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My father used to run a community newspaper in rural Canada and absolutely fucking loved April Fool’s Day.

One year, the front-page story was about how the whole town—buildings, roads, and all—was being relocated from Ontario to Alberta. One reader told his wife, “There’s no goddamn way I’m moving to Alberta. I refuse to go.”

Another year he wrote a column in which he “confessed” to being a deep-cover Cuban spy. He was born and raised in that town, and yet people later came up to him and said, “I never knew you were born in Cuba!”

On one notable occasion, he ran a story that Essex, Kent, and Lambton counties had been sold to the United States. That one got cut out and pinned up in a car factory in Windsor. They thought it was great news.

He would usually write the first 150 words of the story, then add a turn that said “Continued on Page 18.” It was a 16-page newspaper.

I am the direct descendant of a man who used to regularly dad-joke a town of 4500 people.

muzak

In 2011, I dropped out of university. I was pretty sure my life was over, and I needed work, so a friend helped me get a job as a laser tag marshal.

If you think that sounds like fun, you are wrong. It wasn’t the worst job ever, but it featured jackass teenagers, screaming children, belligerent parents, and cleaning up every bodily fluid known to man.

I had that job for three months. There are many people in the world who work far shittier jobs, for a hell of a lot longer than three months. Be kind to service workers, folks. It’s literally the least you can do.

Anyway, one of the managers owned a copy of The Black Keys' album Brothers, which he refused to ever remove from the lobby’s CD player. Over those three months, I listened to the entirety of Brothers approximately 8 million times.

I’m telling you all of this so you will understand how much I fucking hate “Howlin’ for You.”