The Fool
I'm thinking of taking up clowning. Inventing clown yoga. Desperate times call for desperate measures. The Fool, the Zero, self-consciously taking on the attire of the jester, of poking fun at those in power, and also of my own desire for prestige, for security, for stability. Falling down instead. The thing Trumpists and their ilk, nationalists, anti-science conspiracists, truly can't take is to be laughed at. Is to be mocked.
I'd like to be a fashionable clown, a scary clown, an acrobatic clown, a mime. I'd like to paint my face half scary-clown, half sexy-clown. I'd like to terrify at the same time that I attempt to jest. I'd like to unsettle. I'd like to play the court jester, and fart in the direction of power.
When one posts only once every two years, every post becomes an apologia for blogging, and this one is no exception. Blogging itself—look at the name—is a kind of clowning, hamming for the omnicron camera of internet. Everyone who's anyone is writing newsletters (Brandon Taylor and Sarah Menkedick write my two favorites), but blogging is newsletters before they were cool, an epistolary forum wherein one is unsure that a sender even exists. Facebook with no friends, as my brother once devastatingly quipped. And still this website remains, a tribute to my ongoing foolishness and stubbornness.
Two other qualities elegantly abstracted by clowns.
My favorite clowns are the buffoons, the sad clowns, the weird clowns, the mimes, the silver people who dress up and stand still for hours in Central Park. I'm thinking of going to clown college, perhaps because it is the only discipline my subconscious could conjure more humiliating to my parents than novelist.
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