Every once in a while, you encounter a bit of information that has the ability to derail your entire day, sending you hurtling off the path of logic and productivity, and into a ditch full of unanswerable questions, at the bottom of which lies only pain, confusion, regret. Perhaps it’s an unexpected revelation about a loved one, or a troubling news report. For me, it was this 32-word Daily Mail headline about Sarah Palin attending a Kid Rock concert, her impending divorce, and a cryptic meme.
Some of it I understood. I knew that on Monday, the Anchorage Daily News had reported that Todd Palin — husband of former Alaska governor, vice-presidential candidate, and aspiring Skinny Tea influencer Sarah Palin — had filed for divorce from his wife of 31 years. The reason, according to court documents, was an “incompatibility of temperament between the parties such that they find it impossible to live together as husband and wife.”
The rest, however, bewildered me. A Kid Rock concert? A cryptic meme?
It was a lot to digest. Maybe visualizing it would help me understand.
First, what I knew: Sarah Palin rocked out at a Kid Rock concert in Wisconsin just one week before her husband Todd filed for divorce.
Okay. Those two events don’t seem connected, but the timeline makes sense.
Next: Bristol Palin’s ex-husband posted a cryptic meme. But when? Everything in the headline is written in the present tense, as if all three of these seemingly wildly disparate events are taking place at the same time, even though we know at least two of them happened “just one week” apart.
At first, I read it like this:
According to the Daily Mail, however, Bristol Palin’s ex-husband, Dakota Meyer, posted the meme in question on Monday, a few hours after the report that Todd Palin had filed for divorce. So actually the timeline looks like this:
Were any of these events really connected though? Here’s a video Palin posted from the concert in question which, while whimsically edited, doesn’t seem to have anything to do with her divorce.
As for the meme, it’s a picture of a ripped, tattooed dude in a half-up ponytail holding a bow and arrow, and the words: “A man should understand he doesn’t protect his woman because she is weak. He protects her because she is IMPORTANT.”
“Exactly. We need more of this,” Meyer captioned the picture. It doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with the Kid Rock concert or his former in-laws’ divorce.
Hours later, my day fully derailed, my brain fully melted, I could finally conclude the following: Bristol Palin’s ex-husband posted a random meme a couple of hours after Todd Palin filed for divorce from Sarah Palin, who had, a week earlier, attended a Kid Rock concert, and none of these three events were related.
Does that clear things up?