Dotty Parker

sorry. it's not the end of the world.

I was talking with CoolCat today about El Presidente and how much I wish he would go away and how much I am afraid that he won’t. When I think of W, I begin to see that absurdity can only protect a person so much. As a woman who translates annoyances and disappointments into absurdities, I’ve been feeling pretty smug when I hear people getting all worked up about the lack of quality shoe polish or how difficult it is to find a grocery cart that isn’t rusty.

Smugness is not working for me now, though. The sound of the word smug, like someone with a stuffy nose spitting out gum into an empty moonshine jug (think about it—it’s true!), just isn’t becoming. Neither is smugness in its corporeal (as far as that goes) form. It’s not becoming at all.

I’ve decided that I must remove at least part of my mask of superiority (to reveal the true superiority that lies beneath it) to remove some of my smugness. Unfortunately, removing that mask makes it very clear that I’ve been happily blind to how horrifying the big world is.

My darlings, I’ve run out of absurdity for George W. The drawings of him as a monkey are still funny, but it doesn’t matter. Even if he were a monkey, which would be pretty gosh darn absurd, he’d still be president and I’d still quietly cry myself to sleep at night knowing that Amy Goodman will confirm the terror of my impending nightmares. We would have a monkey for a president, which is absurd. Can his actions also be absurd, too? Can it still be absurd if it’s moved on past thoughtlessness to live solidly in the camp of dereliction? I think at some point it’s ulcer inducing.

The horror! The horror!

But perhaps there is room for absurdity. There’s always the Dadaist movement to fall back on. But absurdity just is not working as well anymore. I’m quite certain that I’m not building up a tolerance. I can see no end to my love of absurdity. (My favorite joke is absurd. Shockingly.) There’s just too much translating to do.

Is it absurd to be just too overwhelmed to translate the world into manageable chunks? I guess so. In the kind of way that war and ruthlessness and greed are absurd.

I worry that my attempts to shift my point of view so that I see the world through my very own special Dotty Parker lenses will fail and my world-view will be tainted by cynicism. Cynicism is temporarily entertaining and then an emotional suck of Hooverian proportions. Not that it matters. I just don’t care, really. (See what I mean? Not funny for long.)

And so I told CoolCat, with a mix of weary authority and some thinly veiled begging, “The world is going to end.” In my head I was really hoping that he had devised the solution for how to make the world a happy place. Or at least how to chuck GW out of the White House. But no! Disappointment! Not only did he not have the solution, but he looked at me with his kitty-green eyes and said, “It’s just going to get worse and worse.”

Happily he is not steering this world. He knows much history and would certainly abandon ship and go to St. Lucia to gargle with coconut milk. I imagine he would say, as he walked around the deck of the world pretending to supervise, something like, "Yes. That's how it happened. I tell other people to look at how things have happened in the past, that there are reassurances and patterns there. I like to pick and choose which past, though." Then he might roll his eyes and roll over the rail of the ship into the sparkling blue waters of the warm sea. In search of a lovely bunch of coconuts.

But I will prevail! I will prove that I can maintain high-quality nonsense for my Dear Readers. I will ignore the many histories of this world and go on to create one that will be forgotten with no negative consequences! I will rise up against the sucking chasm of gloom and send pink sparkle dust into pink-sparkleless lives. I’m hoping that some of the sparkle dust lands in Dick Cheney’s eyes. I could maybe give him pink eye! Hahahaha.

Conjunctivitis is not laughing matter, however. Ask BellyRub and Scott Baio.

(I made a picture of Dick Cheney with pink eye and fairies sprinkling pixies dust in his eyes, but it's too disturbing to see Dick Cheney. Ever.)

And so it isn’t the end of the world. With all the nonsense that’s going on in this big world, though, it’s kind of absurd that it isn’t.

Posted by dotty at September 14, 2004 08:51 PM