Cuffing season is here! It’s time to let Gritty break the shackles of the neoliberal capitalist enterprise and shackle you to his love nest.

Gritty, the new antifa mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers has broken into local, national, and global news cycles with a splash! Unlike Animal from The Muppets, this fuzzy, radical bombshell is life-size and figuratively throwing bricks at cops on Sesame Street (and Broad Street?). Recently, the Philadelphia City Council passed a resolution officially honoring the robust essence of Gritty. Within the resolution, council members noted:

“WHEREAS, Gritty has been described as a 7-foot tall orange hellion, a fuzzy eldritch horror, a ghastly empty-eyed Muppet with a Delco beard, a cross of Snuffleupagus and Oscar the Grouch, a deranged orange lunatic, an acid trip of a mascot, a shaggy orange Wookiee-esque grotesquerie, a non-binary leftist icon, an orange menace, a raging id, and an antihero. He has been characterized as huggable but also potentially insurrectionary, ridiculous, horrifying, unsettling, and absurd…

WHEREAS, Gritty may be a hideous monster, but he is our hideous monster; now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That the Council of the City of Philadelphia welcomes Gritty, the new mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers, and honors the spirit and passion that Gritty has brought to the City of Philadelphia and to the entire country, both on and off the ice.” (NBC)

When he’s not destroying the penalty box that he’s sent to, our orange fiend does a lot to garner his status as our Marxist Pixie Dream Ghoul…

1. His bodacious, matronly, tender, supple, furry, textured, lard-ass will keep you toasty during the raging of the Delco Nor’easter storm. His dad bod, from those rugged, chiseled “arms” to his pear-shaped tuchus, brings attention to the contemporary body-positivity movement and keeps your heating-bill down.
2. Fellas and ladies, instead of trying to navigate the serpentine gender politics of casual sexual relationships in college, you can just snuggle up to this absolute hunky unit. He’ll never judge you for your winter carb intake, though he will “force the Exxon c-suite to run on a hamster wheel to power shelters for climate refugees.” (@grittyphilly)
3. Gritty is all about keeping purchasing power away from the hands of companies. Since you can knit with his overgrowing fur, you don’t even have to buy an autumn sweater from fast fashion corporations. Plus, this season’s colors will look great against his beastly orange pelt for your Instagram pictures!
4. Our communist darling loves nothing more than couple bonding activities, such as reviving industrial unionism in Philadelphia. As the threat of Amazon setting up permanent warehouse locations in the Philadelphia area looms infinitely closer, Gritty is working diligently to use his galaxy brain and bravery to personally take down Jeff Bezos.
5. Gritty is queer.

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