of cosmetic procedure gone wrong shattered as quickly as that demented photoshop hit social media on Sunday, and catapulted us further into the Outer Realms of reliability, where culture is currently careening off the edge of truth, into the deep gulf of conspiracy and distortion. It’s easy to believe that Kate’s absence, originally explained as “abdominal surgery,” is potentially another diversion in a long line of diversions from a monarchy in its death rattle whose sole purpose in this world is buttressing the state and hurling women into an event horizon of pain. A diversion from what, is hard to say: the supposed philandering and temper of her Slenderman-ass spouse or whatever morbid strangeness has befallen her hot dog-fingered father-in-law. Or something even more surreal and profoundly dark. We don’t know.
The Princess of Wales issued this statement following the global guffaw.
This humiliating plea for forgiveness, barely in a human voice, most likely the work of a stressed staffer directed to impersonate Kate in begging the world to understand that it was HER who slapped together the unholy family photo, a collage of tartan and turtlenecks and impossibly crossed legs and Kate’s face from either three months ago, or a decade ago, in her continued passion for amateur photography. May God have mercy on that staffer’s soul.
And that unspeakable “C” — standing in for “Catherine, Kate’s Royal name — hangs in space, in degradation. It is alien and uncanny. That C is a thing of nightmares. That C must be sent back to Hell.
I hope Kate is at peace wherever she is, be it in a coma, in a cryogenically sealed tank of liquid nitrogen, along the rolling hills of Tír na nÓg, deeply immersed in the world of body-building, staging a months-long sit-in against William until he gets a hair transplant or at least goes on Propecia, or already living in a bunker of her own. I do wish her well. C
"His winking positivity has always seemed to mask a weary, almost supernatural melancholy." Isn't it true? His persistent, gasping, cackle of a laugh at the unfunniest shit seems so much darker in that context. He supposes he's fooling us all.