Hey, listen. I know the worldâs on fire. But listen.
Iâll tell you a thing.
On the day after the election, when everything was worst and all I could do was go numb or cry hysterically, do you know what gave me the most comfort?
It wasnât the words of Lincoln or Gandhi or Maya Angelou, it wasnât Psalms or poetry, it wasnât my grandmother, it wasnât contemplating the long arc of history. It wasnât even hugging the dog.
It was the Twitter account @ConanSalaryman.
This is a joke account. Itâs somebody who narrates as if Conan was working in an office. Tweets usually sound like âBy Crom!â roared Conan. âYou jackals cannot schedule a mere interview without gathering in a pack and cackling?!â or âConan slammed his sword through his desk. Papers and blood rained through the office. Monday was slain.â
I followed it awhile back and have found it funny. (Iâm not a huge Robert Howard fan inherently, but whoever is writing these does the schtick well.) But if it had not posted once that day, no one would have noticed at all.
Instead, Conan the Salaryman posted something inspirational. And then replied to dozens of people replying to him, for hours, in character, telling them that by Crom! it was only defeat if we did not stand up again, that the greatest act of strength was to keep walking in the face of hopelessness, that the gods have given the smallest of us strength to enact change, that we must all keep going as long as Crom gave us breath, and tyrants frightened Conan not, but we must look to those unable to fend for themselves. (âThough by Crom! We must hammer ourselves into a support network, not an army!â)
I have no idea who is behind that account. But it was the most bizarrely comforting thing I saw all day, in a day that had very little comfort in it. There was this weight of story behind it. It helped me. I think it helped a lot of people. If only a tiny bitâwell, tiny bits help.
I have been thinking a lot lately about Bluebell from Watership Down.
Thereâs absolutely no reason you should remember Bluebell, unless, to take an example completely and totally at random, you read it eleven thousand times until your copy fell apart because you were sort of a weird little proto-furry kid who loved talking animals more than breath and wrote fan fic and there werenât any other talking animal books and you now have large swaths memorized as a result. Ahem.
Bluebell is a minor character. Heâs Captain Hollyâs friend and jester. When the old warren is destroyed, Captain Holly and Bluebell are the last two standing and they stagger across the fields after the main characters. By the end, Holly is raving, hallucinating, and screaming âO zorn!â meaning âall is destroyedâ and about to bring predators down on them. And Bluebell is telling stupid jokes.
And they make it the whole way because of Bluebellâs jokes. âJokes one end, hraka the other,â he says. âIâd roll a joke along the ground and weâd both follow it.â When Holly canât move, Bluebell tells him jokes that would make Dad jokes look brilliant and Holly is able to move again. When Hazel, the protagonist, tries to shush him, Holly says no, that âwe wouldnât be here without his blue-titâs chatter.â
I tell you, the last few days, thinking of this, I really start to identify with Bluebell.
I am not a fighter, not an organizer, certainly not a prophet. Throw something at me and I squawk and cover my head. I write very small stories with wombats and hamsters and a cast of single digits. I am not the sort of comforting soul who sits and listens and offers you tea. (What seems like a thousand years ago, when I had the Great Nervous Breakdown of â07, I remember saying something to the effect that I had realized that if I had myself as a friend, I would have been screwed, because I was useless at that kind of thing. And a buddy of mine from my college days, who was often depressed, wrote me to say that no, I wasnât that kind of person, but when we were together I always made her laugh hysterically and that was worth a lot too. I treasured that comment more than I am entirely comfortable admitting.)
But I can roll a joke along the ground until the end of the world if I have to. And increasingly, I think thatâs what Iâm for in this life. Things are bad and people have died already and I am heartsick and tired and the news is a gibbering horrorâbut I actually do know why a raven is like a writing desk.
So. First Church of Bluebell. Patron Saint.
Keep holding the line.
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