My First Book, page 8
People want to know if I meet all my friends on the internet. I don’t! But I trust the algorithm just like I trust God. It’s all been written. There’s always a code to it. IRL or on the screen, it’s all intelligent design. If you’re reading this, future me, you’re reading this because of the way those powers that be have programmed the world, with all their trends and policies and imaginings made real. Because of some process or set of rules that someone made and that we all follow. Algorithms are made not just of numbers but of words. There is no outside-of-online. Everything is real.
Joke
Everything is wrong. We just got here and the world is already ending. When things go wrong, we laugh. When things seem pretend, they’re funny. When it turns out that it’s real, it’s even funnier.
Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. You’ve heard this one already. Says life is harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But doctor . . . I am Pagliacci.” We are Pagliacci. We’ve taken the rainbow honk pill.
A fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from an audience who believes it’s a joke.
“Smile, because it confuses people. Smile, because it’s easier than explaining what is killing you inside.” Heath Ledger really got it. He got it before we got it. He told it to us as we sat spilling popcorn on our laps at our first hard PG-13 movie in 2008. We smile. It feels good to smile. Then there’s the shooting in Aurora, Colorado, in a movie theater just like the one we sat in.
People die on the screen and off it, sometimes at the same time. The separation between spectacle and real life broke. It stayed broken. Nothing is IRL and everything is IRL. Reality is what we make it. It feels good to smile.
Ketamine
Super acid, special K, kitty valium, the big neigh. Ketamine is an anesthetic, but it feels like a psychedelic and it works like an antidepressant and it’s the only party drug that provokes disassociation, so of course we like it. I heard it was for horses, but I put it up my nose anyways. Ketamine is what you imagined drugs felt like when you first heard about them. Coke is for millennials, for Patrick Bateman, for capitalists. Ketamine is for Gen Z and now it’s legal and I have a prescription. The doctor says, imagine that depression is an infection. You are in pain. SSRIs are Advil. Ketamine is an antibiotic. As we get older, our brains get less mushy and spongy. Things get broken. Ketamine repairs them. Synapses or neurons or gray matter or something like that. It’s the best drug. It’s our drug. I do it off of Kevin’s iPhone and on Maia’s desk and in the bathroom in Berlin and at the clinic in LA. Life is harsh and cruel and smiling makes my cheeks hurt. Doom is contagious, but maybe we’ve found a vaccine. I wonder if it causes autism.
Lost
“You are all a lost generation,” wrote Gertrude Stein, quoted by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph for The Sun Also Rises. I’m in Paris by the river and I can’t help but agree, although they weren’t talking to us. The Lost Generation came of age during World War I. A lot of them were lost in the trenches. The rest were lost, as in “disoriented, wandering, directionless,” in the streets and their lives. The older generations are worried about us, about 4chan and our smiling and our running with the pack. It’s better to be lost, “disoriented, wandering, directionless,” alone. There’s a big problem when the whole pack is lost. They watched us grow up. They babysat and bullied us. Now we date them. They wonder if we are going to be the most conservative generation. They are worried about all this honking and rejecting the self. What do they know? They’re doomed or bloomed. So what if we’re a little lost and in this desperation to be found we’ve found each other and in each other found something horrible and delicious. Some of us voted for Hillary. Some of us voted for Trump. Some of us voted for Harambe, the dead gorilla. Do the trolls even know what they’re doing or are they as lost as everyone else? Everyone is lost except for the bots. I don’t know if I believe in horseshoe theory, but I do know that I believe in that tiny, but infinitely deep, space between irony and sincerity. Ironic voting is still voting and ironic hate is still hate. Within that deep, dark, tiny space is a huge void, where separate realities drift past each other like children’s bubbles. Cheerful nihilism thrives. Come to think of it, I’m lost in that space. We all are. Gideon and I stand outside, sucking nicotine out of our little USB sticks. We can be lost forever, an abandoned satellite, Madeleine McCann, the Roanoke Colony, our baby teeth (yours and mine). No one knows where we are or where we are going. We are on the left and on the right, but we are all accelerating at the same rate. The faster it ends, the faster it can get better. Maybe we will reach a singularity. Full automation could be fun. Maybe we will see it end. Maybe we will see it start. Maybe we could have a war. A war with drones! A war just like the video games our older brothers play after school.
Me
Me! Me! Me! Me! A word impossible to define. A word that is fun to chant, but just like any chanted word the more you say it the less it means. A toy boat of a word. A word that demands distortion. Me. Me. Meme. That’s a meme. An idea shared. Something transmitted, something that belongs to everyone. A meme is mine and yours. A fat Bugs Bunny, universal enough to make us all laugh. All the “me’s” of our generation laughing at one thing. The self is so over. Let us all laugh together as one. Me. My first word. Not mama or papa. Me. Maybe it was just a baby sound, a test of the vocal cords, total nonsense, but I’m from LA.
Nerf
Nerf is a word that leaked off of a toy and into the video game world and back out into our Gen Z vocabs. I like it when words leak like that. We can squeeze and shape language and wash ourselves clean with it.
Nerf is an acronym, “non-expanding recreational foam.” Neon toy guns. Automatics. Soft bullets. Lots of them. Blasters, not guns. Still automatic. The packages never say guns. You wouldn’t buy your son a gun. Or would you? Who am I to assume? Running around with our socks on, jumping over the banister, hiding from the barrage of older brothers’ gentle bullets. War in the playroom. That’s what nerf is, but not what it means.
Older brothers and bigger boys took the word and used it in Call of Duty. Nerf is a verb now. I’m gonna nerf all you faggots, give me that grenade. It means to weaken or make less dangerous, usually in the context of weakening something in order to balance out a game, and is most commonly heard through headsets. Anyone can be nerfed, hit with those soft bullets, if someone decides they are a threat to the balance of our fragile game. When we nerf people IRL, we don’t use foam bullets or digital bullets, sometimes we use real bullets, but mostly we use words.
A prevailing theory is that if we want to play fair, we should nerf rich white men. I guess that’s sort of what #METOO is. A collective barrage of soft bullets against the wrinkled skin of the patriarchy, but I have my doubts. I don’t know who should be weakened. I don’t know how to restore balance to a game that has always been unfair. We’re all implicated. To exist is to be a soldier in this war. Birth is conscription. We have all been training. What if I’m not ready? What if I can’t fight? What if the big boys don’t tell me what team I’m on? What if my socks slide on the hardwood floor? What if they find me hiding in the playroom? What if they laugh at me? What if an orange foam bullet hits me in the eye, what then? Will I cry? Did I deserve it? Don’t we all?
Oppressed
Being depressed is not the same thing as being oppressed. I am depressed, so I know what that word means. I have never been oppressed, so I struggle to define it. Depressed, I am down, in the ground, in the moist earth, in a hole I dug myself. Nobody put me here. I clawed at the earth with my own hands, like I was digging to China or a tunnel out of some death camp. I don’t know why I wanted out or where I was trying to go. I don’t know how long I spent digging, but I have been lying here cold and alone for quite some time.
If I was oppressed, there would be a shovel and someone holding the shovel and I would not be able to get out on my own. There would be others like me in holes near mine and others holding shovels keeping them down. The shovel holders would be benefiting from their actions. They would have some words to justify why they dug. Maybe it would be fun for them. Maybe they were convinced of some danger. Maybe they would just be following orders. Maybe it would be the way it was always done. That’s the most terrifying possibility. The shovel holders might not even see the shovels in their hands. They might not even see the people they kept in the holes. They might go to school and work and vacation to the beach and eat spaghetti and have babies and struggles of their own, all while holding the shovels and keeping watch at the holes. Because that’s the way it’s always been done. Always is bad. Change is scary. Doom is not inevitable. Every now and again we should all check our hands for shovels. Chances are our hands are full and we have been digging for a long time. When you are at the beach or the Italian restaurant, look around and see who is not there. Even if you didn’t dig the hole, there is a good chance you’ve walked by the empty lot where the holes are located. There’s a good chance you didn’t see them and didn’t want to see them, even if you’ve spent years with your hands in the dirt digging your own hole, even if you’ve settled into that hole and feel comfortable there among the roots and worms.
To rise up and fight oppressive forces always takes a movement, a collective, a unified group. It should never be the job of the buried people to claw their way out alone. They have dirt in their mouths and eyes and still they have tried to get out. They spent years carving little tunnels between their adjacent holes and strategizing and rising and getting pushed right back down. They say you need a support system when you are depressed. That no one beats this disease, as they call it, alone, but depression is not oppression. It can be a by-product, but it is not the same thing. I put myself here and I will get myself out and I will try to help others. We cannot create a hierarchy of pain, but we have a hierarchy of needs at our disposal.
Like fireworks or electric scooters or huffing glue, irony can be fun, but also dangerous. If a joke isn’t going to make someone pause and think and act and look at their hands for their shovel then maybe the joke isn’t very funny? Even if it feels good and makes you feel smart and singular, like you get it. Most good jokes are ironic. All good things are dangerous.
I was born with a shovel in my hands, and I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know if any of us do. Ivan and Gideon don’t, but they are not women. When I hear a baby cry I hear it like it’s my own child. I don’t rush to help it, but I feel like I should. That’s my lizard brain working. Back in the caves, when survival was even harder, we took better care of children we did not birth. That communal care is why we survived the ice ages and the saber-toothed tigers and the Crusades. Maybe once the ozone melts it will come in handy again. I tried to make Ivan and Gideon listen to the recording of the kids detained at the border crying for their parents, but they didn’t want to hear it. I know that even if they had heard it, it wouldn’t have meant much to them. Gideon says he wants to have a baby. Maybe once he does he will feel differently about the cries of children whose faces he’s never seen. Maybe then he could put his face he gave his child onto one of those screams. Maybe then we would do something. Ivan says the recording wouldn’t mean much to him because he knows there are children crying, touch-starved, cold everywhere in the world and they have always been crying and they always will be. I know that he wouldn’t say this, that he doesn’t identify with the label on his immigration papers, but the kids on the recording are like him. He was once one of the children, hungry and scared, but he was in his mother’s arms and that made all the difference. His shovel is not as strong as mine. He is less complicit, but I don’t think there’s a point in making some hierarchy of complicity. It’s a spectrum, but there is no point in breaking it down with words, demicomplicit, transcomplicit, bicomplicit. We all live in the same cave. There is a danger. Children are crying and most of us don’t care, or do care but don’t act. We should all feel complicit. We should all care. I don’t know why caring comes so naturally, yet I have never taken any action.
Do I not care enough? Do I care because caring feels good and I want to feel good? Do I care because the tears I cry make me virtuous? Do I want people to see my tears? Are my tears my only action? Is this inability to act doom? Yes. I think it is. They were right, doom is contagious. My doom has spread down to the border and keeps those children cold in their metallic blankets. I cry. What other action is there to take? What does it mean to drop your shovel? I don’t know much, but I do know that no one should be trapped in a hole alone. No one should be buried in an unmarked grave. No one should have their children taken from them. No one wants a Holocaust comparison, but isn’t this what we learned on those field trips we all had to take to museums of tolerance? Maybe all I have written, this flowery extended metaphor about holes and dirt, is a mere exercise of my privilege, a little fancy dig of my shovel. Writing about other people’s oppression is an exercise that ultimately may have removed some weight from my own shoulders, some dirt from my chest. It has nothing for anyone who needs it. Gideon would say if you have time to write down a glossary, you do not need help digging yourself out and just want to feel better. Gideon wants to feel better, but he would never profit directly from other people’s struggle. That is reprehensible. I may as well have written this with the tip of my shovel on newly packed earth.
Pill
Red pill. Blue pill. One pill. Two pill. Mad pill. Sad pill. Pills are ideas that change our body chemistry, the way our brains work, everything about us. We take them when we are in pain. They make us feel better in their absoluteness. They make us feel worse in the long run. On the internet, in a world-class example of semantic shift, there is a new type of pill. They are idea pills and just as dangerous as real pills.
Here’s what they say. Red pill makes you uncontrollably angry and entitled. Green pill fills you with conspiracy theories. Black pill dooms you. Honk pill makes you laugh at it all. A choice in Morpheus’s hands. Wake up and see how far the rabbit hole goes, or go back to how it was. Wake up. Be woke. Once a pill works there is no going back. That is that. Your body and brain are chemically changed. We are always already bluepilled, per the incels. Blue pill is what we get in our vaccines, and vaccines are mandatory. Red pill is a choice and a hard one, again per the incels: the choice to see the world how it really is, a place where women play you and Jews control you and you should be in control. The promise of being awake is alluring. Lots of young men take it. When they take it they awake in a new world, but that new world is a construction, even more of a construction than the old one. It’s a new world with a single and totalizing narrative. It’s the world we must make sure this one does not become.
This winter, I was honestly afraid I was getting redpilled. I began to hate phrases like safe space and the idea of identity politics and infantilization. It felt like I was being infected by some awful disease, so I took a bunch of (blue) Adderall and read a bunch of books as fast as I possibly could. Reading is not like a pill. Ideas on each page can be snacked upon and digested, at whatever speed your body works. It’s healthier that way. Most things are healthier if they are done slowly. A pill is one fast thing, one color, a totalizing idea. Books are the opposite, full of so much, rainbowy.
I go to the ketamine clinic because I like to feel. I want to feel, but I don’t want to feel like I’m:
Alone in this threatening world anymore
Being hunted for sport
A character being written by a man
The crazier one
The less crazy one
Misunderstood
Only real when I’m talking to Ivan or Gideon
Searching for actors for my life’s open roles
I want to know that there are others like me. I want to meet them IRL. I’m anti-pill. I’m straight edge. I’d rather cut myself than do Xanax. No, I’d rather cut myself then do Xanax. I want to calm myself through feeling and unfeeling. I want a pill for that.
I wonder what would have happened if Neo grabbed both of the pills in Morpheus’s open hands and stuffed them both down his throat. Would he have ended up like me? Stuck in the middle and loving it and hating it and loving it?
Quirk
We all have quirks, those little things that make us endearing, those tiny trivial differences that make us matter. Gideon and I could be exactly alike. The world probably doesn’t need us both, but maybe someone in this world needs to see the way he sucks off all the meat of a peach pit and keeps it in his mouth so gently and for so long like a precious stone that needs smuggling or a robin egg that needs incubating. We are all eccentrics. It’s 2018 and there is no other way to be. Being weird isn’t weird anymore. Quirky is cool is quirky is cool. Until it is not, and you have a tattoo of a mustache on your finger and the bangs you cut weirdly short will not grow out right.
Key and historic quirks, -cores, aesthetics:
Vaporwave
