Have you ever woken from a particularly bad night of drinking with an awful hangover, serious memory loss and a vague recollection of some bizarre dream.
You look down and notice there's blood on your clothes. You examine your body, you have no wounds. A visual image of you petting a dog hits you hard. Is it a memory or the dream?
You pat the dog for a few seconds and then for no reason you start to kick the dog to death, much to the delight of onlookers. You love the attention. You start to build your whole personality around kicking dogs to death. Your social media becomes a mix of tutorials on how to kick dogs to death and pictures of fellow dog kickers whom you admire. Soon, you lose your entire life, all you do, all you talk about is kicking dogs to death. Then, everyone around you begins to cough and suddenly the powers that be say that kicking dogs to death is banned for a few weeks. You can't believe it. How dare they. Kicking Dogs to Death doesn't make people cough, kicking dogs to death, if anything is healthy.
You and your friends start a petition. You angrily attack everyone on twitter who doesn't kick dogs to death. You need to kick a dog to death at least three times a week or you will not be happy.
Of course they should stop cats being kicked to death, of course during this ducks shouldn't be kicked to death, but dogs!? Dogs are what I personally choose to kick to death, and stopping me from doing so is making me have to rethink my choices in life, and fuck you if you think that I should think.
You examine the room. The television is on. A redneck man with a mullet, a shotgun and a garden full of tigers is shouting about a woman being crazy. You have to be dreaming, this can't be real.
You look at your shoes, they are stained with grass.
A memory is triggered. You and your friends dancing and hugging in the garden of an old man. He stares out the window crying while you all dance and scream at the moon. He opens his window to ask you to leave and you spit in his mouth. Your friend coughs in his face and laughs. His tears turn to blood as you kick his daffodils around his previously beautiful garden.
That explains the grass stain, but what about the blood?
You remember being at a protest. You were protesting someone else's protest, then another group showed up to protest the protest on the first protest.
The government said that the protest should stop, but they didn't say which protest, so everyone thought that their protest was still OK, and all the other protests were wrong.
Your phone rings, but you're afraid to answer it. It's an unknown caller. You answer anyway. The voice on the other end says that last night you hugged 20 people and they are now all dead. The voice then tells you that you are fired. It's Donald Trump, the former host of The Apprentice US, except now he's the President of the entire world. He starts to give a speech and in the background you hear people cheering. They are supporting him. He tells you and his supporters to go out side your house and kick all the dogs to death. You leave your house to do it, assuming that when you step outside everyone else will be doing the same thing. But you're alone, outside your house the world is as it always has been. The grass is green, the sky is blue, it's all just fine.
Feeling foolish you stand there questioning everything. Why did you care what Donald Trump, former presenter of The Apprentice US had to say? Why did you pay attention to him at all?
You look down at the bloodstain on your clothes and you wipe your finger through it. Licking your finger you realise that it was ketchup all along.
Now you remember.
You stayed in last night, drank, got a takeaway and went to sleep. Everything else just existed in your head, you thought about it all day. You tried to figure it out, but no matter how much you focused on solving the mystery of whose blood was on your hands, it was always going to turn out to just be ketchup.
Well, that's what 2020 felt like.
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