Is it too late to say what I want to do in 2022? It’s not Halloween yet. But I don’t think anything else will happen. The pace of life is fast. My friend Ferris once said that. I don’t look at anyone and say to myself, “Life goes so fast, sometimes if you don’t stop and look around, you might miss it.” He’s crazy.
Anyway, here are some of my favorite things to happen in 2022.
#10 Killing Jeff
Killing Jeff was the first thing I did in 2022, and boy was it a crazy choice. My fiancée was dancing at the strip club when it happened, which worried me because I almost never leave her alone in case she starts breastfeeding. Everyone around me kept acting like I was insane because apparently nobody could see or hear Jeff. “Kontributor! Nobody’s there!” they screamed. “Jeff isn’t a real name!” That’s when I started panicking. If Jeff wasn’t real, then who had I been arguing with for forty-five minutes? I grabbed my knife and attacked Jeff while horrified bystanders shouted, “KONTRIBUTOR! DON’T PIERCE THE AIR!” Eventually three angry dogs arrived and pulled me away, presumably because they were the only qualified mental-health professionals in the building. Nobody touched Jeff’s body. Nobody called an ambulance. His body was still right there. I could see it. Jeff knew what he did.
After killing Jeff, I went home and tried to put the entire experience behind me. I turned on the children’s television, sat down with my fiancée and suckled her left nipple for approximately one hour while contemplating everything that had gone wrong. She didn’t ask about Jeff. Nobody asks about Jeff. That’s probably for the best, because the more you think about Jeff, the more irritating the entire situation becomes. Was Jeff real? Did I kill him? Why couldn’t anybody see his body? Why did three angry dogs have jurisdiction over the situation? And most importantly, how can Jeff not be a real name when I’ve personally met several Jeffs? Eventually I decided to stop thinking about it. Killing Jeff was easily one of the ten worst things to happen to me in 2022. I hope 2023 has fewer Jeffs.
#9 Drowning Ben 10
My copy of Ben 10 for the Gameboy Advance wasn’t an ordinary video game cartridge. It was The Avatar of the Void. This was unfortunate because it was also my favorite game. The cartridge would laugh at me while I cried, watch me while I slept and fill me with the terrifying certainty that one day I would simply cease to exist. Even worse, my fiancee became jealous of my relationship with my copy of Ben 10 for the Gameboy Advance. She said I was spending too much time with it. I told her she didn’t understand what we had together. She pointed out that it was a Gameboy cartridge. Things became tense. Eventually I realized that the Avatar of the Void had left me lonely, hopeless and trapped, and there was only one solution: I had to drown Ben 10.
So I carried my copy of Ben 10 for the Gameboy Advance to the shores of Lake Superior, the same sacred waters where my laughing mermaid mother eventually returned to the sea. I stood at the shoreline, held the cartridge one final time and remembered all our adventures together. Then I screamed goodbye and hurled The Avatar of the Void into the lake. I miss my copy of Ben 10 for the Gameboy Advance every day, but my apartment is fine now, and sometimes survival requires sacrifice. As I watched the cartridge disappear beneath the waves, my fiancee gently took my hand. I thought she was comforting me. Then she threw me into Lake Superior. When I surfaced, she was smiling. She was proud of me. Ben 10 was gone. The Void was defeated. I was finally free and extremely wet.
#8 I Met the Slender Man
Shortly after drowning my copy of Ben 10 for the Gameboy Advance, I encountered a skinny guy in the woods near Bridgeport, Michigan. He was extremely tall and thin, with tentacles as long as his arms and huge sexy eyes, which is strange because I’m pretty sure Slender Man doesn’t have eyes. He stared at me and said something about vomiting. Then he whispered, “Turn around.” Instead, he turned around and revealed the most perfectly sculpted bubble butt I have ever seen on a paranormal entity. He stood there silently for several seconds before lifting one impossibly long leg and saying, “Come on, big boy. I know you want it.” I did not want it. I screamed, grabbed my fiancée and ran exactly three miles back to the car. We immediately spent the rest of the week hiding in the basement of a secret military base. Every few minutes I looked out the basement window to make sure the skinny guy wasn’t following us. Secret military bases apparently have basement windows.
My fiancée is terrified of Slender Man because she claims he kept watching her while she slept, and honestly I think I’ve seen him too, which is a strange thing to say after I just described an entire conversation with him in the woods. One morning she found a scratch on her hand, so naturally I concluded that Slender Man had infiltrated the military base, entered our bedroom and scratched her before escaping undetected. Haha! He thinks he’s great! But Slender Man doesn’t get by on a pretty face. He has no fucking face. I even took photographs that felt extremely real to me, although I won’t explain what “felt real” means for a photograph. Apparently he’s based on an old myth, which makes the whole thing even more intriguing despite that being completely incorrect. Anyway, this was one of the worst things that happened to me in 2022. This is nothing.
#7 The Russian Bed I Slept In
After killing Jeff, I decided it would be wise to hide in Russia for a week, despite the fact that nobody except me believed Jeff existed and therefore nobody was actually looking for me. That’s where I encountered The Russian Bed. This was the first bed I slept in after Jeff, and from the moment my body touched that mattress I knew something was horribly wrong. I was traumatized. Terrified. Goosebumps covered my body. The psychological horror was unlike anything I’d previously experienced, and the disgusting twist nearly broke my stomach. What was the twist? I don’t know. Nothing visibly happened. It was just a bed. But somehow this creepy Russian bed pushed me to the absolute brink of survival. Every night I climbed beneath the blankets knowing there was a very real possibility that I might have to sleep there again.
This is the worst bed in Russia and possibly the worst bed in the world. It must be eliminated. At one point the bed plunged me into a deafening silence, which was especially frightening because that’s normally what beds are supposed to do. I lay completely still, surrounded by darkness, listening to absolutely nothing while the Russian Bed continued being a bed underneath me. Pure terror. Pure evil. The absolute definition of studs and horror. I survived Jeff. I survived The Avatar of the Void. I survived Slender Man’s bubble butt. But nothing prepared me for this mattress. If you’re ever in Russia and someone offers you the opportunity to sleep in this absolutely disgusting Russian bed, I have only one piece of advice: don’t sleep. You must stay awake.
#6 Squidward’s Suicide by Cop
Several people at my fiancée’s strip club witnessed Squidward’s Suicide by Cop, and if you don’t understand what happened, my fiancée explained it to me afterward. She said the night began normally, which apparently means a man dressed as Squidward was sitting in a strip club watching her dance. During the next performance she was making out with another dancer dressed as SpongeBob while the audience cheered, but Squidward just stared at them with very real eyes. The SpongeBob girl recognized the customer underneath the costume and said he wasn’t acting like himself. Then everything changed. The man became frightening, rushed toward the stage with a knife, and police who had arrived at the club shot him before he reached the performers. According to my fiancée, “These things happened very fast.” That’s probably the most sensible sentence anybody will say in this entire list.
I was there too, and afterward I couldn’t properly understand what I’d witnessed. The screams, the gunshots, the blood, the dead Squidward—my brain apparently decided it was easier to process the whole nightmare as a lost episode of SpongeBob SquarePants than acknowledge that there had been an actual person inside the costume. What happened to him? Had Squidward never dealt with tits before? Was he finally sick of being kind? Was it cold? Was she afraid of the dark? None of those questions make any sense, but neither did watching Squidward attack SpongeBob at a strip club while police rushed toward Bikini Bottom. Whatever happened that night, I stopped thinking of Squidward as a cartoon character for a while. Those eyes were too real.
#5 Jack Gave Me His Eyes
Where to start… Jack was the afternoon bartender at my fiancée’s strip club, and his life was already difficult before the eye situation. He hated working weekday afternoons because nobody was there, he barely made any money, and one terrible shift he was somehow forced to crap himself. I never learned who forced him or how this was accomplished. Honestly, I felt terrible for Jack. We cried together several times. His mentality suits me best. He had become a creature he didn’t want to be, trapped behind a bar serving three-dollar beers at two o’clock on a Tuesday, and I understood that kind of despair. Then one afternoon Jack stared directly at me for absolutely no reason and gave me his eyes. Just handed them over. No explanation. No ceremony. Nothing. This was the exact moment I realized that perhaps I did not understand Jack as well as I thought.
The part that bothers me most isn’t even that Jack gave me his eyes. It’s that he put them in his mouth for a really long time first. Why, Jack? What did that accomplish? Why did they have to go in your mouth? Why did you give them to me? I stood there holding Jack’s eyes while Jack silently walked out of the strip club without saying another word. I assumed that was the last we’d ever see of him, but no—he still works there. He came back for his next scheduled afternoon shift and apparently management decided that losing both eyes wasn’t sufficient reason to modify the rota. Everyone calls him Eyeless Jack now, or E.J. for short, and otherwise treats him exactly the same. He still doesn’t make any money. He still hates weekday afternoons. The only major difference is that Jack doesn’t look at me anymore.
#4 Raking the Yard
Je me lance vers la gloire, okay.
Last month I went to my girlfriend’s parents’ house in upstate New York to rake their yard for five dollars. They stayed comfortably inside drinking warm coffee while I was sent outside with a rake, a trash bag and approximately nine billion leaves. This was the hardest thing I had to do all year. Before raking any yard, you need to prepare properly. Lock the doors. Keep children away. Most importantly, don’t let the rake see how messy the yard is, because rakes are extremely shy and may refuse to work if confronted with too many leaves at once. Approach slowly. Make reassuring noises so the rake knows it isn’t alone. Remember that a rake is naturally weak and frequently misses leaves, so keep a longer and slightly faster yard tool nearby to establish dominance. Never allow the rake to sense fear. It can smell hesitation.
If the rake refuses to accept a leaf, yell at it. If yelling doesn’t work, threaten it with a broom. If the broom fails, introduce a leaf blower and make it extremely clear that the rake can be replaced. Eventually I was screaming in my girlfriend’s parents’ yard while attacking piles of leaves with every harmless gardening implement I could find, as her family calmly drank coffee and watched me through the window. At one point I became convinced the rake was looking at me, so I temporarily blinded its single rake eye with a gardening glove and used the distraction to gather several leaves into a bag. The rake later scratched my car. Of course it did. That’s what rakes do when humiliated. I earned my five dollars, but I learned an important lesson: never wait until late September to begin raking your yard.
#3 I Watched a Mouse Die
This was one of the strangest things I witnessed all year because it immediately made me wonder what would happen if Mickey Mouse contemplated suicide. Weirdly enough, that’s not even a completely new idea. Back when Mickey was appearing in newspaper comics, there was an incredibly dark storyline where he believed he’d lost Minnie and repeatedly tried to end his own life, with each attempt failing in increasingly ridiculous ways. Imagine being an actual mouse in 1930 and opening the newspaper to see the most successful mouse in the world has lost the will to live. That comic must have devastated mouse morale internationally. Thousands of mice probably stared silently into the distance and wondered, “If Mickey can’t make it, what chance do I have?” Disney has never adequately investigated the psychological effect this had on the global rodent population.
But the mouse I personally saw die was genuinely frightening. At first he was simply walking around while listening to classical music through extremely tiny mouse-sized AirPods. I don’t know where he bought them. This continued for exactly six minutes. Then the mouse stopped, made a tiny squeak that became progressively louder, and suddenly looked horribly wrong—his eyes went pale, his teeth looked strange, and for a moment he resembled some terrible little monster. Then he collapsed and died. I immediately decided he must have poisoned himself somehow, despite having absolutely no evidence and no veterinary qualifications whatsoever. Maybe he’d eaten something toxic. Maybe he was sick. Maybe those AirPods weren’t properly certified for rodents. I will never know. All I know is that I watched a mouse listen to classical music for six minutes and then die, and somehow I blame Walt Disney.
#2 My Pen Pal Stopped Talking to Me
This was the only thing that made me cry all year. My pen pal had been writing to me since I was ten, but his final letter gave me nightmares for months because he was so angry. First, he called me rude and immature. Then he explained that he was probably not a ghost, because there is no convincing scientific evidence for supernatural entities such as Ghost Rakes or Slendermen. I disagreed based on extensive personal experience, but apparently that wasn’t the point. He said he was also disappointed that I’d spent years pretending to love Iron Man 3 as much as he did. Finally, he wrote the sentence that destroyed our friendship: “I am a real person with real life problems. It is an illusion to think I’m just a talking piece of paper.” I couldn’t believe it. For years I’d assumed my letters were communicating directly with the paper itself. Apparently there had been a fucking person on the other end the entire time.
Then he stopped writing, and that’s when he tapped into my greatest fear: the unknown. You never know what’s staring through your bedroom window. You don’t know what’s hiding in the bushes. You don’t know whether your pen pal is a ghost, a piece of paper, or simply a guy who got tired of hearing your incorrect opinions about Iron Man 3. He lied to my friends, my family and somehow my pets. Where are you going? All I had to do was turn around and realize that the power of love had been inside me the entire time, but by then it was too late. That’s the terrifying thing about life: until the day you exhale your final breath, you can never completely know what dangers surround you—or when someone you’ve loved since childhood will suddenly reveal that he isn’t stationery.
#1 I Lost my copy of Godzilla: Monster of Monsters for the NES
Godzilla: Monster of Monsters was the third video game I ever played, and it remains the greatest video game ever created. Much better than Ben 10 on the Game Boy Advance. From the time I was five years old until May 2022, there are countless photographs of me playing Godzilla: Monster of Monsters on the NES. I played it almost every day. The graphics were believable, the gameplay was incredible, the music wasn’t very good, and Godzilla was simultaneously a pathetic protagonist, a wonderful role model and extremely sexy. The story about a boy battling demons while being haunted by his dead girlfriend affected me deeply, even though I’m beginning to suspect that isn’t actually the story of Godzilla: Monster of Monsters. Then one day my NES cartridge decided to run away from me. I searched everywhere. Nothing. I don’t understand why it chose to leave after everything we’d been through together. Where is Godzilla on the NES? Are you happy?
I’ve tried accepting that Godzilla: Monster of Monsters is gone and may never come back, but losing it was easily the worst thing that happened to me in 2022. Worse than killing Jeff. Worse than drowning Ben 10. Worse than Slender Man’s bubble butt. Worse than the Russian Bed. Worse than Eyeless Jack handing me his eyes. All of those wounds eventually healed, but sometimes I still look toward the empty place where my cartridge used to be and wonder whether Godzilla ever thinks about me. Maybe he found another NES. Maybe another family appreciates his beautifully crafted story and sexy pathetic protagonist. Maybe leaving me was the only way he could finally become happy. Godzilla: Monster of Monsters on NES, I miss you. Wherever you are, I hope you can find the happiness you want.
These Are Media Things 