THERE IS NO PROBLEM THAT CANNOT BE SOLVED THROUGH WUMBOLOGY

STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND READ THIS

Imagine just for one moment what it would feel like to be a pig. Imagine having 4 cloven hooves and a curly tail and a big ol snout. You're out and about, and for millions of years you and your kind just do pig things. You waddle through the forests. You eat mushrooms and squeal at birds or whatever it is that crosses your pig brain to do.

Then one day these horrifying lovecraftian horrors that walk on two legs, make their clothing out of the peeled skin of other animals, and communicate in eldritch mouth noises suddenly abduct you and all of your kind, and every day another one of you is slaughtered. A knife to the neck, a stone to the head, a drop from a high tower. Your kind is murdered one by one and they turn your family into food, clothing, and fuel for their obscene light fixtures.

As you laze about in a void of meaning, sitting inside your wooden prison, a spider calls out to you and tells you that if you listen to her, you'll be able to live another day. Then this spider starts making weird alien runes out of her webbing, and the bipedal ape things are compelled to start treating you better and treat you like the king of all pigs, all because of a spider.

Then your spider friend dies one day and leaves behind like a thousand babies and they all can talk and consider you their step-father.

That's what I imagine it must have been like for Wilbur in Charlotte's Web.

What does any of this have to do with anything in the world? Nothing at all. Not a thing, not a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing.

Although sometimes, as I lay in bed at night, wondering how long I'll have to toil away at my job, I wonder about that pig. I wonder what it would be like to be that king among swine. I think of how many decades I'll spend fixing problems that will never end, appeasing entitled office assistants that think they're queen ♥♥♥♥ of ♥♥♥♥ Mountain because they can fill out an excel spreadsheet. I think of how sweet the succor of a pig's life must be. I wish that I was Wilbur. I wish I was "some pig". I wish there was a Charlotte to spin me a tale to impress the masses and elevate me above this mundane evil of existence.

But alas, here I am, suffering in urbane mediocrity. A cog in an industrial machine that won't stop turning until every last drop of value has been extracted from my bones and I am left an empty, dry husk of a man.

At least I don't have to worry about being turned into bacon. For now.