In Defense of the Ridiculous

I have changed what I write about.

Not because I ran out of sermons, meditations, and folktales, but because the world sounds too much like a pulpiteer—long, loud, and entirely devoid of mirth. I turned to absurdity the way a drowning man turns to air: instinctively, and with no guarantee of survival.

The stories I tell now, about bureaucratic saints, apologetic corpses, and squirrels gripped by metaphysical doubt, are not escapism. They are my form of rebellion against the great and humorless seriousness that has settled like ash over everything. When truth is wrapped in outrage and irony is sold by subscription, I find it infinitely more honest to laugh at the machinery of it all. Laughter, after all, is the last confession left to the sane.

Writing absurdly regulates me. It is how I wrestle anxiety back into its proper shape: comic, tragic, and faintly ridiculous. Each story is a kind of exorcism performed with a raised eyebrow. In a world addicted to doom and discourse, I prefer to light a small, deranged candle and watch reality dance round it.

I am not writing to make sense of the world. I am writing to remind myself, and anyone still listening, that sense was never the point. Meaning lives in the margins: in a saint’s paperwork gone wrong, a machine that apologizes to trees, or a resurrected tax assessor asking for a coffee break.

The world is absurd. So, I intend to meet it on its own terms, double espresso in one hand, keyboard in the other, laughing just loudly enough to stay human. —D.