Goodbye, April Fools (& Other Shit We Should Abandon)
I am not entirely sure when this article will be coming out, but I assume we will still be in the middle of a global health crisis, and have been for about 1 year to the date.
Times were simpler then, and 2020 hadn’t gone FULL 2020 on us quite yet. By this time last March, we had only a few reported Coronavirus deaths, a President that was just acquitted for soliciting interference from a foreign adversary, and we didn’t quite know the extent of internet musical sensation Doja Cat’s dealings with sending racy pictures to white nationalists on the internet. I also hadn’t ever written a sentence with those words in that specific order before.
It wasn’t long after that we were all wearing masks and fighting people in grocery stores for toilet paper. Ah, those were the days! Cut to now, April 2021, and there are multiple viable vaccines in circulation, Spring breakers are back to doing body-shots with little regard for their own well being, and there’s a significant increase in firearms purchases. The world is healing!
With that being said, I want to present some things that we can 100% leave in the pre-world-crippling virus-era. It turns out we don’t need any of these things anymore. We dealt with them when we felt they were absolutely necessary, but not anymore! We are keeping them in the past where they belong—or at least cutting back significantly. We are going on a ““cultural institution diet”” and these are the carbs that have to be cut first.
1. Movie Theaters
Now, I’m not talking about arthouse theaters, community theaters, public playhouses, drive-ins, or small multiplexes. I am talking about Texas-sized megaplexes with 40 movie theater rooms packed with 200-odd-people, munching on popcorn, and yelling at the screen during the 18th SAW film. How on earth did we get away with our health protocols, pre--virus, in a place like a large movie theater.
Used gum under the arm rests. Sticky floors. Children with their head under the nacho cheese dispenser. THE NACHO CHEESE DISPENSER!! Germs were having a Fight Club in our mouths, gleefully kicking the ass of everyone’s immune system while they tried to watch Liam Nieson save his daughter for the 8th time.
I once saw a guy at an AMC sit two seats next to me, open a family sized bag of Doritos (now we’re not even talking Nacho or Cool Ranch flavored—so this man clearly chose violence that day), and proceed to eat the entire bag of chips! Loud and proud, licking the dust particles off his fingers and rubbing them on his seat. I’ve never been so anxious that I was at ground zero for the disease from “Outbreak” than in that moment.
Look, I appreciate the art of cinema in all of it’s forms. I think the Matrix is incredible. I love the Marvel movies. I’ll watch any Disney movie, unashamed! Little Shop of Horrors is one of my favorite movies of all time. So, I have varying tastes in film….BUT, I just bought a 70-inch 4k TV for the price of KFC Family Buffet, which I can now eat in front of said TV.
Let’s be honest with ourselves, not EVERY movie has to be at the Cineplex. Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, and Amazon have all premiered multiple movies that I easily paid $5-$10 for from the comfort of my own home TV or, hell, even on my phone from the comfort of my toilet.
I’ll watch the Marvel movies at a big screen IMAX theater for $20, but it would also be nice to see “Forrest Gump” or “Judas and the Black Messiah” in a small neighborhood theater when I want to experience the director’s vision for the film or hear the dialogue over the explosions. Hell, we could have movies with subtitles again (I know you all have been practicing during this pandemic). The first person to come out with a “Basement” style theater where I can drink bourbon and discuss the director’s vision for “Hot Tub Time Machine” will have a customer for life.
2. April Fools Day
This “holiday” sucks. How did we even get to it? I’d do the research if I cared more about it, but I am just going to assume it was some guy in the 16th century named Bob who once put a dead rat in someone’s mutton as a joke, and now people fake pregnancies just for shits and giggles.
We do not need this holiday anymore. April 1st 2020 is the day the siren song of bad jokes and insensitive pranks died. Between a reality show President who ignored a global pandemic and every single commercial brand trying to be the lamest on social media, we are better off just cancelling the whole thing.
If I read one more tweet about toothpaste-flavored Oreos being released on April 1st, I’ll scream. What did America’s favorite cookie do to deserve that? Child Protective Services should have been called to have Oreo removed from Nabisco’s toxic household.
3. Handshaking
Black people have been right about so many things, but man—we were WAY ahead on completely disregarding the formal “handshake”. We are NOT going back to shaking hands with other adults who we have seen spend the last year admitting that they don’t wash their hands, and don’t want to.
We saw massive amounts of people disregard ANY scientific safety protocols in order to jump in hot tubs with total strangers, because it was “their GAWD GIVEN right” to be boiling in a bowl of COVID microwave Top Ramen. Not after this year. It’s all fist bumps, elbow bumps and dap-ups from here on out. High-fives, YOU are on probation!
Remember how people told us that we needed to have a “firm, non-sloppy” handshake in order to be respected in the world? That’s done. We are doing the Kid-N-Play to execute business deals now. If you don’t get the timing on the two hops, you are not getting our business this quarter, Johnson. Waving from a distance is now standard operation procedure instead of what I do when I see someone I REALLY don’t want to talk to. I’m not rude, I’m careful. It’s a win-win all around.
4. Pants
Now, I am not saying that we are just going to solely wear boxer briefs and t-shirts from now, as if the entire fashion industry read “Winnie the Pooh” one time and adapted it as a uniform. However, there is no way in hell I’m wearing real pants anytime soon. It’s not even that real pants are fully uncomfortable or are too ”fancy”, I just don’t even remember my waist measurements.
When I started quarantine, I had a 34 waist, now who the fuck knows!? I could have the same thing or not—it depends on if the snacks have hit my body over the last year and I guarantee, if they did, it hit like a ton of bricks.
The idea of having to put a belt on again adds to anyone’s seasonal depression. If I can’t wear joggers or stretchy pants (shameless Olney merch plug) back to the office, what's the point of even starting the economy back up again? Give me drawstrings or give me death. Let's do casual Fridays from here on out. The lockdown has taught us that days don’t matter anyway, we might as well live like it’s our last...of the work week!
This list isn’t definitive by any stretch, as there are hundreds of things that will never quite be the same anymore. We have lost so many past times and good people over the past year: R.I.P. to Charles Entertainment Cheese, the greatest American pizza and child communicative disease industrialist in history.
However, I do think that this is a pretty good start! It’s hard to think about life going back to normal at all. Even though I hope that it does, it doesn’t mean that I think that everything that was, should come back. Think about all the things you’re not looking forward to coming back. Your friend’s kid’s birthday party--what the hell were we doing?! Shit like that, let’s leave behind, or at least, let’s keep the one good thing Covid has given us: The ability to cancel plans without needing any kind of creative excuse!
