Ryan: Trump is president, and other startling facts

You hit your head in a car accident on Dec. 22, 1999, and ever since you have suffered from identanterograde amnesia. Meaning that your long-term memory is intact up to the day of your accident. But now, every night, it resets.

Fifteen years ago, we fell in love, got married, had children, and I write you these daily notes, these reminders.

Our life is basically the plot of "50 First Dates," an Adam Sandler movie featuring Drew Barrymore.

It is now October 2019. Almost Halloween.

A lot of things have changed since your accident. Obviously, the world survived the millennium. But since then, life has gotten pretty weird.

Donald Trump is president. He ran as a Republican in 2016 and beat Hillary Clinton, former first lady. People who love Trump, love him to the hilt. People who hate him, hate him every single moment of their day. For a while, there were protests every weekend. And, this month, Trump faces impeachment for the fourth time as he treks across the country on an arena tour.

Remember AOL Instant Messenger? It's gone, but social media replaced it, online platforms where people chat and complain, places like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and dozens of others.

Trump recently demanded, via Twitter, that the nation of Sweden release American rapper A$AP Rocky from custody. Upon success, Trump dad-joked: "A$AP Rocky released from prison and on his way home to the United States from Sweden. It was a Rocky Week, get home ASAP A$AP!"

Then he stiff-armed Denmark for not letting him buy Greenland.

Zoom out a little farther and Trump has become friends with Kanye West, the musical figurehead of our time — who was called a "jackass" by the last president, the country's first black president — and whose marriage to Kim Kardashian connects him to a bizarre American legacy with its roots in a vicious murder, an MDMA-fueled sextape, and a famous Olympian from the 1970s who inspired young boys to be men on the box of Wheaties, but who is now happily living as a woman named Caitlyn. In true American fashion, the Kanye/Kardashian Legacy has played out on national television over the course of 17 seasons like some beautiful Shakespearean romantic-comedy.

Bill Cosby, long considered "America's dad," a convicted serial rapist serving a prison bid. Singer R. Kelly, who sang your beloved "I Believe I Can Fly," is also facing prison time, also for sexual assault and rape, as part of his longstanding sex cult of underage girls. Same for producer Harvey Weinstein, whose name appears in the opening credits of "Pulp Fiction" right before Quentin Tarantino.

The resultant #MeToo movement advanced women's rights overnight.

Dennis Rodman's friendship with both President Trump and Kim Jong-Un quite possibly prevented World War III.

A potent form of heroin known as Fentanyl killed Tom Petty and Prince and several people you personally knew on account of the opioid epidemic. Same goes for the growing suicide rates. Robin Williams, one of the funniest and most lively people of our time, hanged himself with a belt on a doorknob.

There are human beings who still believe Earth is flat.

America boasts the highest number of Olympic medals yet we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic.

Michael Jackson? Dead, because of a doctor. And the verdict is still out on Jackson's pedophilic tendencies, but it does not look good.

In general, medical and scientific advancements keep us healthier than ever. Burger King sells a meatless burger. Bookstores don't really exist anymore.

We've got cameras in dune buggies on Mars and footage of other galaxies, and American footprints are still the only ones on the Moon.

The pope is a hippy from Argentina, and hip-hop has overtaken rock as the most successful genre, maybe ever. Rapper Drake has more hits than the Beatles.

The ocean is full of plastic. Gay marriage is legal. Marijuana, too, pretty much. The Twin Towers are gone forever.

Daily life is just as peculiar. Our phones are not only portable, they contain all known information, including misinformation, and a lot of us can't tell the difference, hence the flat-Earthers.

Newspapers are all but gone and news media are bleeding out and Joe Rogan, former host of "Fear Factor," is leading a media revolution.

We almost had our first woman president. Which is still a sensitive subject.

Billy Joel, who wrote the "Only the Good Die Young," is still alive.

Overall, life is better than ever before. We live longer. We heal faster. We thought we'd have flying cars and lasers already. Instead, it's mostly plastic surgery and next-day delivery and Facebook spying on us, which, embarrassingly, we somehow did not foresee.

We are privileged to the hilt yet we somehow manage to argue about everything. These last few years, especially, have been pretty rocky.

The following are among the many nonliving objects to have become politicized in the past few years: toads, Brazilian waxes, trains, the color pink, cartoon frogs, the color red, tiki torches, paper clips, hats, beanies, chicken sandwiches, bathrooms, statues, bakeries, the okie-dokie sign, black polos, beer, soccer fields, smiley faces, hurricanes, and so on. … We can't agree on whether or not the Earth is dying.

We can't even agree on facts anymore.

We imagine a day without troubles, as if that were even possible. And at no moment does any of us know what will happen next. Meanwhile entire caravans of people, thousands of them, are trekking through Central America and Mexico for the chance to join us.

In the words of George Carlin, "When you're born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat."

New installments of this series come out every Monday and Thursday morning. Check out my Twitter or email me at kryan@mercurystudios.com