I spend an hour on my phone in my basement home office making a parody video, for a project I’m working on. I scarcely lift my head until I have a full draft. It’s a gray day, so I’ve left the curtains wide open. The sunshine is welcome if it decides to visit.

The object being parodied is that Sarah McLachlan ASPCA commercial. It’s a cinematic language I get lost in for an hour. You know it, even if you don’t think you do. It’s the slow zoom in on a creature’s face, the high-contrast text, melancholic music, and then the ask: “Will you give?”

Turns out, people would. They did. That ad generated millions of dollars in donations. Even if it hadn’t “worked” to that degree, it would still be an artifact.

Why do I like it? It is earnest, so it does the thing it seeks to do. There’s no mistaking how the ad wants you to feel and why they’d like for you to feel it.

I don’t mind.

I know that they are aware what they are doing, and that I will not mistake it for anything else, so what some would call the manipulation doesn’t bother me. The video has been orchestrated, no doubt: it’s always up to the viewer as to what they’d like to do with their reaction to it.

So I borrow this language, make translations for my own uses. And you know what? The injured doggies and doomed kitties have opened a door. I’ve made something new with my own two hands—well, thumbs—pointed in the direction of my own purposes.

Suddenly I’m giggling to myself, swiveling side to side in my office chair, half-slumped around my device from concentration and now half-drunk with giddiness.

Comedy asks me the important questions. 

Can I prepare myself for what might go right?

The curtains are open in case the sun joins me on this weekday afternoon, and when I throw my head back in laughter, I spot an ant making its way across my ceiling. The stippling in the texture must excite the ant. How could it not? I mean that it would excite me. All the ridges and valleys. The surface of things might look smooth at first, but life is full of texture.

---