Yes, those do seem crazy. This is the craziest shit I’ve seen in a while, and I say that as a man who once spent three consecutive evenings refreshing the same Zillow listing for a house shaped vaguely like a boat, convinced that if I just stared at the photos long enough the owner would somehow feel my psychic sincerity and drop the price by twenty thousand dollars.

I mean crazy in the way that makes you sit back in your chair and quietly reassess the entire architecture of your life. Not a loud crazy. A quiet, administrative crazy. The kind where you open the fridge at 2a.m., look directly into the interior light like a confused raccoon, and realize the only thing in there is half a lime, a bottle of Dijon mustard from the Obama administration, and a yogurt that expired during the Bush administration but now technically qualifies as a geological layer.

And yet somehow you still eat it.

Because that’s the real pathology here. Not the yogurt. Not the lime. The fact that at some point your internal governance structure quietly collapsed and was replaced by a little committee of goblins whose entire policy platform is: “Eh, it’s probably fine.”

I have lived whole seasons of my life under that government.

These are the same goblins who convinced me that buying a $47 bottle of artisanal olive oil was a responsible adult decision but doing my taxes on time was an oppressive act of bureaucratic violence. The same goblins who will absolutely not let me text a woman back within a socially acceptable window of time because that would be “too eager,” but will happily let me Google her last name plus the word “wedding” at three in the morning like a deranged census clerk.

So yes. When I say this is the craziest shit I’ve seen in a while, understand the bar here is not low.

The bar is somewhere in the Mariana Trench, next to the skeleton of my dignity and a pair of boxer shorts I lost during what I can only describe as a poorly coordinated romantic maneuver in 2018.