★★★★★ A little haze tempered the brightness of the sky, and dampness sweetened the air. A barista and a customer discussed the reasoning behind sticking, for the moment, with hot coffee over iced. Clouds slowly thickened, and warmth floated over cool currents, the temperature as richly layered as the light was flat and thin. It was necessary to get out in it, to find reason to walk extra blocks. The yielding and turning and holding of the prop-weight vestibule door outside the cafe was choreographic. A hot dog cart seemed the reincarnation of the first hot dog cart ever seen on the streets of the big city. Men stood handsome and sufficient in suits. Maybe they were someone. So many people might have been. A child on a tiny bicycle rounded the sidewalk corner onto Fifth, bell ringing all the way. The persistent bleakness of the light made it look from the office as if conditions must have turned, but they had not; walking out was the same surprise all over again.

I mean, sure, whatever, NOTHING MEANS ANYTHING ANYMORE AND WE’RE GOING TO PRETEND LIKE IT NEVER DID, so why the hell not. I can tell you for certain what Twitter thinks it is.

Of course, there are more fervent opinions out there:

I want the hamburger helper glove to fist me

— Bobby (@SullivanBobby) April 1, 2016

Okay, I believe that may be it for the week. May God have mercy on our souls.

“Google has long used April Fools’ Day as an opportunity to let employees have fun and show users its playful side.”

“When a woman brands her man as ‘sexist,’ she is saying that he is the worst kind of man that could possibly exist in the world. He is a woman-hater, a misogynist, and the lowest kind of male scum. He is a second-class, a social leper, a persona non grata. The man not only feels hurt and angry, but the name becomes a brand and a part of his identity; when it is repeated over and over, it begins to have an effect on his self-esteem, particularly his masculine self-esteem. Every man, whether he admits it to himself or not, needs his woman’s approval, as he once needed his mother’s approval. To put it another way, inside every man is a needy little boy.”
 — There’s… a lot going on here.

I get it: Everything is terrible and only getting worse. This week was impossible and as happy as you are that it’s almost over the only thing you can think about is how, seemingly seconds from now, the next week will start up, and you’ll go through it again and again until you die. All around you is misery and sorrow and stupidity speaking in an outdoor voice. I know your pain! I feel it myself! Would that I can tell you things will get better! I cannot, because I don’t want to lie to you. But I can tell you this: For the next four minutes this bear video will let you pretend that your sorry, pointless life isn’t something inescapable and that the crushing burden of existence has somehow lifted itself from your aching shoulders. It’s not much, but it’s not nothing. Good luck to you.

by Frank O’Hara

It used to be customary around these parts on the first of April for the editors of The Awl to commission a poem by a respected scribe to best encapsulate our feelings about the day. Let’s revive that tradition one last time and enjoy some verse from one of the New York School’s brightest lights.

Poem [April Fools is really bad!]

April Fools is really bad!
I was clicking along and suddenly
they started tweeting and posting
and you said they were joking
but joking makes you laugh at things
hard so it was only lameness and
garbage and I was in such a hurry
to click away but the traffic
was increasing for those “jokes”
and suddenly I see a headline
APRIL FOOLS! WE GOT YOU!
there are no jokes on April 1
there are no laughs on that Internet
I have been to lots of websites
and left some really terrible comments
but I never actually tried to pull a sorry-ass prank on the most obvious day of the year
oh April Fools we hate you shut up

If you see anything funny on the Internet today please seek immediate medical attention, because there is no humor to be had on the Internet today so you are probably having some kind of dangerous neurological event. Be careful out there. Anyway, you have almost made it through another terrible week, and that is no joke. Home stretch! You’re almost there! You can do it! Etc.! Enjoy.

★★★ The dance of the coats — back now to the big puffy ones for the kids — was more tolerable with the returning cold in spring than it had been with the endless incursions of warmth into winter. It was bright, plenty bright, for the school dropoff, but why walk on to the coffee shop when there was tea to make at home? Pear blossoms were a floating wall of white on Columbus Avenue. A sweater felt burdensome, yet the shade was deep and chilly. Kids grappled and scuffled in the sun-struck bare concrete on the back side of their high school. One tree in the block of fast-food places on Amsterdam had ventured into leaf and bloom, while cold wind still blew through the bare and trash-clogged branches of its fellows. The blooming tree had its share of trash in it, too.

This, from Identities.mic, is everything that’s wrong with the internet. pic.twitter.com/woIK6vgosg

— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) March 31, 2016

Hahaha, this isn’t even everything that’s wrong with Identities.Mic. There is SO MUCH MORE wrong with the Internet. The Internet is a puddle of puke that actually turns out to be a bottomless pit of puke plus there’s a lot of shit that rains down on you the further you fall into its greasy, vomitous belly. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is for sure the kind of gag-inducing garbage that makes even the most hardened victim of the Internet’s continuing assault on every single sensibility want to gouge out his or her eyes and then strangle himself or herself with the router cable, but let’s not give it so much credit as to make it everything that’s wrong with the Internet. Listen: The Internet is everything that’s wrong with the Internet. The rest is details.

“Is it any wonder that Muslims as a group are increasingly looked upon as inflexible fanatics engaged in the genocide of non-Muslims? Is it any wonder that political leaders like Donald Trump are speaking aloud what is on the minds of so many Americans — and rising in the polls with each new terrorist attack? The ultimate question, of course, is whether the new, more restrictive America now unfolding before us is morally justified in the face of the extreme threats posed by Islamic terrorism. It is a question best answered by debate and reason rather than by waving the bloody shirt of racism.”
 — We’re currently debating whether this is obscene, insane, an amazing piece of performance art or a new low in click-hunger. My personal feeling is that it could very well be three of those things, but not all four. If you’re not doing anything else, and if you’ve made it down this far let’s face it, you’re not, get the full experience yourself by clicking here. Also, I take no responsibility for your reaction if you do click, so don’t come back to me with your “I can’t believe you made me read that whole thing” because no one can make you read anything you don’t want to. If you read it it’s because you hate yourself and feel like your head should be filled with a big bowl of crazy word potpourri. The choice is yours. [Previously in Crazy As Fuck Shit from the Observer]