The Big Mood: it’s a hog’s life

This little piggy went to market… these 30 – 50 wild hogs tore through the yard where my kids were playing in three-five minutes. So it goes.

I could fill the remaining 369 words of this column with jokes about the feral hogs. I could do that very easily. Hogwash. Hogwild. I love my feral hog and her curvy body. My feral hog fell off a cliff. No, don’t overanalyse the hogs, they’re too feral. Hog girl summer.

The beauty of the hogs – and truly, to be sentient and with access to a keyboard on the day the 30 – 50 feral hogs came tearing through the backyard of the World Wide Web was beautiful, it was a joy I’ve not touched for a long, sad while – is that they were so surreal that they could simply slot in anywhere. Almost within minutes of their introduction to the collective consciousness of Online (in a debate about gun control no less, a man professing to be a rural American asked how the hell he was gonna keep the hogs in line without his big ol’hog killing machine) they transcended all context and became iconic in their own right, the meme to end all memes.

There were far more than 30 – 50 hogs now; there were millions of hogs, all racing through the backyard where the kids were playing, within three to five minutes. The jokes did not stop – even the death of iconic author Toni Morrison only paused them briefly. The hogs felt like the peak of internet surrealism, cathartic almost. I laughed until I wept, reading hog joke after hog joke, each more ridiculous and funnier than the next. Why did it strike me so much? Sure, the hogs were a laugh – but there was recognition in there too.

In 2019, fact is far stranger than fiction and the world often appears to me as a Dali painting, all twisted and foreboding. The internet is a cruel place and I think Twitter is one of the most hellish pits of all. We all scream and holler at one other without saying much at all; it is sound and fury, signifying nothing. Memory is short there, IRL events forgotten within hours thanks to headline fatigue.

Nothing seems to really matter and yet for at least 15 minutes every tiny, little thing – a Comment Is Free piece, a throwaway Tweet about shoes, a joke about a spotty dress – matters more than anything else in the world. We race through them at warp speed, yelling our opinion, squealing our thoughts until someone tells us we’re a dumb twat for saying that, backlash begins, the battle rages for a few hours and then suddenly everyone’s tired and ready to move on. We are the 30 – 50 feral hogs, racing through the yard where the kids are playing within three to five minutes. We’re the boars. The piggies driven mad. Oink Oink. Big Mood.