Pris and I got ratted out by Sally Fein, a disability-rights advocate who came to the carnival with a goddamn GoPro buckled to her son's wheelchair. The device captured Pris' intellectualist slur and my snorting approval with uncanny fidelity.

Rather than throw us to the white-Zin wolves on her mommy-blogger socials, Sally contacted CrashChannel.  She bent the ear of someone soaring miles above Keenan's pay grade and shrewdly bartered her video rights for the chance to facilitate an on-air "healing conversation".

Keenan explained the scheme in calm contingent terms.

"We could cringe and wait for this bomb to fall, yes?" he said.  "But it makes better sense to climb aboard now.  Ride it like a pony, scream yee-haw all the way down. What do you say?"

I told Keenan I would gladly saddle up and ride the bomb.

He refused my handshake and shooed me from his vehicle into the custody of two grabby PAs.

Pris and I were rushed through makeup and wardrobe, sent shambling to our marks on a darkened set. 

We stood in scratchy new tracksuits and watched the offending video before a solemn audience of our castmates.  Then a montage of Sally's son filled the jumbo screen, a slogging PowerPoint gallery of horsey smiles, stretched-out superhero costumes and dinosaur-themed good times set to that acoustic Green Day song I can't stand. 

The lights came up.  Sally took center stage in a sequined T-shirt that read LOVE. She spoke of ableism and privilege.  Recounted the grim history of discrimination against people with special needs.  Wrought blunt-force parallels between Then and Now.

Sally said back then, Nazi doctors murdered "feeble-minded" Germans in a soft opening of the Reich's Final Solution.  And she told us how right now, Iceland's Combination Test was rooting Down Syndrome children from the womb, quietly nudging a chromosomal-aberrant minority closer to extinction.

Her eyes shimmered through the Coca-Cola smoke of her Mark David Chapman transitional lenses.  Words withered and stuck in her throat.  One dry hand swallowed the other in a scaly snake knot and she began to cry.

A bucketful of side-eye passed between me and Pris, rich slop for sarcastic hogs.  We were exhausted, eager for our hostess to get her shit together and wrap things up so we could turn off the lights and go home.

Sally snuffled.  Her breath came back and bumped up the kerning between the twinkling letters on her shirt.  She looked to the audience and invited comment from any "advocates or allies".

That's when my farewell appearance on "Celebrity Apocalypse" lost its conversational "Donahue" tone and devolved into a public stoning. 

Activated by outrage, the Under Thirties snapped together like components of a judgy Japanese megabot, functioning as one to put me and Pris on blast.  Those kids had logged thousands of hours in their bedrooms staring into ring lights, stomping out TikTok war dances.  They wielded pointed "I" statements with cruel precision and none of my clever desert-island survival skills could mitigate the damage.

Pris and I stood there and took it, two well-fed partisans condemned to be shot without the courtesy of a blindfold or a final cigarette.  It was my most public termination from employment and my greatest humiliation.