This is why the Neon Tommy office has rats. (Graham Clark/Neon Tommy)

Either way, yes or no, please let me know in the comments section below. 

You can post anything there. There's no filter, and people have plunked down more creative comments than I could have possibly imagined. You can read everything from wistful first person narrative snippets to threats of gang violence—really, people threatening to commit murder in the Neon Tommy comments section.

But it would be ideal to hear from someone who claims they honestly grok what's happening right now, writ large.

This business in Washington D.C. needs to be parsed out first and foremost. Why it's happening on some basic level is obvious enough—it's human nature to be stubborn and make things fail, and these politicians are so bogged down with affiliations and obligations it's amazing they can pass their own turds much less effective policy.

U.S. Rep. Marlin Stutzman has now apologized for saying, “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.” He recinded the statement and admonished himself for "misrepresenting" his party. 

What sucks about that is that he actually did a great job of speaking for me, one of those people elected officials are actually supposed to be representing. What better sums up the thoughts of rank-and-file Americans like myself than such a statement: there's no way of knowing where this crazy clambake is going, but if it's not some place good we're all screwed.

ALSO SEE: Neon Tommy's Ongoing Coverage Of The Government Shutdown

This shutdown puts such a startlingly obvious face on our dumb process. When party leaders don't know what they're trying to accomplish by killing regular federal procedures, at the same time they claim everything's in line with their divine plan, fitting everything that's happening into one cohesive understanding becomes incredibly murky. To employ a grotesquely inappropriate reference point, observing our country's political structure at this moment brings to mind my feeble understanding of the Khmer Rouge's early organization, under which "If you ask[ed] ‘who is my leader?’ your head was chopped off immediately."

Now add to that Miriam Kerry, getting blown away behind the wheel of her two-door Hyundai. Kerry's that 34-year-old dental hygienist who spurred a lockdown in D.C. when she drove with her baby into a barricade post in front of Congress, then tried to take flight through a crowd of cops.

ALSO SEE: Capitol Hill Shooting Suspect Dead, Eyewitness Video Gives Details

As soon it happened, word on the street was that her death had nothing to do with politics. Offering what appears to be our society's new mantra whenever blood is spattered on a publicly significant level, her actions and grisly fate was chalked up as having to do with "mental illness," and the country's discourse continued shuffling onward, as if those two words were some kind of postpostmodern, bleeding-edge neoliberal, metaphysical Mr. Clean Magic Eraser for wiping away evidence of the fact that, as Beck put it, today has been a fucked up day

Which led me to ask, in the words of the equally indomitable sage Reggie Watts, why shit so crazy?

Then I baked a fruit cobbler.

I baked a cobbler because I thought it would be good, something to share with people I care about who help me do what I need. I also had to do something with a load of fruit and rhubarb I bought from the Highland Park farmers market before it went bad like fruit is wont to do. This is fruit I bought from a farmer whose husband is allegedly dying of cancer and has no health insurance, who supports "Obamacare and all that," but says it doesn't effect her personally because she's, "so poor she already pays nothing." You see how that factors into me being unable to understand, as this article was previously titled, what the fuck is up.

It was technically a strawberry-rhubarb-pomegranite buckle, with a pineapple masa crust. Sort of a Pennsylvania Dutch, Central America fusion thing. Here's a guide to the difference between crumbles, cobblers, Bettys, grunts, buckles and pandowdies. Since the dough's on the bottom and the fruit on top, this a buckle, but Google's trend analytics tell me cobbler has beaten buckle in the search engine optimization game since July 2013, and I'd rather pastry porn hounds find their way on this page than cowboys looking for belt accessories. So I'm calling it a cobbler, not a buckle, even though it's a buckle.

Neon Tommy staffers ate the buckle on Oct. 3. (Graham Clark/Neon Tommy)

1) Fruit out like Steve Jobs

You want to give your sweet stuffing at least a half hour to congeal, so do this first.

Cut up your rhubarb into chunks. Other recepies for strawberry-rhubarb pie suggest using one-inch chunks, but one-inch is a really nonsensical unit to break up something in the shape that rhubarb's in, so just make 'em like the slices of celery some people put in potato salad.

Strawberries get chopped in half because that's how strawberries are sexiest.

Dump that in a big bowl. Slice a ton of fruit because that's how much you got at the farmer's market. Pile a big fistful of brown sugar atop like a meatball on spaghetti. 

Shake out some tapioca there, 'Minute tapioca' is okay since it just needs to cohere when it heats up with the rest of the juices in the oven. 

Zest two key limes into that bad boy, slice one of them in half and squirt its tasty juices on the heap. 

Splash in vanilla extract until it looks right. Then flop around that whole mess with your hands. Awh yeah. Nice. Get your metacarpals all up in them juices. Perfect.

2) Masa in effect

Now you can preheat your oven. 350 degrees ought do the trick.

Masa makes the base of this recipe. Like how "tabla" just translates as "drum" in Hindi, this word means "dough" in Spanish, I think. 

You want it to be corn meal mixed with lard. It's got a little lime juice and water in it too, but unlike tortilla dough it's really soft, squishy-soft. About a week ago my housemate and I realized this self-frying dough made a killer pizza-casserole crust, and we've never looked back. 

Since I neither wanted to use a store-bought Pillsbury crust sheet, nor dedicate the time to actually preparing flakey layers of my own, I popped across the street to Superior grocers and picked up a massive lump of prepared sweet masa. It came with pineapple mixed in among the pork fat. You smoosh this stuff in the bottom of a pyrex baking dish, give it a little time to precook (you know, till it's… precooked looking) and then load it up with toppings out the wazoo.

3) Hot stuff, comin' through

Your fruit had awhile to coagulate? Cool. Pull that dough out of the hotbox after it's puffed up a tiny bit, and stopped being so sloppy. Scoop out the fruitstuff with your hands until it's piled more than an inch about your dough foundation. Then back in the oven for precisely awhile.

Once the rhubarb's gotten a bit soft, you can give it another sprinkling of brown sugar for good measure. I added some more tapioca pellets at this stage too, since one of my buckles was looked a bit soupy. Then crank that heat, let 'er rip. You want this bitch extra crispy, I'm pretty sure.

4) Food of the gods of the underworld

Get the seeds out of two big pomegranates like this. Eat roughly a fourth of the seeds because they're amazing and contain pure unbridled life, as far as I can tell from my understanding of what an antioxidant is. When the buckles are good and done, zazzle 'em up with pomegranate seeds all over the top.

Then drizzle honey on top in a big criss-cross pattern, like it's a huge fruity toaster strudel. Use the smallest-batch wildflower honey you can find, since my Uncle James is a beekeeper and he's a great guy.

5) Bring your baked good to your workplace or friends or family and eat it together while it's still warm, reminding yourself that while human existence choogles along with impossible weirdness and stymying perplexity, we will help each other understand what the fuck is happening and act appropriately every step of the way.

Have awkward, strange interactions with each other, and push through those moments to form connections. Do things you enjoy with people that matter and thank those who teach you things. Go see "Gravity" this weekend and listen to the Beach Boys, or, if you're in L.A. attend the South African Arts festival, the Eagle Rock Music and Arts festival, or Ciclavia this Sunday.

And bring a bunch of forks. And don't forget to comment below.

EDIT: The Onion made a single infographic that sums up exactly everything this was intended to say.

Reach Editor-At-Large Graham Clark here. Follow him on Twitter here.