I have no clue, and I must live in 2020 (I have no mouth D.A.R.E review part 3: Reflect)

        Hello and welcome back to the reading blog whose host is in grave need of rest. I am your host, Ay Ay Ron, and today at the reader in yellow, we're going personal again. That's right, we're back at the wonderful world of reflecting. Now, I do need to say, (Else ESUHSD District Superintendent Chris D. Funk will waterboard me in an odd mixture between boiling chocolate and chili peppers) here's a slight trigger warning in advance for this entire article, as we might be diving into heavier stuff, given the entire depressing themes of the tale, and our current timeline. If anyone reading this finds this stuff a little TOO relatable, or has encountered similar issues, I suggest calling a hotline (here you go) or, if you're a fellow student, looking at the back of your ID card because there's some useful stuff there. Now back to our regular scheduled programming of me yelling into the void about ESUHSD-District-Superintendent-Chris-D.-Funk-knows-what.

2020 in a nutshell for y'all

        You've heard me yell about it a thousand times (and if you haven't and this is your first delve into my insane blog , I recommend going here and here), about how Harlan Ellison's deceptively short story is about how everyone suffers, including the five incredibly flawed protagonists and the terrifyingly human-like computer AM, but never has it been more relevant than this year. Mental health has been in a terrifying decline around these times if you trust the news (Relevant links Here and Here), or you're like me and know this firsthand. Like AM, we've essentially trapped ourselves in a cycle of boredom, and it's actually terrifyingly easier to relate to the big evil computer than it is to the protagonists in this era. Just like Current-But Soon-To-Be-Resigning-ESUHSD District Superintendent Christopher D. Funk the Aggressive Menace, many of us have that one pastime that keeps us relatively sane, and if you're AM, that'd be torturing people in cruel and unusual ways, and if you're like me, it's writing (be it creatively or in order to make fun of my assignments), which is essentially the exact same thing. Even more terrifyingly similar is the fact that these pastimes eventually do come to an unexpected halt, driving the one partaking further down the spiral. For AM, that's when Ted snaps and murders everyone, and for someone like me, it's when the amount not-fun work becomes so overwhelming that it's hard to derive any more dark humour out of it than has already been derived. For AM, his reaction wasn't pretty, turning Ted into that horrifying pile of goop that is a perfect metaphor for every extrovert during quarantine, and for me, my reaction was not the prettiest either. Like AM, I may or may not have taken my anger out on characters within some of the stories I've been writing, condemning them to cruel and terrifying fates that'd make even Sitting ESUHSD District Superintendent Christopher D. Funk blush. Alongside this, AM seems to go quieter at the end, as Ted can hardly talk back, and this is another thing I can unfortunately relate with AM on. Around the folks I'm forced to be around during the pandemic, I'm told I've become many levels more quiet and withdrawn, and easily irritable, or at least, moreso than usual. Like AM, with the bulk of my stress relief down the drain, operating at only one-fifth peak efficiency at all times, I've felt quite terrible indeed. But what I think is honestly the most terrifying fact is that during this pandemic, I've had enough time to question more than once whether or not I myself have turned myself into something as terrible as AM himself, including his worst traits of childishness. In my mind, I often think that perhaps by relating to AM, I am also indulging in a bit of entitlement, or narcissism, just like the villainous computer in thinking that I have it ANY worse off than other people. It makes me feel as though I am stupid, cold, and selfish, among other things, traits I've always feared I have large amounts of. I find myself in the middle of good memories for a second, and the very next, they've been connected to some embarrassing thought connected, and often with a little shiver, the thought of maybe all my "good" memories were just me being indulgent in some form of narcissism akin to AM comes flooding in. And that leads me to ponder whether or not I'm just being some "edgy teenager" who thinks "depression is kewl" or something, on some subconscious layer, although I'm constantly consciously aware of how much I hate my current mental state, though I hesitate to call it "depression" for those very reasons. It'd also be insensitive, not to mention edgy, to say I may or may not have considered on multiple occasions attempting what Ted from the short story ultimately could not have done, however I don't want to sound more problematic than I already do, so for legal reasons this statement is to be ignored. For a long time beforehand, I feared getting help, because then I'd admit to myself that there was something clearly wrong with my mental state (well, aside from the stuff I already knew about), yet when the pandemic hit and getting help became ten times harder, I suddenly felt really, REALLY, stupid for neglecting things like this. I fear that like AM, I've become a childish and insecure manchild who reflects their own suffering onto their playthings (In my case, the characters in the stories I write, or at this point, conceptualize but totally neglect to write). Among my biggest fears is that if this is just a SMALL amount of suffering compared to what everyone else is going through, then that means I've been somewhat entitled, somewhat of a brat, something of a terrible human being, who would not survive in what all adults call the "Real world". Like AM, I'm paranoid as well. Although my paranoia stems from my fear that maybe my subconscious is just making up all of this for attention. That'd be terrifying in my opinion.  Thoughts like these genuinely scare me, yet I cannot help wondering if this was actually the truth my mind chose to be ignorant of the whole time. To this, I have no answer. Not yet at least. All I know is that I can relate to the evil computer, and I'm terrified because of it. Of all evil computers I could have related to, I probably would have given anything for the one to have been something closer to HAL 9000. At least he was cool. Probably not ARCHIE-3 or GlaDOS, though, as they also seem to be undergoing similar levels of suffering to AM. Wow. That was kind of dark. I'd quite like to sneak a bit more humour in (As reading my less humorous works tends to be quite the chore), but at the same time I'd hate to take away from any meaning in anything I wrote, and adding humor to something with a subject this heavy would just be a bit insensitive. In the end, I guess we all have a little bit of AM inside us right now.

Back to your regularly scheduled dose of  humor now. Wouldn't be a proper RiY post without any.

        So anyhoo, that just about wraps it up for this wild goose chase of a post. Again, if anything here seems a bit problematic, or if you've a similar predicament, do not be afraid to say something about it. Don't be a dummy like me and wait until the only people you can turn to is a circle of close friends and a faceless blog that I'm probably going to regret posting this in, but have to anyways because I don't like leaving things unfinished and I genuinely enjoy this kind of blogging. As always, stay safe, stay sane, and stay away from invoking the ever-burning eternal wrath of Sitting ESUHSD District Superintendent Christopher D. Funk, bane of Cthulhu, destroyer of both mental and physical health alike, first (probably) of his name, he who bears the eternal hoard, lord of the kneecap destroyers, the bane of grades, the chaos of the district, and defenestrator of elder ones. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a lawsuit to settle with angry zombie Harlan Ellison, and I'm not about to let Judge Judy deem it necessary that I pay a rotting corpse $65,000.

Because in this day and age, you can get sued by anything. Even a flaming corpse that ascended all the way from the lowest levels of heck in order to get a taste of that sweet sweet colby jack cheese and just so happened to come across some teenage punk dunking on them from behind the safety of a laptop that never has less than one-hundred concurrent tabs open on firefox at any given time.