As I stare at the thirty-fifth iteration of my book (NOW available in hardcover!)
and think, with heavy heart: “Shit! I forgot to put in a yacht race and the rape of the dowager’s emeralds! Time for a re-write!” I realize that you guys are on the slowpainful equivalent of the Paleo diet: the actual paleo version, where you walk around the boreal forest, skin hanging off your bones because you’re starving to death, then collapse from a stroke at your first glimpse of a moose, or failing that, refuse the blackberries your offspring foraged that morning because “you’re not doing simple carbs until you can rock the cashmere sweater” or you’re self-conscious about having to belt your wolfskin wrap under your muffin-top.
What terrifies me about Paleo believers—and like all ideological diets, this is not just a way to get healthier or lose a few pounds, it is a belief system every bit as tyrannical as those that insist that ninety-nine percent of us are losers in this human-eat-human rat race, or that little babies are born with the stain of sin—is that Paleo dieters are the ultimate blank-brained, culture-free Philistines.
Go on, throw it all at me! I say Philistine because humans didn’t achieve anything—ANYTHING—until they settled, put up the picket fence and started raising food for the community. This meant that Thorg could now spend some time actualizing himself with those cave paintings, even though his parents would far rather he went to law school, and Gerpf could indulge her passion for science and come up with the application of heat to food, thus making possible those big styrofoam containers of Pad Thai that everyone loves on Friday Lunar Sacrifice Nights.
You know? Kind of thing? Also: Mozart.
The Paleo diet represents all that is wrong with our siloed, culture-free brains in this slide-down-the-razor-blade century, because it does not know of what it speaks; it does not admit or even know that Paleo people were starving to death daily; had no time for anything other than keeping their short, desperate, ignorant, terror-driven lives going for another few hours, do not know how culture happened or that it happened or what it is or why they would want it.
Let’s re-invent ourselves as perfectly vacuum-packed solitudes, with no reference to history or the common good, let’s write history that is totally, lunatically self-serving. It’s the perfect diet for the Trump Era, Trump being the guy who, when no one came to his inauguration except his mom and dad, Ivanka and Frankenstein Foreheads numbers one and two, insisted it was, like, the BIGGEST crowd EVERRRRR??!!! and told us there was just something wrong with our eyes.
Eliminate your intelligence and you’ll indeed feel a whole lot lighter. Maybe it will help you float when the entire state of Florida has become a giant water theme park and we’re spending our remaining lifetimes, where every day is a rainy Sunday, rowing out for picnics on the top of the CN Tower.
On it goes: So Donald Trump gets up at the United Nations, makes a long, rambling incoherent speech filled with stuff he’s just made up on the spur of the moment, and the audience laughs at him.
Just think. It’s like the nightmares you had before big final exams or music competitions or your amateur theatre group production:
“I’ll get up on stage and forget my lines and everyone will laugh at me.”
But that’s just at school! TRUMP GOT LAUGHED AT BY THE UNITED NATIONS! and here’s the thing: IT DIDN’T BOTHER HIM. He lived through everyone’s worst nightmare, which for us would be pure fantasy— but it was real.
He was laughed at by the U.N., then just went home, had some Trump steaks with ketchup, pinched some Miss World butt and stared into space.
Maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe there’s no such thing as being too stupid. And there’s no point calling Trump an idiot when he is merely a reflection of—a symptom of—
You see where I’m going with this, my little freckle-faced Paleo dudes?
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To help you further slim down your brain cells, I offer as dessert trolley a selection of images of interest culled during my morning 20 laps around the unleashed Carolina Lake of Pig Poo that is the Innernet.
I was in a bit of a hurry—so I may have gotten the captions mixed up…
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