Billionaires and Honey Bears

Who’s your least favorite African American? I’ll go first—mine’s Elon Musk.

I didn’t want to mention him, obviously—and you didn’t want me to mention him either, because nobody, nobody at all, or at least nobody worth mentioning, feels uplifted at the thought of Elon Musk. We understand the problem well enough. He has a crippling need to be mentioned by people. Worse than that, he wants us to be annoyed with him, like some bratty fourteen-year-old boy making too much noise on public transport. Of course, if we complain about him, we assume we are letting him win. Personally, I doubt the assumption. My feeling is that if a fourteen-year-old boy is being unnecessarily loud and spouting racist nonsense on a bus, we’re allowed to elbow him in the ear accidentally as we exit that bus. Accidentally and only because we didn’t see the nasty little brat, obviously. Human error and all that.

But for most of us, Elon is little more than an unskippable advertisement at Youtube. If you’re like me, you only go to Youtube to watch videos of otters, because videos of otters are probably the coolest things on the internet, anyway. Though recently I discovered honey bears, also known as kinkajous, a carnivorous mammal of Central and South America. So, I’ve been watching videos of them as well. I love honey bears. I love everything about them. I think it’s their ears.

Now, before you go searching for videos of honey bears, remember they’ll be a few unskippable advertisements. Google, which has been surveilling me for at least a quarter of a century, surely realizes by now that I don’t particularly care for their advertisements, but their business model, evidently, is to irk me so profoundly that I’ll give up and subscribe to their … you know, that thing they have. That service or whatever they’re calling it. They have a pop-up appearing on the screen, though like any right-thinking individual, I ignore pop-ups. But through the general zeitgeist I’ve learned they have a subscription service which would enable us to watch videos of honey bears all day long, sans advertisements. So, I know such a service exists, and I also know I’m never paying for it, because that is who and how I am. I don’t support toxic business models, I guess I’m saying.

I’m also not giving any money to Elon Musk, the climate change denier who manufactures electric cars. Oh, I know he has his supporters, just as Draco Malfoy had his Crabbe and Goyle. Oh, I heard Elon is suing companies for no-longer advertising on Twitter. Because after he bought that website and started amplifying racists, advertisers left the platform. He probably thinks (to paraphrase another billionaire) he’s been treated very unfairly. Fascists are always bleating about how unfairly they’ve been treated. There’s a lot of whining about minor grievances in fascism. I mean, Elon is ridiculous, but that’s not the main issue here. The issue is that, like any unsupervised fourteen-year-old on a bus — or much like one of those unskippable ads at Youtube — Elon wants us to to think about him. He would also like those thoughts to be negative, when possible. Which is convenient in a way because nobody likes him, at least not as far as I’m aware, apart from a few bitter young men lacking the requisite standards of hygiene to attract a female counterpart. Otherwise, nobody likes him at all.

I exited Twitter when the Nazis turned up in force. The lack of otter pictures didn’t help. I expect the website will eventually be sold at a loss to somebody who isn’t a Nazi. I might pop back in then to see if my account still exists, but until then, everything I hear about Elon is, generally speaking, against my will. Which reminds me, a friend sent me this.

If somebody who wasn’t a billionaire said that at work, they’d be escorted from the building. And that’s me saying it, someone who created an entirely inappropriate ecard site. But a billion dollars couldn’t buy Elon Musk a sense of humor, I guess.

You know, if I’m being honest, I misinterpreted that tweet initially. I simply didn’t understand it. I didn’t think oh, he’s offering to father a child with fellow billionaire, Taylor Swift. I just assumed he was offering her one of his existing children. Still creepy, but differently creepy. Because we know he has something like a dozen children already, and that none of those children are on speaking terms with him. (Something to do with his personality or something.)

Then I thought, he probably has dozens more children about whom we know nothing at all. Doe-eyed children, cloned directly from his DNA, who live in a secret bunker deep below his mansion — a bunker that is only accessible via a secret elevator concealed behind a bookshelf in his study.

Every few days, Elon opens the secret door behind that bookshelf and descends the elevator, where he’s greeted by those miniature Elons like a visiting god. He sits with them awhile and plays board games with them. Monopoly, probably. And when he wins the game, he punches the air and yells, “YES! I WIN! YES!” and laughs that weird high-pitched laugh of his.

But occasionally one of his doe-eyed children beats Elon at Monopoly and the man becomes withdrawn and distant. Wordlessly, he leads the guilty child through a locked door, and down a long dark tunnel which ends at the top of mine shaft. And here, he tosses the child in. Then he ascends the elevator again, carefully closes the concealed door behind the bookshelf, sits down at his desk and types:

t … w … i …. [backspace] [backspace] [backspace]

x …

Then he retweets a conspiracy theory about brown people eating pets, punches the air a few times and yells, “YES! I WIN! YES!”

Oh, come on, people. I’m joking. You know that guy doesn’t have a bookshelf.

It’s been a minute, Kris. Where have you been?

Yeah, it’s been a few months since my last newsletter. I’ve been working on a project and found it a little difficult to multi-task. But I love writing newsletters and would love for this to be the only thing I have to do.

I’ve also been working on Wrongcards, which is undoubtedly now the best ecards website on the planet. And what’s that like? Well, it’s like owning the world’s most impressive ball of string. I mean, one supposes somebody in the world gets to have the honor, but it’s not exactly a scintillating experience or anything. I don’t mention it when I meet people, for example. “Hi, I’m Kris St.Gabriel and I own the most impressive ecards site on the internet. Unfortunately, none of the cards are appropriate to send to anybody, but you can’t have everything, can you?”

Meanwhile, my primary source of income comes via donations of coffee – and I am truly grateful to you all for being here with me through this, er, peculiar phase of my life.

By the way, fifteen minutes ago the birds outside my house went absolutely berserk, so I went out there and found my neighbor leaning over our eight-foot fence. He looked rather rattled, actually. There was a snake crawling along the top of the fence, apparently. He told me he’d called the local Snake Catcher because this snake was about seven-foot-long and … well, I don’t know what he said after that because I went back inside and locked myself in the bathroom. I have now seen three snakes in my yard and have no desire to see one more. Remember my story about the danger noodles? As you see, my life is beset with many challenges.

Anyway, the birds stopped screeching a moment ago (and I do appreciate the way they operate as a sort-of Neighborhood Watch) so I came back out here to finish writing my newsletter. Which, as you can see, I’m just about to do.

Things with me are alright. I’m going to write again in a few more days and offer more depth and substance to my recent shenanigans. Right now, I’m still a little shaken about the snake. I hope this newsletter finds you in good health and otherwise untroubled by reptiles.

With chaste affection,

Kris St.Gabriel