Pineapple Thoughts

I am a pineapple, floating gently on blue waves.

…Perhaps I should back up a bit.

I was reaching the end of my ability to bear up a few days ago, I think, under the pressure of oh, let’s see, everything going on now. Then Ammon Bundy came out in support of BLM (but not the Bureau of Land Management, he’s still mad at them, I’m sure) and all the absurdity just… floored me.

It was a helluva news cycle. That wasn’t even the biggest item on the WTFJHT docket that day.

One cannot provoke or schedule the moment any absolutely baffling mess (like, say, yours truly putting together Ikea furniture, or surviving a pandemic in a failed state) suddenly reaches the point of “laugh or scream and die, pick one path, AND I SUGGEST LAUGHTER.”

So I started to laugh, and I felt that curious internal sense of pressure bleeding away. I was absolutely stick a fork in me, M-O-O-N spells done. The kids were a little concerned, the dogs were snout-down in their food bowls and so, unconcerned, and I was laughing like a hyena who had just discovered a pile of juicy carrion in just the right stage of decomposition.

I took a few days off after that, and now I’m having more luck with work. I was getting afraid that even my capacity to absorb bad news had been knocked out of whack by *gestures* all this.

But now I am a pineapple, floating upon the deep blue sea. It makes just as much sense as anything or everything else.

The Princess appears to have hit her own moment of absurdity too. “Mine doesn’t happen all at once like yours, Mum. I just sort of wake up one day and I’m done.” The Prince just shrugs; he processes in other ways.

It’s not quite exhaustion, though there’s a component of pure fatigue. I suppose it’s just that I’ve been stripped down to bare metal, there’s nothing left to come off, so why not laugh? This is, incidentally, the moment people become truly dangerous, because every last fuck is gone and we might as well.

I sat down today meaning to talk about hope, but I suppose I’m past even that. There’s not a lot left but shaking my head at the sheer outrageous absurdity of it all. We don’t even get a proper villain, just this painted-orange shitgibbon and a crop of petty criminals stuffing what will soon be useless paper in their pockets while an entire nation burns.

Yet the dogs still have to be walked. The squirrels still have to be yelled at. The kids still need me, and if I don’t write, we don’t eat. Of course we might not eat even if I’m working my ass off, the way things are going, but it’s either write or go mad, along with scream or laugh fit to die, so I’m choosing the former of the former and the latter of the latter.

So I’m testing a new plugin today, to bring a little art to the semi-daily posts, and one of the images was a pineapple floating along. It just… struck me.

I thought, hey, why the hell not? It’s pineapple, after all. It’s the fruit that digests you back. It’s a spike-covered monstrosity going for a swim, in utter defiance of its own impossibility. Fuck you, it says. I’m a fuckin’ pineapple, and you can’t change that. You’re gonna lose if you try.

I don’t know about your coping mechanisms, dear Reader, but I hope they’ve arrived and are doing their work. I hope they’re serving you well; mine have arrived at the last ditch and are putting up a valiant effort. In the absence of hope, I will take the giggles and chuckles; after all, they are the traditional best weapon against demons.

Evil cannot stand honest laughter, and tries to crush and stamp it out. The ability to find something funny–or, barring that, to simply laugh as you’re going over the edge because nothing remains but the irreducible called a soul and you realize that cannot be taken away, ever, no matter what they do–is kryptonite to these banal villains. So until further notice, I’m laughing.

If it sounds like a howl, or a screech, or the dying scream of an enraged goddess who will now return from the dry land of death to fuck your shit right up, well, now you know one of the deep secrets of witchery. Cry if you must, laugh if you can, scream in the darkness. Sooner or later you find out nothing in that darkness can match the juggernaut you’re capable of being, and the knowledge leaves a mark.

Maybe I’ve found a new superpower. It’s possible. Or, you know, it could just be that I’m a pineapple.

Floating on the warm blue waves.

Either, at this point, is just fine with me.