Love in the time of ponies and pie cannons

I was asking around last night for writing prompts. Things that people who know me well wanted to see me write about. Now, there were suggestion for the usual things in my arsenal…Politics. Love. Family. Love. Men. Women. Things I would normally write about.

Then, a few of you suggested some things that I know you were deliberately trying to be absurd with. Among those – Pie Cannons, Cheese, Rubber Ducks, and more than one request for something My Little Pony related.

I also had someone challenge me to say something nice about each of the political candidates from both sides without being snarky or overly ironic.

I tend to feed the creative monster in my head by drawing inspiration from a wide variety of people. Granted, they are mostly the geek and nerd variety, but all of them are very versatile. Very different.

I can tell you this…I usually don’t say nice things about political candidates, mainly because they are campaigning trying to win my vote. They need to impress me. I get kind of nerdy about politics. I actually get MORE nerdy about politics than I do about Comics, Cartoons, or anything like it. These guys have the chance to make real changes in peoples lives. They are actually in a position, unlike you, or me – to affect real change in the lives of real people. For a woman with a fixation on super heroes, politicians are a natural next step – or they should be.

It’s an election year, and with that usually comes the kind of circus of stupidity that is only rivaled by feeding men and women to lions, or a televised crazy train like “Jersey Shore.”

In light of this, I think I have a solution to settling some of the major disagreements. Debates are fine for intellectual sparring. But sometimes that isn’t enough.

In one of the many games I play, there is an application where players can make items and trade them. These items can literally do whatever you want them to. These get used a lot in role play, as it gives tangible items to trade and use when they would otherwise not exist in the game itself.

Using this application, a long time friend/sometimes adversary handed me a pie cannon one day.

A goofy yet brilliant pie cannon.

It got me to thinking.

These things could be made easily, and issued standard at all political debates.

It helps vent frustration, it helps to give a visual representation for said frustration – and lets face it, it would be pretty easy to tell who could handle things under pressure like this. The first time a candidate melted down and repeatedly smashed a pie in the face of the other candidate, it would be pretty clear who could handle what.

Is this the most graceful way to handle political discourse?

Absolutely not.

But we dilute ourselves every day thinking that politics is graceful and dignified.

It is a lot of things, and politicians have the opportunity to really help some people – but it is not graceful, and it is not dignified.

We may as well all just get to watch something interesting while the circus prevails.

Just a thought.