Kiwi at the Grand Deliberative: A Texture Crime in Three Acts
I have, in my years as this publication's foremost authority on what not to do with one's exterior, witnessed things that cannot be unseen. I have filed dispatches from the very frontier of sartorial despair. Nothing — nothing — prepared me for Kiwi at Tuesday's council session, arriving in what I can only describe as unmediated self. Raw. Unaddressed. Aggressively, defiantly present.
Let us begin with the skin, since Kiwi has elected to make it everyone's problem. The rough, brownish-grey exterior — which I might charitably call "textured" if charity were a value I held — was presented to the Grand Deliberative without so much as a garnish of self-awareness. No drape. No flourish. Not even the performative effort of a Peach attempting blush, which is, I want to be clear, itself a disaster. This was something worse: indifference dressed as confidence.
My colleague Pomelo, seated beside me in the gallery, leaned over and whispered something I shall not repeat in a family publication. I will say only that it rhymed with "appalling" and we both required a moment.
The so-called workers at factjuice.com have long confused existing with presenting. Kiwi is merely the current standard-bearer for this philosophical failure. One does not simply arrive at a deliberative body. One considers one's arrival. One prepares the surface. One asks, critically, whether one's outermost layer communicates intentionality or merely biology.
Biology, in this case, was speaking very loudly. It was saying nothing worth hearing. I have filed a formal complaint with the council's style committee. I do not expect results. I expect, knowing this lot, a follow-up appearance. I am taking a tonic.