How's that for an important question? What would your life be like without a cuddly shark, on the presumption that you have one to begin with? What? No cuddly shark? How do you get by? Where's the silliness? Oh, the madness of not accepting the madness is utterly insane...
To divert for a moment: It's amazing to see just how many different animals get the cuddly toy treatment in zoo shops now, utterly amazing. At Barcelona Aquarium, a sea turtle and a sting ray made it into my collection, and a silverback gorilla at the zoo. It might even be possible to get a comprehensive cross-section of the mammal kingdom, if you have a small annexe to house them all and unlimited funding.
Let us however get back to the cuddly shark - mine is called Vera for reasons best left undisclosed - that great huggable ruthless predator of the oceans. Isn't it impressive that as a species we can render even the shark loveable in toy form? And the tyrannosaur too? It's fascinating how we take the most terrifying things and break their power to scare by loving them on some level instead. Yes, we would still be scared witless in an encounter with a real shark, but never away from the water! Making light of the horrors of the world is how we stay insane and functional.
Yes, we need the cuddly sharks, the fluffy rhinos, and the lighthearted fluff to avoid going sane, or at least I do. A sane person would have cracked decades ago under the stress of solitude and constant mess-ups. If you don't have a cuddly shark, then how about a blog of fluffy nonsense, which you write between turns at the mighty pipe organ in your supervillain lair basement? Or a magic greenhouse of exotic plants? Or a world full of jazz? At some point we're going to have to get to jazz, and not just the two general types of 'cool' and 'when does the tune start'.
A jazz trio would think nothing of having a cuddly shark. Can you bear being less cool than them? To the fluffy shark store with you!
O.
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