On the 11^th May 2024 a temporary forest sprouted in a theatre in Tartu, Estonia. The trees  were a gathering of around 50 tattooed Estonians, and the ink on their skin spoke of personal  stories of triumph and heartache, pride and resilience, celebration and change. We instructed  them to show as many of their tattoos as possible while dwelling silently in the darkened  performance space. 

I was positioned in the centre. I’d written a sequence of eight stories inspired by the same  tattoos that now surrounded me. I’d also spent time reading Estonian folktales and  mythology, I’d explored the edgelands of Tartu, and I’d visited the ancient mires and forests  of the nearby countryside. The stories attempted to respond to these various nodes while  staying rooted in the narrative traditions of folklore. The tattoos offered an obvious theme of  ‘permanence & change’ which I soon found reflected in the Estonian landscapes and their  accompanying mythologies. The resulting story sequence told new folktales of forests and  their people who contend with nebulous technologies, eternal conflicts, and fragile  interpersonal relationships. One of the stories, ‘The Artist’, is interwoven throughout this  essay, like ivy embracing a tree trunk. 

Back in the theatre, I’d fanned out the stories around me in an eight-pointed mandala.  This is a pattern often found in Estonian folk cultures and was also to be discovered inked  across the shoulders of one of our trees, somewhere in the shadows. At fifteen-minute  intervals, small groups of audience entered the space with torches. They were told to roam the forest, shining their lights on the tattoos while I read out one of the tales. At the end of the  story, that audience group would exit, and the next would enter soon after for the next  reading. 

Beneath it all looped a soundscape composed by UK electronica artist Rickerly that featured birdsong, the swish of the wind in the canopy, long-held drone tones, and sonic hints  of distant machinery. A chasing sequence of lights pulsated overhead, and a thin haze of  smoke filled the air. The tattooed trees would sway and shift, a few fell gently to the ground,  others crouched like stumps, one did a handstand as if uprooted, her roots turned upwards to  the sky. Sometimes I would roam towards particular tattoos, other times I would stay seated  in the centre and let the audience make their own connections.

We cycled this for four hours so that each story would be read twice. Two full turns of the  mandala.  

This was The Forest of Ink & Skin. 

The Artist: Part 1 

On the edge of a mighty forest lived a woman who was all alone in all the world.  No-one knew why she lived alone. Some from the town say that she was left in the forest as  a baby and raised by bears. Some say she had a husband once, but he was so cruel to her that  she killed him and burned his body in the fire she uses to heat her sauna. Some say she’s not a  woman at all, but a witch who is also a werewolf. But she kept herself to herself and was no  trouble, so the townsfolk let her be. 

But the world turned, as it does, and the times changed, as they do, and the town swelled  and became a city, bursting at the seams.  

And from that city came a man.  

He had silver hair, a golden suit, and bronze shoes, and he ate dry food from boxes instead  of the plentiful food offered by the forest. He walked with great confidence, his head high and  his arms swinging, as if pretending he were a giant taller than all the trees. He thumped a fist  on the door of the woman’s house. Against her better judgement, she let him in. 

“Why do you live here all on your own?” he asked. “No husband, no lover, no children, not  even a dog or a cat. Aren’t you lonely?” 

It took some persuasion to make the woman speak, but the man had a silver tongue and lots  of patience. Soon enough, the woman was telling the tragic tale of her life. She had not been  abandoned as a baby, she had never married nor killed a man, she was no werewolf or witch.  Her tale was much more complex, much more difficult to understand, and contained just as  much love as it did pain. Later, when the silver-haired man was questioned he could not  remember her story, for he had not really been listening. His mind was typical of the men from  the city: always busy thinking of other things. 

“There must be something that you want?” he said. “Something you desire most in all the  world?” 

She said that she had everything she needed right here in her house with her sauna, and the  forest. 

“That can’t be true,” he said. “You need a husband?” 

No.

“You need children?” 

No. 

“Then surely you must feel the need to travel beyond the forest and see the rest of the world?” 

She paused. She said no, but he heard her hesitation.  

“Aha,” he said. “You have wanderlust!” 

She had never heard this word.  

“No,” she said, more firmly. “True, I am curious about the world, but I have no desire to leave this place.” 

“Well, that’s easy,” he said, smiling a smile with no real smile inside it. From his pocket he produced a strange, glowing device and gave it to her. He showed her how to use it, and it  showed her the world.  

She was soon entranced. 

“You can keep this one,” he said. “But I want something in exchange. We’re building a harbour. Boats, ships, and docklands that look out over the sea. Our city needs to keep growing  and the ocean cannot stop us. Naturally, we need lots of wood. I will be taking the forest.” 

The woman nodded because she was not really listening. She was looking at pictures of  harbours and docklands and boats and ships, and she was looking at the sea and wondering  how far it stretched. 

“I will return for it in one year,” said the man, and strode out with his head high, his chest  up, and his arms swinging like axes. 

How it came to be: 

The core concept of The Forest of Ink & Skin had sprung from the head of my collaborator,  the Tallinn-based performance artist Henri Hütt. We had wandered Tartu together seeking  inspiration, and he’d struck upon the idea of an audience doing the same. He envisioned a  ‘rhizomatic story experience’ where an element of ‘soft participation’ might be created through  an audience actively rambling through tattoos. Perhaps, he suggested, my story might mention  an owl, and in that same moment the various torchbearers could be looking at a feather, or the mandala, or a mouse, or a skull, or the word ‘survive’, or, indeed, an owl. In this way, each  audience member makes their own symbolic associations between what is seen and what is  heard, perhaps enjoying thematic resonance or instead experiencing the disturbance of  dissonance, or something more nebulous in the hinterland between the two.

And while the tattoos had directly inspired the stories, that unity was eroded by the roaming  audience who encountered these alternative montages. A skull tattoo might portent a character  death that never happens, or a devil sparks a fear that proves misguided, or a heart suggests a  romance that is unfulfilled. In a sense we’d created a strange edgeland of narrative where  steadfast symbolic connections are put under strain and new uncanny linkages spring up in  their place. 

Of course, the audience had other alternatives. They were also free to switch off their torches  and turn away from the tattoos to focus entirely on me – and, indeed, some did exactly this. In  contrast, there were many others who roamed with determination from one inked body to  another as if this were an art exhibition (which, in a sense, it was), and seemed to completely  ignore the story being told. This too was a legitimate experience, especially for those few who  may have struggled with the language barrier (my stories were told in English). Whatever they  decided, our main intention had been to liberate the audience from their anonymous,  homogenous block of relative safety and instead let them loose to embrace a degree of chaos. 

To be rhizomatic, according to Deleuze & Guattari, is to resist the ‘arborescent’ and  hierarchical way of thinking, with branches sprouting from branches all derived from a central  trunk. Instead, we are to adopt a planar, horizontal network with no overall coherence or order,  where starting points and ending points are not so easily defined. In this sense, while our  tattooed participants became trees for the afternoon, the rhizomatic experience better evoked  the imagined mycorrhizal network beneath our feet; the ‘wood wide web’ of fungi fibres that  spread from tree roots to tree roots carrying messages and information. There was a visual  sense of this during the performance. We kept the experience on a horizontal plane, no one  person any higher or lower than anyone else, myself included. We had no riser stage to step  onto, and the audience were not in their raked seating. The traditional theatrical spatial hierarchy was eroded.  

This was partly how I was able to brush off those audience members who seemed not to be  listening to my stories. We had created a space of wandering freedoms rather than a constricted  focus, an almost neurodivergent theatrical expansion that accommodated the differing needs,  attitudes, and intentions of the non-homogenous visitors. I also came to realise that I did in fact  have a dedicated second audience in the form of the tattooed trees, many of whom reported  entering a heightened mindful state as they embodied the forests I repeatedly invoked in my  tales (especially the carved one included here in ‘The Artist’). By the second half of the four  hours, they were making links between the stories and showing me relevant tattoos that I had  not previously seen. I was most delighted to discover a hedgehog on someone’s arm given that the final story in the sequence ends with a hedgehog with ink in its spines. The rhizomatic  network was feeding messages back to me.  

I’ve deliberately invoked neurodiversity here as a rhizomatic offshoot from my previous project, where I studied the relationships between autism and fantastical narratives for a  Creative Writing PhD. I’d come across the work of radical French educator Fernand Deligny  who had, across the 1960s and 70s, fiercely resisted the institutionalisation of autistic children.  Instead, he’d developed a form of cartographic observation where young autistics are given  time and space to roam as they pleased while Deligny mapped their ‘wander lines’. These maps  were subsequently used as navigation aids during the therapeutic and socialisation activities of  his clinic. 

Deligny’s idea was to allow the world to bend around the autistic people, rather than forcing  the autistics to fight their instincts for the sake of fitting into a world constructed around  neurotypicality. Such thinking is a core tenet of the neurodiversity movement in the present  day, and this ‘neuroqueering’ of the world offers a fresh approach to the deconstruction of the  stubborn hierarchical structures of narrative and performance. I like to think we all left our  ‘wander lines’ on the floor of that theatre. Overlapping loops and circles of audience, trees, and  performer, each telling their own idiomatic tale of the desire to see and be seen. 

It would not be a wholly rhizomatic picture. Seen from above, it would be me at the core with the audience circling, and the trees drifting slowly around in the same orbit, like satellites. But I think also of the pattern of the torch beams, the ‘castlines’ perhaps, that tell a more  rhizomatic tale as they dart from tattoo to tattoo in a divergent quest for coincidence and  discordance. 

Something had been freed, I like to think, to run wild inside our forest. 

The Artist: Part 2  

Later, the woman was alone in her sauna.  

There was a great storm shaking the forest, and the branches of the nearest tree were tapping  furiously at her window. Soon enough, the strange device stopped working, so the woman had  to come back to her own mind. She remembered what the man had said, and it upset her  immensely. 

She ran from the sauna and sought out the wisest trees of the forest.  

First, she visited the eldest birch, the kindest and most understanding, and begged for its  forgiveness. A birch does not hold grudges, for it offers patches of its silver skin to write love songs and memories. The birch, in all its wisdom, could see she had been tricked by the silver haired man and his hypnotic device. 

The birch said: “You must take the device to the eldest oak and place it inside the hollow.  The oak will examine the device and it will soon know what to do.” And the birch gave her a  coat of its silver skin to protect her from the rain. 

She hurried to the oak and kneeled at the roots, begging again for forgiveness. While the  oak was grumpier than the birch, it was also the sturdiest and wisest of all the trees in the forest.  It took the device in its hollow and swallowed it. The oak began to understand new and  wonderous things. It learned about the strange age of glowing devices that had arrived so  suddenly in the last few rings of growth. It saw how they connected, and how the humans were  dragged along in an agonising cycle of high joys and deep pains. Most of all, it saw possibility.  Endless possibility. And soon it had a plan. 

The oak placed a crown of its leaves upon the woman’s head to grant her its wisdom. “I will keep hold of this device,” it said, “it is not for likes of you. Now go, to the eldest  pine, who will give you the items you will need.” 

With her cloak of silver skin, and her crown of leaves, she hurried on to meet the pine.  Again, she fell to her knees and begged for forgiveness. The pine was the most artful and  cheeriest of trees. It had long forgiven the woman even before she transgressed, knowing full  well that she would never harm a living soul. The pine knew of the oak’s plan, and happily  agreed. It bled out a barrel of its inky sap and gave her a sack full of its sharpest needles. 

“Well, well,” said the pine. “You’re going to create art, my dear. A picture, if you please,  upon every tree in the whole forest, but a different picture each time, of course. And then go  into the city and tell all the people to come see your work. It will be fabulous.” 

She was very scared, as she had never attempted to create art before, and she had not visited  the city for a long time. The pine laughed and gave her a cone to place beside her heart, because  a pinecone is a work of patience and pattern beloved by young and old.  

She spent a moment practicing on the trunk of the pine, drawing two stick figures fighting  with swords. It was crude but it was delightful, and for the first time since leaving the sauna,  the woman felt a glimmer of hope. 

What it meant: 

During my trip to Tartu in February 2024, just as the writing of the stories was starting in  earnest, I escaped the hard Estonian winter for a couple of hours and took to the cosy warmth of the Elektriteater cinema. The auditorium was packed, not a spare seat in the house, and the  Estonians were uncharacteristically fidgety and vocal. The film was Vara Küps (‘Vertical  Money’), a documentary by Martti Helde concerning the current management (most would say  mismanagement) of Estonian forests. Slick businessmen would appear on screen to justify the  excessive logging and the unhealthy cutting methods, raising incredulous laughter and barbed  comments from the auditorium. The tension in the room was palpable.  

Estonians have been known as ‘forest-people’. Around 60% of the Estonian landscape is  forest (compared to around 12% of the UK), and their histories, religions and mythologies are  deeply intertwined with woodland. For philosopher and semiotician Valdur Mikita forest covered landscapes are ‘an essential part of the sense of home for Estonians’, and he suggests  that forests have been ‘an accelerator of consciousness’ for the nation. He argues that forests  are where ‘periphery accumulates’ and spending quiet, meditative time within them ‘supply a culture with the unusual and keep it alive’ (Forestonia, Estonian Literature Centre, 2020).  

He also tells of the importance of the ‘home forest’; the area of woodland closest to your  home which is adopted as a sacred and treasured place. You’ll go there to forage for berries  and firewood, you may build your smoke sauna within those trees, you may even find yourself  a warden of an ancient and sacred pagan site. Historically, Estonia was one of the last holdouts  on Christianity, abiding for hundreds of years as a stubborn pagan pocket, and there are signs  throughout the country that these earth-beliefs never fully went away. This may have been in  large part due to these forests, where sacred spaces could stay more easily hidden and  preserved. And while Estonia is today considered one of the most atheist countries in the world,  there is a clear spiritual intensity for nature within Estonian hearts, with forests as a central  pillar of the pantheon. 

Estonian trees have persisted as protectors and providers of sanctuary. During World War  II, when Estonia and the other Baltic states were tossed between Soviet and Nazi control, the  forests became the fertile arena of resistance. The ‘Forest Brothers’ freedom fighters took  advantage of the generational knowledge of the woodlands and became a persistent thorn in  the side of the oppressors. While the Stalinist regime eventually quashed these efforts, the  legacy of this woodland brotherhood echoes down and can be felt today in the proud and  unwavering Estonian support for Ukraine. 

Today, many of the urbanised Estonians will retain a modest ‘country house’ at the edge of  a forest to decamp to during summer – locations that proved vital during the COVID pandemic.  Wood is everywhere in Tartu; most of the houses are made of wood, their tourist nick-nacks  are wooden kitchen utensils, and in the colder evenings the streets fill with the heady scent of woodsmoke. It was no small thing to choose the forest as our creative setting; the trees  intertwine with Estonian existence as if their blood were sap and their skin, bark.

And yet, despite all this, Vara Küps reveals a governmental distain for the preservation of  woodland heritage. Forest felling has accelerated in recent years, and large swathes of ancient  woodland are being aggressively cut in pursuit of profits. Wood, of course, is one of Estonia’s  key exports, and the forestry commission argue that harder winters and growing populations,  both within and outside Estonia, require more wood as a source of fuel. But activists contend  that protected forests are being shadily re-categorised and felling stats are being fudged to  accommodate aggressive expansion. Environmental concerns are also being ignored as  monoculture pseudo-forests are cultivated for the purposes of logging, resulting in unhealthy,  lifeless woodlands with little other flora or fauna. The pointed use of drone shots throughout  Vara Küps show the devastation wrought on the landscape. Bare and boggy arenas scratched  with the black track lines of the harvesting machines, the scarring wander lines of ecocide.

The story sequence of ‘The Forest of Ink & Skin’ makes regular contact with these fragilities. In one tale, a future city has carefully constructed sanitised ‘zones’ of nature,  including the most extreme version of a monoculture forest, and has embedded folkloric fears  among the people to stop them straying beyond the boundaries and into the wilds. The girl who  disobeys is reunited with animal life and transformed into a witchy figure more radical than  the city folk have been allowed to imagine. In another, a family collectively loses their memory  after one member, the youngest, is cursed for neglecting the home forest. Returning to the trees  restores a fragile form of harmony, but the ancient forces of the woodland fade into an unheard  distance, doomed to be forever out of sync with human modernities. I hope ‘The Artist’,  included here, speaks for itself. 

Like our audience, the stories meander and drift and make unexpected turns. They are  pointedly self-aware, asking questions of the narratives we construct for ourselves when we  use them to justify inharmonious actions. Obvious conclusions are resisted, questions are posed  and left unanswered, and throughout the sequence the forest abides as a ‘bewitching landscape’  (Mikita, Forestonia). It persists as often as it falls, it outlasts and outlives, sometimes shunning  our fairytale foibles, sometimes embracing them wholeheartedly. Much like our tattooed trees,  the forests in the stories are temporary, private, mysterious, and lead their own lives away from  the glare and the torch beams of visitors. 

Vara Küps unveiled to me a febrile debate that I was wholly unaware of, reminding me of  the similar debates we’re having in the UK concerning the poisoning of our bodies of water. It  also helped to reveal the cultural importance of asking a group of Estonians to embody a living forest of temporary trees and inviting another group to explore it. The rhizomatic experience  within the theatre space extended far beyond those darkened walls, reaching into the depths of  the home forests, ancient forests, and sickly forests just beyond the city limits.  

The central presence of the tattoos, I hope, emphasised a theme of defiant permanence that  helped strengthen these mycorrhizal narrative lines. Here, carved on the skin-bark of our sturdy  oak-humans were hieroglyphics of hope, icons of inspiration, and runes of resilience, the exact  details and reasons for their origins deliberately obscured. Instead, the mere existence of the  tattoos urged us forward by showing that change will happen, but our destinies are shaped by  what we choose to do. 

The Artist: Part 3 

Every day of that year from dawn to dusk, she went from tree to tree sketching and etching,  wearing her cloak of birch and her crown of oak, with the cone of pine snug beside her heart.  On the tree closest to the city, she drew an eight-pointed mandala with a butterfly at the  centre. It would tell the townsfolk that there was a transformation underway.  On the tree furthest from the city, she drew herself, her arms crossed over her chest, and her  head replaced with blooming flowers and stretching leaves, so that she could always remind  herself that there are ways out of every difficult situation. 

And on the tree at the very centre of the forest, not far from the eldest birch, she drew a great  dragon, borrowing all the colours of the forest, from the berries to the beetles, and the tree  responded by growing twice as tall so that the dragon could look out across the canopy, ready  to spring to life should any felling begin. 

It took her almost the whole year but with one day to spare, and only one needle from the  pine remaining, and just one single drop of its sap, she had etched pictures on every trunk of  every tree throughout the whole of the mighty forest.  

There was but one task remaining, and she barely had the energy to do it. But the dragon  roared from above the canopy, roses bloomed from her cheeks, and the mandala swirled  through her mind and drew her to the edge of the city. 

With the final needle and the last drop of sap, she fell upon the door of the house closest to  the forest and wrote the words: ‘Come and See’. Then she turned and walked back towards the  forest, knowing full well that this journey would be her last. 

When she reached the mandala, she just had enough energy to look behind. There was a vast  crowd of people following her and they all had the same strange device as the man who had  visited her almost a year ago. 

And the great tragedy of this tale is that our artist died on that spot thinking that she had  failed. Her final thoughts were these: that all those people had been hypnotised by the silver haired man just as she had been, and they were going to use those devices to destroy the trees  and build the wooden city to choke the distant sea. 

But the trees knew differently. She had not failed. The oak’s plan had worked perfectly. The people came with their devices, but they did not cut down the trees. They explored the  forest to every corner and every inch, and they marvelled at the work our artist had done. And  with their strange devices, they showed her work to the rest of the world and within the space  of just a few brief hours, the plans of the silver-haired man were stopped.  As for that man, he was driven out of the city and told to go elsewhere. As for her house, it  became a shrine for her mighty work.  

As for the forest, it lived on, the trees aching in the pain of bearing her art, but they stayed  standing for as long as they could manage, which was many, many years.  And by the time the last painted tree had fallen, there were already many new trees in place.

The post The Forest of Ink & Skin appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Ash Patel-Brown is now on an eight-day streak. COW24’s new meteorologist has accurately predicted the weather eight days in a row, an unthinkable feat that has never been attempted until now. One can say she’s taking the meteorology world by storm. This is John Maynard reporting for XYMN from Boston, MA.

July 10 

Sir, the viewers are irate! We are getting more phone calls, letters, and emails than we’ve received about any story or subject we’ve covered in the twenty years I’ve worked here. People are confused. They’re angry. They have no idea what to do with accurate weather forecasts. An elderly couple got soaked because they left their umbrellas at home—Ash had predicted rain. They’re threatening to sue the station, and Ash because she’s changing the old way of doing forecasts. Others are upset that we’ve made their lives more predictable and boring. Today we received a letter from Congressman Jordan’s office. He plans on launching an investigation into Ash’s liberal education and elite credentials. By the way, he’s also threatening to subpoena all of our internal correspondence. 

July 12 

Ash, consider this your first warning. This station has a long and storied history. While we appreciate your work ethic and commitment, you are changing too many things, and too fast. First, you insisted on ditching the traditional blue/black/gray suits for dresses and then last Thursday, you wore a print! On air! I’m surprised we haven’t been targeted by the Epilepsy Foundation. But really, for Pete’s sake… Haha, get it? I’m Pete!… Haha, anyway, you have to bring inaccuracy back to the forecasts. People are not ready for change. Nosireeebob, they are not. It has to rain when none is predicted. It should be sunny when you forecast a storm. You can’t mess with traditions!

July 13 

Are you kidding me? That witch predicted a sunny day and it’s fucking sunny! I already cut the patio servers thinking it will rain. Now the guests are complaining they have to sit outside on a beautiful day when they were expecting to be told patio seats weren’t available due to rain. Goddamnit! I’m going to have to put on an apron and serve the cranky beasts myself!

July 15 

Dear Asha, 

This is to inform you that the Meteorologists Association & Glaciologists of America is suspending your membership. You have brought disrepute to our noble profession with your “revolutionary” practices. Scientific theories and fact-based predictions have no place in our modern world. We are also worried that you will lend credence to climate change believers and socialists. Please return your official ID and weatherman’s raincoat at your earliest convenience. Sincerely, 

Donald Goodwin 

President, MAGA

July 16 

Yes, Ma! I’m going to stop thinking so much… 

…Yes, I want to keep my job. 

…Of course, I want a husband and family someday. 

… I threw out my analysis. I’m going to predict a snowstorm… Yes, exactly. It’s July, I can’t possibly be right. 

…I’ll give them what they want. Don’t worry. Give Dad a kiss for me.

July 18 

This is John Maynard reporting for XYMN from Boston, MA. A freak snowstorm is causing panic around New England. Sub-zero temperatures have been recorded throughout the region. At grocery stores, shelves have been emptied of bread and milk while other retailers are struggling to meet demand for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas decorations.

A growing chorus of voices is blaming this anomaly on meteorologist Asha Patel. In the House of Representatives, a bipartisan resolution condemning Patel for her hysterical behavior has over 400 cosponsors. Station owners offered no comments but sources close to COW24 President Eric Murdoch Jr. confirmed that the station has already launched an internal investigation into the veracity of Asha Patel’s birth certificate.

July 20 

Asha Patel was seen wearing a tan suit.

July 22 

Comedian Bob Whitefellow was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his critically acclaimed skit featuring an interview with an Asha Patel mask made to look like a severed head.

July 24 

Extradition proceedings against Asha Patel grind to a halt after the mayor of Jacksonville, FL refused to acknowledge her birthright city-zenship. Patel has already been declared a persona non grata by the state of Florida. State lawmakers in the Sunshine State are filing emergency legislation to replace teaching about slavery with a course on the horrific failings of Asha Patel.

July 30 

Asha Patel offered a tearful apology for being a woman, brown, scientist, and anything else that might have caused offense to the American people.

At a hastily scheduled competing press conference in the parking lot of a Hobby Bobby, former presidential candidate and retired American hero, Rudolph Plump urged Americans to reject Asha Patel’s apology.

July 31 

Breaking news: Asha Patel’s emails were leaked to the media by an anonymous Danish activist. Among other gems, the emails revealed that Patel had turned down offers to appear in the next season of the Indian Matchmaker as well as Bravo’s hit reality show Idle Women of Jacksonville.

August 1 

LGBT+ activists are alarmed by Patel’s Bravo snub.

August 2 

Young Republicans and Democrats voice concern and confusion over Patel’s use of a Hotmail email address.

August 3 

MEN365 reports that Asha Patel has been granted asylum in Afghanistan. Patel told MEN365 reporter Mitchell Crank that she is looking forward to feeling safe again and to the anonymity granted by being wholly excluded from public life and employment opportunities.

August 15 

Sen. Warren Liz cast the lone vote against bombing Afghanistan for harboring Asha Patel.

August 30 

COW24 President Eric Murdoch Jr. announced that Kandi Kardashian has been selected to replace Asha Patel as the Chief Meteorologist for the station. “I hope that Kandi’s appointment helps us turn the page on the recent controversy. The American people are ready to move on,” Murdoch said in a statement released by the company. 

It seems that people on the street agree with Murdoch. Our intrepid reporter John Maynard checks in with the people.

“I’m just bored of the whole thing. It’s time to talk about things that matter. Did you see Kandi’s TikTok reel?” Brittany Lavoie, Burlington. 

“I don’t even know where Afghanistan is.” Matt Mattson, Portland. 

“I’m sick of the media’s gotcha questions. No, I cannot spell the name of that place.” Farah Malin, Juneau. 

“They need to have better special effects and actors if they want us to care about the war.” Loren Hobert, Graspen. 

This is John Maynard reporting for XYMN from Boston, MA.

The post A Perfect Storm appeared first on The New Absurdist.

(CN: Self harm, suicide, homophobic slurs)

There was a great and mighty wind,

splitting mountains and

shattering rocks

by the power of the Lord;

but the Lord was not in the wind.

After the wind – an earthquake;

but the Lord was not in the earthquake.

After the earthquake – fire;

but the Lord was not in the fire.

And after the fire –

a soft murmuring sound.

1 Kings 19:11-12

The post Reincarnation appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Over the seasons, like a lot of people, agitation over the virus and the lockdowns made me want to embark on some ambitious project. Everyone’s quarantine pet project is different. For some people it’s baking, watching old movies, making a career change, or just trying to survive. Just be glad mine wasn’t a mixtape. It was Paintings for the Planet, a non-for-profit website where I sell prints, mugs, and greeting cards featuring my paintings of natural scenery to raise funds for environmental organizations. 

The idea came to me because I realized the intentions of a painter and an environmentalist are pretty similar. Both aim to preserve the landscapes they love. Their branches are different but their roots burrow through common ground: a vision for a peaceful relationship between humans and the forests, mountains, and rivers that sustain them. (They’re also both prone to self-righteous moralizing, but let’s overlook that one.)

A Big Challenge

As an amateur artist and college student with very little grasp of technical composition, sales, or social media marketing, starting this endeavor was an uphill battle. But I had a neurotic determination and would force it to work if I had to. First, I had to find the right materials, printing company, e-commerce platform, charities, postal service, and attitude. I’ll spare the bureaucratic details but it was a tiring, months-long preparation process.

And when I thought I was dotting every i and crossing every t, it turned out I was accidentally dotting my t’s and crossing my i’s and my other 24 letters were imploding. Every step forward came with two steps back and I was always discovering some new flaw in my plan, whether it was a typo in a bank routing number or a glitch that made all the text on my website invisible or an achingly awkward phone call with a customer support agent from a ceramics customization company. I dreaded accusations of eco-hypocrisy so I started making all my boxes out of upcycled consumer packaging. This development sounds chic until you picture me, eyes bloodshot, feverishly dissecting an empty Cheez-It box with an X-Acto Knife at three in the morning.

After a breaking point I realized I had to just launch the website before it was perfect, because it would never be perfect. I could either work out the hiccups as the business grew, or I could let the hiccups consume me and never advance. I just wanted to share my art with other people in a way that could help other people. It was a broad goal, but it was the narrow things that were blocking me from reaching it.

So I launched it, starting out with four prints then adding about two dozen more products over the course of three months. 

How It Changed Me

I practiced and got better at painting. Yes, I watched Bob Ross videos, but also about a million other YouTube tutorials about blending, lighting, and the uses for different brushes. In school I admired (and envied) my friend Anshul for being able to craft beautiful things in her art classes. I never thought I had the discipline to do it myself. I still find it challenging, but now I enjoy the calculation a landscape painting demands. It feels like a reconnection with the arts and crafts we love to do as kids, but with the patience that comes with being a few years older.

And I started seeing things. I’ve lived in my hometown for 20 years but I never understood it until now. I was a recluse growing up and mostly saw these streets through school bus windows and closed screen doors. But now I go for walks in the nature trails here for painting inspiration, and I make a trip to the post office twice or thrice a week. I walk past the gray and white houses, the Dunkin’ Donuts, the masked and unmasked pedestrians. I see the shadows of branches on the forest floor. The reflections of clouds on lakes. The way we never really see landscapes for what they are — we only make impressions of what we think they look like and fill in the distant details subconsciously. 

And when I was sending out some packages one day, I saw an old lady thanking a post office worker for his service. I saw more children riding bikes than ever before. I saw pools of rain, blades of grass, and leaves starting to creep up the wooden frame of the gazebo across from the town hall. I saw an evening fog that made the whole world look like watercolors.

People I hadn’t talked to in years placed orders and sent messages and spread the word about what I was doing. My favorite teachers from high school, my relatives, close friends and faraway ones, and complete strangers all contributed to support the conservation of New York’s natural resources. Their generosity was like a glistening woodland waterfall that never stopped cascading.  A rude voice in my mind says that they all contributed out of pity, that I was only even doing this project for clout, and that my impact was too small to ever matter. But I don’t let those thoughts linger. I’m proud of what I’m doing and I encourage you to think about what calling you have, or could hone, to find your own spark! 

Maybe you can even turn it into a cloying, self-congratulatory thinkpiece.

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