I became a father a couple weeks ago, but my son has yet to leave the cardiac intensive care unit. Seeing the definition of an innocent human subjected to such pain and uncertainty because of nothing but random chance really drives it home: the world is unfair. The world is absurd.
Inbetween reading medical journals and health insurance fine print, my wife and I are trying to find ways to stay sane while sitting at our son's bedside. My wife draws, writes, and knitted the kid some booties. One thing that I did to cope was throw on my headphones and make this.
It is, of course, an homage to the Mad Libs-style newspaper headlines that star in one of my favorite games from my own innocent childhood -- SimCity 2000. But these headlines are not innocent; they are absurd because they are sourced from an absurd world. Some of them are funny, some of them make no sense at all, some of them make it hard to distinguish which are real and which aren't. When you experience that uncertainty about which ones are real, it's hard to avoid the natural corollary question: "what the actual fuck is going on in the world?"