Hey kids!  It’s another rip-roaring Tuesday night!  Somewhere out there, young couples are falling in love, heroes and villains vie for control of the streets, and Jim Sapperstein of 228 Oak Villas Road is deciding whether yogurt that is three weeks out of date is safe to eat!

CAN YOU FEEL THE RAW ELECTRICITY IN THE AIR!?!?!?!??

Sorry. I routinely make fun of how dead Tuesdays are, mostly to lower your expectations about the content of these posts.  One of these days I’ll write a real piece with Important Insight, and y’all will be like “Holy fuck, didn’t know he had that in him. And on a Tuesday no less…”

People come up to me on the street and ask “Reverend Mayhem, are you reeeeally a genuine bona fide ordained figure of religious authority?”  And I say to them “Stay back! I have mace!”

But it is a legitimate question. And the answer is yes- I am an ordained Pastafari minister.  Here is an introduction for those of you who have not been Touched by His Noodly Appendages (not like that- what do you think this is, Southern Baptism?).  Does the Catholic Church’s FAQ have a section entitled “What is this business about pirates, and the Beer Volcano, and Stripper Factory?”  It does not!

Tangent: I actually looked at the Vatican’s FAQ page, because I am an obsessive pedant. A not-inconsiderable portion is dedicated to the Vatican Pharmacy. I find this fascinating.

ANYWAY: As an authentic and genuine Ministeroni, I can preside over weddings, funerals, consecrations of Holy Ground and supermarket opening.  However, I can ALSO answer your burning ethical conundrums (conundra?) with Absolute Moral Certitude.

This comes up because a friend in a group chat posted the following:

“I’m a dick for suddenly not feeling so bad about Dwayne Haskins, right?”

In case you missed it, Dwayne Haskins was hit and killed walking on a Florida highway last month. At 6:30 in the morning, he called his wife in Pittsburgh and told her he had run out of gas.  He abandoned his car and was walking when he strayed onto the roadway.  The untimely death of the 24 year old Steelers quarterback prompted an outpouring of sorrow, as is appropriate when a young person is killed.

Unfortunately, the toxicology report came back and changed The Narrative.  Haskins was drunk. And not a little drunk.  His blood samples were .20 and .24 BAC, between twice and three times the legal limit.  Moreover, he had ketamine and norketamine (its metabolite) in his system.  For the non-pharmacologically-inclined , ketamine is a short-term anesthetic and widely-used recreational drug, Big ups to the Columbus Dispatch for the following note, after (mis)explaining the potential off-label uses of ketamine for depression: “Monday’s report didn’t say why the former Ohio State football star had it in his system.” In defense of the Dispatch, I suppose he COULD have had undocumented surgery at 2 am after getting into a fight with the guy he went clubbing and drinking with…

Which brings me back to “are you a bad person for not feeling as bad once you hear these things”?  And the answer is “no”.  Loss of human life, in the abstract, is tragic. But here, we have a guy who got into a car heavily impaired in two different ways and decided to take it out on an interstate highway.  He was waving a metaphorical loaded gun around in a crowded room.  The fact that he was the one who ended up dead makes this unfortunate, but certainly not tragic.  I feel for his family, because I know what it feels like when someone you love self-destructs. But looking back at Henry Ruggs, you see what a real tragedy looks like in a similar situation.

I’m too tired and too old to pretend to be a better person than I am.  I look around and see suffering on a scale almost unimaginable in the pre-internet age.  Famine. War. Pestilence. Base cruelty.  Now brought to us from every corner of the globe in nearly-real-time and in full color.  The average human psyche is not built to process this level of misery from so many different sources competing for our empathy.  As I write this, I get a news alert about 14 dead children in Texas.  I go to the website and scroll past the roll of the dead from Buffalo and a story on the maternity hospital the Russians bombed in Ukraine.  In the face of those and a thousand other genuine tragedies, I cannot fake sincere grief over Dwayne Haskins.

I apologize for the extended Giant Downer. I am sorry if this makes anyone think less of me (as if that were possible).  But it needed saying: it’s ok to have empathy fatigue.

Anyway. NEXT MORAL QUANDRY!

“REVEREND MAYHEM, I FEEL BAD FOR LAUGHING AT SOMEONE WHO IS CLEARLY DELUSIONAL.”

Those ghosts that Sam Darnold was seeing on the field in 2019 are apparently back, and this time they are whispering madness into his ears.  Darnold, who leads the betting field for First QB To Get Benched For A Rookie, told reporters that “I’m confident I can be one of the best quarterbacks in the league.”  I mean, yes- professional athletes (and especially QBs) have to have confidence oozing out their pores just to get out there and perform.  But this level of detachment from reality is just mindblowing.

He did preface this insanity with “[a]s long as I know what we’re doing, what the defense is doing,” which, I mean, yes.  It’s a lot easier to succeed as an NFL quarterback when you have foreknowledge of the defense’s formations, coverage and signals.  Just ask Tom Brady and Bill Belichick.  And I’m sure in whatever obscure world of the infinite Multiverse where Darnold knows what he and his team are doing, he’s a much better quarterback than he is in this one. But still man…get a psych eval. Or maybe just a mirror.  If you never play another snap, you’ll have made $50 million before your 26th birthday.  Pay someone to tell you the truth, or at least alert you when you show up to a social function with underwear on your head and an imaginary koala named Stanley.

MOVIE OF THE WEEK:

It was going to be Down Periscope. But I can’t right now.  Just go watch some static for an hour then go to bed.