Lon Shapiro, you’ve just solved a problem for me.

Yes, it’s true, Colette, piñatas are spiritually and metaphorically important to many Medium writers. We have a piñata court here at the Mill. It used to be a badminton court, but the people in accounting were so over-competitive that every match ended with a ridiculous argument about rules. Things came to a head during a game between accounting and editorial. Jill Smith, one of our best young writers and the author of last summer’s bestselling book Millennial Falconry, got fed up, dropped her racquet, and walked off the court saying, “Fuck you and your birdies.” Then Arty “The One Man Party” Wojciehowicz, who was not a great writer but who kept our magazine Cat Obsession filled with advercopy for Purina even though he spent most of the day commenting on Deadspin, threw a nutter and destroyed the badminton net.

We decided not to rebuild the badminton court. I was sick of lining it anyway. Since then we have used it for piñatas. We usually have several a summer. The person most upset by the change was a guy from IT named Chait. Chait was the first to insist that he be allowed to use his badminton racquet on piñatas, which we now permit.

Most summers we have a “piñata of death” towards the end of the season. A “piñata of death” is a piñata filled with razor blades, broken glass, and hypodermic needles. You’ll notice that last year the “piñata of death” was listed as the first option for “events” at the August Solstice Party:

But it didn’t make the cut. When the “Order of Events” was completed, there was no “piñata of death”:

This Year’s Piñata of Death

I felt like last year’s party suffered from the omission. It’s hard for a party to really kick into overdrive without someone drunkenly shouting “Let’s destroy the piñata of death!” (usually it’s one of the Gretchen sisters who shouts that).

I thought maybe this year we could have a piñata of death early in the season, perhaps around the fourth of July. I didn’t pick that date because of a connection to Independence Day. July 4 is a good date because that’s when the mosquitoes are the worst, and nothing speeds up a piñata party like swarms of mosquitoes.

I went to the art department and asked them to craft a piñata in the image of the death goddess Kali. My idea was to fill it with asbestos and talcum powder and then scrawl the word “anthrax” on the piñata’s forehead in red magic marker. I was inspired by this recent post by Arin Basu:

After talking to the art department it occurred to me that Chait might think I was provoking him. He is a big fan of Jiddu Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti was a student of Vivekananda, who was a student of Ramakrishna, who was a devotee of Kali. The whole reason Chait is devoted to badminton is because he thinks that he is as handsome in his badminton whites as Krishnamurti was in his tennis whites.

These are the problems of our globalized friendships. We face questions like “Is it disrespectful to make a piñata of a Hindu diety?” Chances are, it is, so I went back to the art department. You wouldn’t believe this, but they hadn’t started yet. The head of the department, “Radical Free Ellie”, told me they had scheduled working on the piñata for July 3rd, so there was no problem in changing the specs.

Having read the piece by Lon Shapiro, I told them I wanted an indestructible “Bebop the Warthog” as the piñata of death. While I was really looking forward to the symbolic majesty of taking a discarded broom pole to time itself, I would rather be sued by Disney than offend Chait. Thanks, Lon!