Alternative Fun Facts: The End of The News
Spoiler Alert: Something Extreme and Unexpected is About to Happen! | Fiction | Fresh Soup
I haven’t read a whole book for pleasure in a year. Which is quite the confession, coming from someone who essentially makes a living from other people reading his books. Over the past year, I’ve read a lot for professional needs: I teach literature, and I often read when I’m preparing a lecture or an author event. But the whole idea of reading as a pastime has somehow dropped off my life menu, and the time I used to spend in fictional worlds is now spent incessantly refreshing the news. I sometimes still try to kid myself into believing that this pointless consuming of current affair is important for my understanding of reality and even for my survival. But deep inside, I know that the momentous piece of news—the one that will supposedly pull me and the entire Middle East out of the deep pit we’ve fallen into—will never come, and all my endless refreshing and scrolling is just another stage in outsourcing my emotional world. After all, it’s a lot easier to wait for updates from a dismaying reality than to listen, feel, and submit to someone else’s imagination and hopes.
Halfway through the second Trump administration, there was a devastating series of earthquakes in California that destroyed Los Angeles and left the world watching in horror as more scenes of loss and devastation streamed by, immediately followed by a vicious civil war in Canada, and no sooner than that was over, the lethal Virus-F pandemic broke out, which infected only redheads and was perceived in militant anti-colonialist circles as divine retribution against the oppressive white society. Alongside the horrifying redhead plague, the media blew up with a humiliating MeToo episode involving two astronauts on the spacecraft Venus2, an incident which, due to being the first sexual harassment incident exposed beyond the borders of Earth, sent shockwaves through not only NASA but the entire solar system, with the interracial aspect of the episode adding fuel to the fire and resulting in a worldwide wave of attacks against various space program crews and both current and former astronauts throughout the universe, culminating in a mob that stormed the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, where they set fire to Nova3 and caused the death of three mechanics, and immediately after that, the news simply stopped.