The bar at the end of the world isn’t in some dusty sci-fi outpost; it’s a TGI Fridays in the D.C. suburbs, where the air conditioning is set to ‘cryogenic’ and the TV screens are permanently tuned to a loop of legislative paralysis. It is New Year’s Eve, 2025. Outside, the ghost of the Great Shutdown still haunts the beltway, though the barricades technically came down weeks ago. Inside, I am nursing a lukewarm gin and tonic, watching the last few hours of this feral year bleed out on the floor.
They called it the “Year of Normalization.” The suits, the pundits, the shivering talking heads in the press pens—they all promised us a return to baseline. Instead, we got a year that felt like a bad acid trip in a locked room. 2025 wasn’t a return to order; it was the year the American nervous system finally fried.
A Speed-Metal Coronation in the Deep Freeze
It started in the cold. January 20th. The inauguration was forced indoors by temperatures that would freeze the soul of a tax collector. We watched it happen on screens, disconnected, a digital coronation for a digital age. Trump was back, signing executive orders with the manic energy of a drummer in a speed metal band—225 of them by year’s end. A record. Each signature a hammer blow to the delicate, rotting drywall of the bureaucracy. The mood in the capital wasn’t triumph; it was a terminal anxiety, a vibrating hum of ‘what now?’
And the answer, inevitably, was ‘chaos’.
The November Reprieve and the Paper Truce
The “Suits” finally blinked on November 12th. The shutdown ended not with a bang, but with a whimpering continuing resolution signed at an ungodly hour, presumably to avoid missing the Thanksgiving turkey. For forty-odd days, the machinery of state had simply stopped. Garbage had piled up in Yosemite like monuments to our own apathy. But even when the lights flickered back on, the hum wasn’t the same.
The government reopened, but the trust didn’t. We walked through the wreckage of the federal budget like survivors of a bomb blast, realizing that the compromise was just a ceasefire in a war that had gone guerrilla. The bureaucracy limped back to its desks, but the air was thick with the scent of ozone and burning toner cartridges. We learned that “essential” is a relative term, and that the country can run on autopilot for a frighteningly long time before the engines stall out completely.
Pastoral Lies and the Rise of the Plastic Monsters
If 2025 had a mascot, it wasn’t a politician or a revolutionary. It was a Labubu. Those fuzzy, grinning little monsters from Hong Kong took over the collective consciousness like a plastic plague. I saw grown men in three-piece suits clutching them on the Acela, talismans against the void. We were all clinging to soft, tactile things because the reality outside was getting too sharp to handle.
And when the plushies weren’t enough, we filtered ourselves out of existence. The “Ghibli AI” wave hit in the summer—millions of Americans uploading their faces to the cloud to be spat out as wholesome, hand-drawn anime protagonists. I tried it once. The AI erased the bags under my eyes and the fear in my grimace, replacing me with a pastoral hero ready to farm turnips. It was the ultimate lie. We didn’t want to fix the world; we just wanted to render it in soft pastels.
The Underground Frequency: Gonzo Alerts
I spent the bulk of this feral year screaming into the digital void of Gonzo Alerts, the only outlet left with the spine to publish the autopsies of a dying empire while the rest of the press was busy normalizing the asylum. I was out there, mainlining the madness so you didn’t have to, documenting the systems failure of meaning in real-time.
I was there when the satire finally slit its own throat in Washington. I filed the dispatch from the Kennedy Center, watching Gianni Infantino—a man with the “sheer, oily sheen of a perpetually nervous seal”—hand a FIFA “Peace Prize” to Donald Trump. It was a moment of pure, uncut delirium. I wrote it down in ink and blood: while Trump held a trophy for global harmony, his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, a “sentient jawline” who literally wrote the book on ignoring war crimes, was fighting off allegations of ordering “double tap” executions. I told you then that Peace was War, and that we were watching a “vibe check for a doomed republic.”
When the noise got too loud, I fled to Amsterdam to find the frequency behind the static. Sitting in Cafe Hill St Blues, fueled by hash and paranoia, I sent back reports on the “Digital Thunderdome.” I watched the youth—”video larvae” with eyes like black holes—being fed into Zuckerberg’s “hate-engine.” I warned you that the algorithms weren’t just watching us; they were shaping the meat puppets, turning the populace into a polarization battery for the “Lizard King.”
But the American psychosis is a sticky thing; it followed me to the Mekong. I chronicled the “Swamp Fever” radiating from Florida, where the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center rose from the Everglades like a monument to cruelty, used as a fundraising prop while migrants fought off pythons. I tracked the MAGA civil war as it imploded over the suppressed Epstein files, with the faithful branded as “weaklings” by their own leader for daring to ask about the President’s alleged “lewd doodles.”
And then, I went to the edge. My last files, for a while, came from the Thai-Cambodian border, high on Chang beer and ancient history, chasing the ghosts of a military incident near the Preah Vihear temple. I was dodging bomb drills and looking for the invisible strings pulled by generals in Bangkok. The signal went dark after that. I spent months in the haze, lost in the “terminal humidity,” before washing up back here, in this cryogenic TGI Fridays, to file another report. I survived the jungle, but I’m not sure I survived the year.
Zero-G Firecrackers and the Super Bowl Messiah 
To distract us, the culture machine went into overdrive. It gave us spectacles of such high-definition absurdity that you had to laugh or scream. Katy Perry went to space. Actually went to space. While we were down here arguing about the price of eggs and the legality of ICE raids, a pop star was floating in zero-G, beaming down “Firework” to a planet that was already burning. At least that’s what I imagined as she tried to be cute with “What a Wonderful World”
Then there was Kendrick at the Super Bowl. A bootcut-jean messiah preaching on the fifty-yard line. For fifteen minutes, the electric current of pure, unadulterated ‘art’ cut through the static. We felt something. A collective shiver. And then the commercials came back on, selling us AI agents that would “eat our jobs” so we could have more “leisure time.” Leisure time to do what? Starve?
The Musk-DOGE Guillotine
And then came DOGE, when the federal government was finally converted into a volatile meme-coin. Elon’s “Department of Government Efficiency” didn’t just bring the axe; it brought the circus. By summer, the boring machinery of the state had been gamified into a terrifying spectator sport. We sat in bars, glued to X, betting on the “Agency Death Pools” while a neon-soaked leaderboard ranked cabinet members by “Hardcore Engagement.” It was no longer about saving money; it was about the spectacle of the burn. I watched a career bureaucrat plead for his department’s survival on a livestream, only to be “fired” by a chatroom poll that voted 80% for “Chaos.” The American Dream wasn’t just outsourced; it was ratioed into oblivion by a frantic billionaire trying to debug the country like it was a crashing Tesla autopilot.
Closing Time at the Edge of History
So here we are. December 31st. The ball is about to drop. The government is open, but the wound is still fresh, and speculation about the next shutdown has already crept in. The President is ruling by decree. The borders are hardening, and the metaverse is leaking into the water supply.
It has been a savage journey, my friends. A year of high-speed collisions between the past and the future, leaving the present crumpled in the median. We are late-stage everything now—late-stage capitalism, late-stage democracy, late-stage sanity.
But as I look around this TGI Fridays, at the tired faces illuminated by the blue light of their phones, I don’t see defeat. I see a feral resilience. We bought the ticket, we took the ride, and we’re still here. Battered, confused, and chemically fueled by a minimum of caffeine and anxiety, but here.
2026 is knocking at the door like a landlord demanding rent we don’t have. It’s going to get weirder. It’s going to get harder. But if you can survive the Year of the Labubu, the Shutdown, and the Space Pop, you can survive anything.
Drink up. The simulation is rebooting.
– Rip Thorne.
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