What’s up, old folks? Here, not much. Holidays are history and the fact that batteries last 15 days will be for those who have alkaline batteries, because some of us go to the mountains of stress through the roof as soon as we get back into a rush. I came back from the beach on Saturday, after dealing with the traffic jam of Operation Return, and, as soon as I dropped my bags off at home, I got in the car again to go to the supermarket to fill the fridge before it closed. For whatever reason, there were no pineapples left in the fruit shop. I mentioned this to the cashier, and she told me that they were sold out every day due to the success of a supposed campaign encouraging people to go to their shops to flirt between seven and eight in the evening by putting a pineapple upside down in the shopping cart like a green light for taxis. I doubt it. That it’s all so banal, I say. Any tweet, whether or not it is from an interested party, only goes viral when the alleged virus revolutionizes our defenses enough to provoke a fever spike, whatever it may be: laughter, tears, anger. Excitement, in short. In other words, when it puts its finger on the sore spot. And that, beyond any brand strategy, is what, for me, has happened with the parable of the cart and the pineapple.
It appeals to us because it portrays us. And we laugh rather than cry when we see reflected a way of life in which the only time that work leaves us is to buy food and where, even to meet up with a friend, let alone to find a partner, you have to schedule it and risk leaving or being left stranded because your afternoon gets complicated or because, what a drag, having to look handsome and friendly when you are so exhausted that the only thing you want to do is collapse on your sofa and put on your body what is left in the fridge, and on your soul what is shown on the screen. Starting with those dating apps that look like catalogues of offers from the meat market. More than living, we consume. That is why, if it is not true, the metaphor of the pineapple and the car is so well-found. Before the pandemic, the anthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga complained in this newspaper that “life cannot be just working all week and going to the supermarket on Saturdays.” We are still the same. And laughing because you don’t want to fuck is nothing more, nor less, than a defense mechanism.
#Laughing #fucking
