Funny Funny Joke Joke - Blog Post | February 2nd, 2021

Here is a cat sat on a cushion. Everything is fine

I feel like there’s a joke in this situation if I can just figure out a punchline. It’s something like this, I go “what did the artist put in their blogpost in lockdown 3.0” and then you go “I don’t know what did the artist write in their blog post in lockdown 3.0” and then I go: “absolutely nothing because time has no meaning and anyway this joke format is dead.”

Here is an extreme close up of a living bee. Not all the bees are dead yet everything is fine.

Knock, knock, who’s there? Existential dread.

I don’t know about anybody else but I’m finding it a little bit difficult to know what to say at the moment. I can only really write for an imaginary future where everything is, if not okay, at least less on fire?

It’s like I don’t want to talk about the good and exciting things that are happening because it feels inappropriate, everyone’s doing their best to keep going and I don’t want to show off, I don’t want to be that person on the other side of the internet that makes someone feel shitty because they don’t have good news to share.

I don’t want to talk about the bad stuff either, because who needs to read about my bad stuff when they have so much of their own to deal with.

This author. Doing totally fine because everything is fine.

What else is there to say? I’m reading a lot of light-hearted fantasy books and watching a whole lot of Ru Paul’s Drag Race. I’m working on some applications and a short film I was commissioned to make in the autumn. I’m having a lot of conversations with my cat.

I keep thinking about Shakespeare writing Hamlet in quarantine or whichever play he was meant to have written in quarantine. I feel bad about it for a minute but like, in fairness what else was Shakespeare going to do in quarantine? He couldn’t get distracted with his phone, he couldn’t get bored and go back on Twitter for the first time in aeons and find himself watching a live stream of domestic terrorists storming the US Capitol within 30 seconds. Shakespeare couldn’t watch a daily round-up of the Black Death plague death count. Shakespeare couldn’t spend 5 solid hours clearing flowers on Buzzy Beehive Bedlam. Shakespeare could just get cosy with his candles and write, write, write.

Maybe Shakespeare needs to stop showing off about his bloody achievements. That iambic pentameter shit is only cute for so long you know, stop trying to make Titus Andronicus happen.

Nobody needs another play. Nobody needs another Instagram post about how hard it is to be missing seeing friends like you could back in October, even though my home town was only out of local lockdown for three weeks total. I swear to God any second now I’m going to have to take a deep breath and remember that this situation is uniquely difficult for everyone and I shouldn’t assume it’s easy for people based on what I see in one photo or three acts of a play about the rotten state of Denmark.

I’m sure there were hard things about living through the Black Death. Those lacey ruffs look super uncomfortable.