Ducky, Vladi, and the Art of Obliviousness
alright, so, all the personal crap, feelings, whatever else is rattling around in my head… let’s just, you know, park that over there for a minute. Because i think i’ve got something that vaguely resembles a public service announcement.
you know how call of duty, whatever the hell the latest, shiniest iteration they’re pushing as "the new shit" is, eventually just gets… well, boring? like, after a while, you’re itching for something with a bit more substance, a bit more… i don’t know, oomph? well, here’s a thought: kyiv? it’s just a 19-hour drive. nineteen hours in a car, and you’re there.
not only will every call of duty game from this point probably suck by comparison, but hey, you’ll have some killer stories for the grandkids, right? assuming they ever bother to ask what you were up to when there was a war raging, practically on our bloody doorstep.
now, don’t get me wrong, i’m not sitting here claiming i’m any better, not by a long shot.
because if we’re being brutally honest, the most effective way i could probably help ukraine win this whole mess would be to join the russian army. yeah, seriously.
and since that’s pretty much the situation, i guess i’ll just write this blog post instead.
for the, what, three people who might actually end up reading it?
uhm, okay, quick detour here – a little peek into the magnificent mess that is the inner workings of chris, i guess.
so, i was about to launch into something about trump, and it got me thinking about that supposed book, you know? the one they say gets passed from one president to the next, filled with ‘secret notes’ or some other such shit.
my first thought? sounds suspiciously like one of those friendship books we all had back in the day.
anyway, thinking about this presidential hand-me-down book, a memory surfaced. i remembered this one time i got one of my old friendship books back, and it looked like someone had treated the page like an application form for some avant-garde art school. the entire page was just… covered in drawings.
i think the last question was probably something like, ‘draw something for me.’ and this person, man, they’d answered all the questions with such meticulous care. i vaguely recall that for most answers, there wasn’t nearly enough space, so the writing just trailed off, extending way below the designated lines, trying to cram it all in.
and honestly, i didn’t pay it much mind at the time. even over the years, whenever i’d randomly stumble upon that book while moving it from point a to point b, only for it to sit gathering dust for another x number of years, i’d flip through the pages,
and it just… it never clicked.
not until right now.
and don’t get it twisted. i know those people. the ones who’d turn every single page of every friendship book they ever got their hands on into a goddamn miniature art installation. every dot on every ‘i’ and other letters? transformed into a tiny ❤️
it was like their very existence depended on it. as if, should an ‘i’ ever be written without that minuscule ❤️ perched on top, the ground beneath them would shatter, crack open, and swallow them whole.
then they’d have to live out the rest of their days under the surface with all the other non-❤️-ing heathens. and nobody wants that, do they?
thinking about it now, i can almost see a kind of strategy to it. like a failsafe they’d cooked up. they probably figured they’d hone their artistic writing skills to such an extreme, turn every text they ever produced into something resembling a love letter (style-wise, at least). that way, in case they ever completely blanked or couldn’t come up with a decent answer, well, at least it would look good.
whereas a piece of my handiwork? often looks, and sometimes feels, like it’s been scrawled in some bizarre, indecipherable alien language.
oh man, am i ever glad i can just choose my font from a dropdown menu these days and not have to train my handwriting over and over again.
quick excourse officially over.
and you know, even if you did opt for the real-life call of duty experience, it probably wouldn’t change a damn thing in the grand scheme. same goes for this blog post, really. even if a much bigger audience somehow got exposed to it,
reading about something is one thing; actually acting on it? that’s a whole different kettle of fish, isn't it?
and the real kicker, the supreme irony of it all, is that the one person who could actually do something significant about this situation, yeah, not the only person, sure, but the one who most certainly would have an impact,
that person is instead prancing about like they’re a lead character in gossip girl, while putin over here is giving an oscar-worthy performance in his role as a character straight out of house of cards.
i was just pondering trump's actions and how utterly oblivious he seems to be. almost as oblivious as i was when i failed to see those friendship book art pieces as anything more than a simple, kind gesture.
i think donald trump is in love with putin.
now, before you brand me completely crazy, let me try to explain. i don’t know for sure, but i’d wager, based on my own school-day memories, that american youth generally get taught a version of russia, and indeed of the us itself, that’s just a tad biased, one way or the other.
and while my takeaway after all those years of schooling was basically ‘germany = bad,’
i reckon if i’d grown up in the us, my notion would probably still be ‘germany = nazis = bad (but also, russia = bad too).’
i can totally see trump not paying a blind bit of attention during that particular history lesson, but come on, even i would at least spend a few hours brushing up on us history if i was about to become president of said country.
so how can he be so clueless about it all? just slot in that gossip girl persona,
and suddenly, a faint glimmer of something resembling order starts to emerge from the chaos.
him being the ‘business’ guy he supposedly is, he was probably already chummy with putin before becoming president of the united fucking states.
then, after being in the big chair for a while, it’s time to meet other world leaders, folks who also have a bit more say in their respective countries than you or i.
on that list, naturally, is russia. trump sees russia on the itinerary and probably thinks, "easy peasy, vlad and i are bros." since that infamous island is no more,
they can at least reminisce about the good old times they supposedly shared there, right?
i can just picture their first meetup after trump became president.
"oh vladi, my dear, why have you been so quiet lately?"
and putin’s like,
"ducky, you need to understand, a lot has changed. and now you’re even president… how exactly did you imagine this was going to work out?"
(yes, in case you weren’t aware, legend has it putin called trump 'ducky,' derived from donald duck. some say there’s a deeper connection involving the replacement of the letter d with f, but only putin truly knows).
donald, utterly shocked by this, starts reminiscing about the old days,
"all those moments, all those shared moments, those beautiful moments…"
he pauses, a single tear tracing a path down his cheek.
"put…in,"
he says slowly, his voice thick with emotion as he remembers the exact moment that particular inside joke was born.
"put in, putin,"
putin echoes, one eye laughing, the other crying.
donald then apparently tells him about his deep yearning when that photo of him on the horse hit the news. anyhow, they part ways with the understanding that they’re now destined to be some kind of freakish, geopolitical version of romeo and juliet, with putin expertly playing his manipulative games on trump.
and while i have absolutely zero concrete evidence to back up any of these claims, i do think it all sounds disturbingly plausible. and now, i really, really want to know if anyone ever actually pulled that ‘put in’ on him. seriously.
if you’re currently asking yourself if you just waded through some bizarre putin-trump fanfiction, let me just gently remind you what the bible is. (minus putin and trump, of course.)
but okay, all jokes aside for a moment, there is a serious war going on.
and just because we’re not directly involved, doesn’t mean we should just be content with it, you know? just because we are safe, doesn’t mean everyone is.
people are literally being killed by another government, from another country, day by day.
for years now. YEARS. that’s YEARS as in, multiple, long, agonizing YEARS.
a war dragging on for YEARS. and the person seemingly most capable of actually getting things to change has apparently only just realized that maybe,
just maybe, he’s been thoroughly played by the leader of a country that his own country has had some kind of 80-year-long beef with.
i can only imagine how good that must have felt in the kremlin.
picture this: they’re having some top-secret meeting about concocting an elaborate hacking operation to snag some classified papers from the us.
and putin just strolls in, all casual, and goes, "yo, comrades, i’ll get you your papers. and not only will they be brought right here, but the president of the united states himself is going to deliver them." fucking boss move, right?
putin was probably just like, "yo ducky, my man, for elon and your grand plans to rebuild the island, i’m gonna need those papers."
to bring this whole rambling mess to some sort of conclusion, i’ll just stop now and hit post.
i don’t even know what this is, exactly, but it’s… something.
humor, or trying to find it, kinda feels like the only way to even approach these topics sometimes. if i try to bring too much cold, hard reason into it, it just gets incredibly difficult to even talk about, because it’s all such a convoluted, tangled-up disaster.
not to imply for a second that there’s ever a justifiable reason for any war, whatsoever.
