It’s All My Fault
20 Startling Predictions for 2026
By Duane Scott Cerny
I’m psychic in the fashion that I’m still paying off my college intuition.
I’ve never claimed to be psychic though I have often been called psychotic. I’m psychic in the fashion that I’m still paying off my college intuition.
The year 2026 will be the most monumental year in the history of man, but only if aliens make their presence known somewhere other than the parking lots of Home Depot, Menard’s or Farm & Fleet Enema.
So, in the spirit of clairvoyant foretelling non-AI-written predictiveness, let’s all take a long leap off a short pirouette…
- Department of War’s Pete Hegseth will launch a new non-alcoholic beverage called “98% Proof I’m Not Drunk.” Foreign oil tankers will be pirated to ship the confusing brew to the nearest dry land that can be found.
- Ground will be broken on the Donald J. Trump Ballroom and Money Laundering Dry Cleaner. Buried deep under the East Wing shocking discoveries will be made: a column size, wax replica of LBJ’s penis which had held up the portico; Nancy Reagan’s Ouija board with Suzanne’s planchette; and Roy Cohn’s popper-abused dentures.
- Fox state propaganda will launch a user-friendly interface to the internet capable of changing your mind in only a minute. You know, like the rice. Yes, Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip will finally hit the market, though a Hulu subscription will still be required to watch Only Murders in the Building.
- A portal to another dimension will be discovered. Disappointingly, the fourth dimension will reveal itself as a long hallway leading to a box-packed cloak room at Mar-a-Lago. The Fifth Dimension is both a popular musical group from the 1960s and a higher level of consciousness that can only be experienced by listening to their hits on vinyl.
- The missing three minutes of Jeffrey Epstein’s jail house detention tape will be discovered on a discarded laptop in a Hell’s Kitchen Salvation Army donation bin. It will reveal Epstein was simply cross-stitching an embroidered sign to read: “May Every Day Be Another Wonderful Secret.” Apparently, the yarn got away from him mid-snitch. I mean, stitch.
- An exciting new restaurant will open in the Meatpacking District called Mamdani of Sunnybrook Farm to Table. All ingredients will be locally sourced from the tri-state area and greatly expanded to include our beef with Argentina. Alternatives to meat will include products such as “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Roadkill,” and for poultry, “It’s Not That Hard to Swallow” swallows.
- Ghislaine Maxwell will sign the largest book deal in history; however, her memoir will only be available as a virtual, inappropriately touched eBook. Proceeds will establish a worldwide chain of orphanages, each bearing a plaque in her dishonor, promoting a vulgar mispronunciation of her name.
- Brothers Andrew and Chris Cuomo will joint venture a new podcast to be called I Don’t Recall where disgraced newsmakers are interviewed about their best excuses and results of same. Listeners can call in things they, too, remember, misremember, or just made up.
- It will be revealed that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was Opus Dei, but only on weekends.
- Donald Trump’s catchphrase “Things happen!” goes viral. A few nukes disappear. “Things happen!” His ex-wife mysteriously falls down a flight of stairs. “Things happen!”
- The Hallmark Channel will be rocked when it is revealed that most of their plots and storylines weren’t properly recycled by separating paper from plastic from trash.
- Banksy will draw an immersive Broadway musical as a bath.
- The letters “A” and “I” will sue the seven major tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Google, Nvidia and Cracker Barrel for improper usage of their names, images, sound similarity and vowel-atility. “E” and ”U” will appear on VH1’s “Where Are They Now?” but we don’t know why.
- Delivery robots will unionize to demand better working conditions, including the right to roll over slow-walking tourists, push aside double-wide strollers (see locomotive cowcatchers), and secure smart tech shock absorbers while traversing the cobblestone streets of the West Village.
- The apathetic eyeroll or “stare” of Generation Z will be replaced with a QR code that won’t give a damn about you either.
- Flying vehicles will clog many inner-city side streets as they are endlessly seen circling around multiple blocks in search of parking. Vespas will be villainized for their curbside carbon footprint even though they have no feet.
- The casualty of Donald Trump’s seventh and final bankruptcy will become official: the United States government. Bankruptcy trustees will be pulled from a select pool of billionaires, then thrown back in the pool. The deep end.
- Thousands of people will return from the dead, only to complain that the afterlife had better lighting, service and gluten-free options.
- Major American cities will monitor the hundreds of thousands of empty retail storefronts transitioning from coffeehouses to eyebrow threading salons to bodegas to phone center stores, often in the same month. This will be called: Small Business Weakly.
- Many previously unknown pyramids will be discovered, some still attempting to pass as casinos. Shockingly, it will be revealed that the oxygen tanks of octogenarian gamblers along with the carbonization of free diet cokes prompted the query “What’s that stink?” Methane-producing cows will win the largest class action slander suit in history to be known as “Flap Meat vs. Flatulence.”
Duane Scott Cerny takes the blame for most everything in his monthly satirical column, It’s All My Fault. Best-selling author of “Selling Dead People’s Things” and “Vintage Confidential,” he is the co-owner of Chicago’s Broadway Antique Market and is a guest favorite among fearless podcasters. Contact him at E-ThanklessGreetings@yahoo.com.
