Remember when the world shut down and your brain turned into a doom-scrolling crime scene? Pan(dem)ic! At the Disco! is Clifton and Shay’s gloriously chaotic debrief of the years we’re all still low-key recovering from.

Shay starts in upstate New York, where the trains stopped, the clubs went dark, and the anxiety went nuclear. She’s policing her parents’ every move, terrified for her grandma, and low-key traumatized into full-time bed-rotting. Meanwhile, HR is basically holding her paycheck hostage behind a vaccine mandate, so she makes the kind of “my money or my body” decision nobody prepared us for.

Clifton, on the other hand, is fantasizing about getting laid off, loading up his van, and surfing his way to Patagonia… only to get retained, underpaid, and bored enough to excavate an entire basement into rental apartments. He also confesses to a disturbingly practical thought experiment about “thinning the herd,” inheritance, and a second Roaring ’20s—before reality smacks everyone with inflation, $9.79 McNuggets, and $22 sandwiches.

Between Mexico escapes, conspiracy-ish fears about vaccines, and the moral gymnastics of mask-wearing, they unpack just how weird, horny, selfish, generous, scared, and ridiculous humans got under pressure.

It’s dark, it’s dirty, it’s way too honest—and, somehow, both of them still end up calling the “panini” the best thing that ever happened to them.

Because without it? No San Diego. No Olas. No CliShay. And definitely no “stimmy shimmy” in the sheets.

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