The weirdest conspiracy I've ever experienced
In the greatest Simpsons episode of all time, there is a skit where the principal’s kitchen burns down while successfully hosting the superintendent. He calls the fire “the aurora borealis.” This back-and-forth, culminating in a deadpan “no,” remains the hardest I have laughed in my entire life, when I watched it upon its airing in 1996. I laughed so hard at that joke that I didn’t catch the equally amazing joke right afterward, where the principal gaslights his mother into believing that the fire is, in fact, the aurora borealis.
Flash forward to the present day, and I have still not seen the aurora borealis. In fact, I have not seen it to the point where I now believe it has never existed, and my whole life has been lived in order to figure out this fact, Truman Show-style, to the aghast horror of millions of curious onlookers.
Two days before this writing, my partner & I woke up to our friends texting us a red haze in the sky, over and over. The aurora borealis had reached as far south as Chicago, and far away from the city everybody was gobsmacked. In fact, the aurora was forecast for that evening, too. So we went out at the appointed time, and of course nothing. It is always nothing. This is maybe the sixth time that I’ve heard an aurora borealis in the forecast, only to look up into the void.
That’s because the aurora borealis does not exist, and all existing photographs of the aurora borealis are in fact crude photoshops meant to trick me. I don’t know why any of you are doing this, but I’d like you to please stop.
It’s very convenient of you to all believe that the aurora borealis exists in places that I exclusively hate going. Alaska. Iceland. Other sundry places in the arctic circle. Oh, sure, you all tell me to go to Iceland. “It’s amazing,” you say. “How is the food,” I ask. “Horrible,” you reply. And then I do not go all the way to Iceland in order to fail at looking at your fake sky haze.
Look, I tried here. I went outside my front door twice in one of the most infamously light-polluted cities in North America. But I remain unconvinced. Please stop telling me the northern lights exist. Next you’re going to tell me that there are lights in the south, too. Yeah, right.