Ridiculous Opinions #209
So, I was posting a Maurice comic on Threads and I saw a link to this article from The Atlantic, and I got mad.
Why? With all that’s going on in the world, why are we, as a society, such navel-gazers that this kind of crap gets written about? How can a magazine like The Atlantic commission a story like this? How can the writer sleep at night, thinking, “I really knocked it out of the park with that article on the mustard-flavored Skittle!”"?
Sure, the article may be fine. I’m sure it’s well-written and it may be interesting.
But I don’t want to know that it exists.
I have a theory that an idea is like a virus. You can’t “cure” a virus. Once it gets in your system, it must run its course until it either kills you or it dies out. If you get a cold, you cannot take a pill to get rid of that cold. You will suffer through the entirety of the cold until you are better.
Ideas run the same way for me. Once an idea gets implanted in my head, it must run its course. I can’t get rid of it. It’s there, lodged in my system, like a cold. It’s like a song that keeps running through your head in a loop. You can’t not-hear it until it has simply tired itself out. One day, that song will no longer be there, but you can’t accelerate that moment.
This article is like that. I will find myself walking down the street later today, thinking, Someone wrote an entire article in The Atlantic about a friggin’ mustard-flavored Skittle. Then, I will run that over and over in my head, wondering who greenlit the article, how much time the writer spent on the article, and whether or not there is some kind of conspiracy here by Big Candy to pay the author of the article so that their Skittle-Propaganda can make its way further out into the world.
I don’t want to spend one second of my time thinking about this article and here I am, writing an entire newsletter about this article. Now, I hate my own existence and my weak mind that allowed this idea-virus to burrow into my brain and force me to devote time to thinking about how much I hate the world.
And lo, it is the world that I hate. I hate a world that allows suffering at the same time as it allows articles like this to be written! What is wrong with the universe in that all of human evolution, the movement of the tectonic plates, the creation of life, the big bang…existence…led to a moment in time where someone wrote an article about mustand-flavored Skittles?!? Is this all that the whole of science, philosophy, and life has led to?
This moment?
Is this what it’s all come to?!?
Anyway, we’re going to see Barbie in about an hour, so I’ll write you a review next week.
