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DRUNK MONKEYS IS A Literary Magazine and Film Blog founded in 2011 featuring short stories, flash fiction, poetry, film articles, movie reviews, and more

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ESSAYJohn McCain and The Vampire Fish from the Tangent UniverseM.G. Poe

Photo by Kate Chikina on Unsplash

On election night, November 7, 2016, when ABC Election coverage announced that Donald Trump took Florida, I actually went into the bathroom, closed the door, lowered the toilet lid, sat down, and cried. I know quite a few of us who did the same; we knew something we could not explain, something hitherto unprecedented had just happened. When North Carolina and Ohio went red and finally, Iowa, I wretchedly watched George Stephanopoulos, clearly nonplussed, ask his co-anchoring panel of pundits, “How could this happen when a solid majority of Americans said that Donald Trump wasn’t qualified for the job?”

“If you’re awake, by the way, you’re not having a terrible, terrible dream. Also, you’re not dead and you haven’t gone to hell. This is your life now. This is our country,” reported MSNBC’S Rachel Maddow that same night.

“It’s a different Earth today than it was yesterday,” responded co-anchor Chris O’ Donnell.

This is exactly what happened. We are living on a different Earth than we were before. An Earth on a tangent universe to be precise.

I’ll explain. First you must understand the nature of the multi-universe and know that there are also multiple explanations on multiple dimensions for what happened. The one in which we are living is just one interpretation.

At some point in time, possibly way before the dismal election night returns came in, the order of the time-space continuum flowing through our universe suffered a skipped beat, or a corruption in time. Nobody really knows what happened, when, or how it happened, or why, but just one skipped beat in the flow of the time-space continuum was all it took for a Tangent Universe (TU) to open up and swallow us.

You, reading this now, are really living in an arm of the Primary Universe (PU) within which we used to reside.

If you can imagine all possible universes and series of probable events as a tree with multiple branches and understand that whenever there is an event it causes a split into either one universe where the primary event happened or another in which it did not happen, then you will understand that in the multi-verse there can be an infinite number of splits occurring every single instant, creating different universes with individual atoms arbitrarily splitting in a myriad of different ways at any given time, and on different levels. Sometimes, however, an aberration in the split occurs that causes the creation of a tangent universe instead. The TU has every characteristic of the PU from which it comes, except one. That one exception is its terminal flaw, a glitch in its matrix. A malignancy occurs in the splitting, and the reality created becomes increasingly toxic as it develops until it eventually self-destructs.

The election of Donald Trump was just the apex of such a malignant creation event.

And, this explains why if it seems like you are living a derelict, macabre interpretation of cinema and bad television reality come to life, a hydra cancer, where things seem eerily the same but social schisms, political situations and all manner of daily life’s cause and effect, truth and fiction, are obviously not just tilted sideways, but uncomfortably different, that’s because you are.

Now this doesn’t mean you should sit back and do nothing (Democrats), or cowardly continue hitting balls onto the green with a maniacal Commander-in-Chief while you pretend to the rest of us that what we’re living is normal when you well know it’s not (Lyndsay Graham). And, if you can’t find the chutzpah to be bold and decisive and stand up to tyranny when you recognize it (Mitch McConnell) then just step the hell down, because you’re only making matters worse with your weakness of character. What one should do upon realization of the truth, is act like Arizona Senator Jeff Flake—“Mr. President, I rise today to say: Enough. We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes normal…. We must never regard as 'normal' the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals.”—and Tennessee Senator Bob Corker— “at the end of the day, when [Trump’s] term is over the debasing of our nation, the constant non-truth telling, the name-calling ... the debasement of our nation will be what he'll be remembered most for.”— did, boldly and publically decrying the tyranny of ignorance and evil in front of Congress and the nation. Our responsibility as participants in this fucked and fluky reality is to stay in the game and try to fix it (seriously, Americans, speak out, resist, vote in 2018!) any way we can manage. The unstable nature of a tangent universe is so strong and unpredictable that if it is not tempered and destroyed as soon as possible the whole tangent reality will sink into a black hole and ultimately destroy everything and everyone in it.

Think Donnie Darko.

As taken from the book in the film The Philosophy of Time Travel (PoTT) by Roberta Sparrow, aka Grandma Death, time is usually a stable construct but every now and then the fourth dimension (which is apparently made out of water) gets corrupted. When this happens, it creates a tangent universe which is highly unstable and will only last a few weeks before it collapses upon itself and possibly creating a black hole capable of destroying the primary universe as well.

(Obviously it’s been way over a few weeks. And we’re in big trouble. If the PoTT is to be believed, we can expect to self-destruct at any moment.)

Additionally, according to the PoTT when a TU is created an Artifact will also spontaneously appear. The Artifact is the first evidentiary sign that a TU has been created. The book tells us that they are almost always made out of metal.

On June 10, 2015, The Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported that mysterious giant “vampire fish” fell from the sky repeatedly over the course of two weeks in the Fairbanks, Alaska area, terrifying locals. These fish, arctic lampreys, resemble eels and have disc-like mouths filled with small, sharp teeth. Lampreys use their teeth and tongues to bite through the scales of other fish and feast on their blood. They were found both alive and dead in gardens, streets, driveways, parking lots; one even landed inside a car.

First, that explains the corruption to the Fourth Dimension—fish out of water, and all that.

Second, while not exactly metal, their teeth are real pointy and their mouths are round, and the occurrence is weird, as weird as any of the alternate truths that Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and recently even John Kelly have told us we should believe and not question. Almost as bizarre as the GOP Congresses’ transparent covering up for the President while calling it patriotism in the name of the American people, when in actuality they are only patronizing their special interest groups for money.

In any case, on June 14, 2016, the press broke the news that in an attempt to compromise the 2016 election, the Russians hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail server. On, June 15, just 5 days after the arctic lampreys began to fall from the sky, Donald Trump absurdly announced he was running for president.

Thus, the arctic lampreys, those gruesome vampire fish, are obviously the Artifact, which dropped out of the sky on the day the tangent universe finished fully forming.

Think about it. It makes as much sense as anything Devin Nunes does, Paul Ryan says, Rex Tillerson doesn’t say, Jeff Sessions can’t recall, or President Trump tweets.  

Grandmother Death also tells us in PoTT that when a TU occurs with an Artifact then a Living Receiver must be chosen. This person is picked at random and in most cases, doesn’t even know he is the chosen one. The Living Receiver’s mission is to guide the Artifact out of the TU, so that the tangent universe will disappear and the rest of us can all go back to living normal in the primary universe.

Obviously, this person, whom chapter nine of the PoTT says is in the tangent universe to “ensure the fate of all mankind,” is Arizona’s Senior Senator, John McCain.  I am sure that between cancer treatments and trying to make a GOP Congress remember that people-over-party should be the way of our democratic process and not vice versa, he spends all of his spare time trying to figure out how to get the arctic lampreys back where from they came so we the people can unify with the primary universe once again, and Frank the Rabbit, (Didn’t he have orange hair? Or is that just my imagination?) aka Donald Trump, can go back to wherever the Manipulated Dead go.

Oh, yeah. I forgot to explain the Manipulated Dead.

As Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said when defending  the President’s criticism of NFL players kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police brutality, “I don't think there's much to clarify, it's pretty black and white.”

According to Grandma Death, the Manipulated Dead are even more powerful than the Living Receiver. Their objective, by use of Ensurance Traps, is to get the Living Receiver to follow their path to correcting the timeline of the primary universe by returning the Artifact to the PU. The Manipulated Dead also have some knowledge of the impending disaster. And see, that fits right in, because I have always felt that Donald Trump knows exactly what he is doing. That part of him, the malignant narcissist part, doesn’t give a fucker’s damn if he blows up the world, or tears down Congress, or disenfranchises the rights of the American people, or any other group of people, as long as his ego-self is served. He has set many Ensurance Traps for Senator McCain, (Remember this tweet from @realDonaldTrump: “[McCain] should be defeated in the primaries. Graduated last in his class at Annapolis--dummy!” Or this quote brayed out at the Iowa Family Leadership Summit in 2015: “He's not a real war hero; he's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured.”)

Trump is also apparently excellent at controlling the Manipulated Living, often friends and colleagues of the Living Receiver. The Manipulated Living are prone to irrational, bizarre, and often violent behavior. This is, according to the PoTT, as a result of the unfortunate task they have to endure, which is to assist the Living Receiver in returning the Artifact to the Primary Universe. The Manipulated Living will do anything to save themselves from Oblivion. Just like the House and the Senate.

Live something long enough though, and it becomes your reality.

Have we lived in this distorted tangent universe full of fuzzy thinking, led by Frank, the Orange-headed Rabbit, for too long? Are we getting used to this revolting de-evolution and erosion of our heretofore elegant, globally-admired democratic system and ideals? I mean, Sarah Huckabee Sanders did say, “If you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that's something highly inappropriate.”

Really?

Has asking for the truth from our government officials and questioning its validity become inappropriate to our American constitutional form of government? Who is supposed to be serving whom? And where does their responsibility to answer our questions collide with our responsibility to remain informed and vigilant to corruption? Is this erosion of truth and transparency within our government becoming the new normal for our representative democracy? Has it gotten too late to merge back into the Primary Universe before we self-destruct?

“I think it is safe to say that before Thanksgiving… something’s going to drop with Robert Mueller, Julia Kayyem, national security analyst for CNN said recently. “Every 12 hours we’re dealing with a piece of this story at a pace we haven’t seen…. This is so close to the Oval Office now, if not in the Oval Office, that all of this [dossier news] is just background noise to what Mueller is going to deliver. This is more than an obstruction charge. There is something big underlying the obstruction.”

On October 30, Robert Mueller, head of the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department to oversee the investigation into Russia’s alleged foreign electoral intervention in the 2016 presidential election and its related obstruction matters, (and one of the few people in Washington who seems as yet untouched by the warp energy of the TU) indicted Donald Trump’s ex campaign manager, Paul Manafort and his “right-hand-man” Richard Gates, on 12 counts of obstruction, including conspiracy against the United States, and conspiracy to launder money.

In a separate story, George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign advisor, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Thanksgiving is not far away. Tangent universes are bizarre, erratic, moody, volatile, and unstable units of reality, kind of like our current President. And like our current President, it would be foolish to underestimate their, and his, powers of destruction. Anything, as has already been proven, can happen, including Trump’s ego-driven irrationality continuing to act out in vile and destructive ways, bringing us closer to annihilation (he does have the nuclear codes) in an effort to draw attention away from himself and his culpability (yes, I do believe he’d rather blow us up than lose his base). If, as Ms. Kayyem has stated Mueller is closing in on the Oval Office, it will now be a race toward an unknown end. Caught up in the throes of the tangent universe also, I cannot tell yet whether salvation is at hand, or a greater hell awaits us just around the corner.

Let us just hope John McCain is getting closer to figuring out what to do with those fish.


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