How the Word Filter Affects My Life Personally
It’s never going to work if you have to plan every small detail.
You’re going to fail at this just like you’ve failed at everything that you have ever done in your entire life. I hope you realize that. Good.
There’s nothing to stop you.
There is a standard in place. A golden, shining standard that you can see in the sky like the sun. According to this standard, no one should have to have pain or suffer or do anything that they don’t want to do or eat anything that makes them gag or, hey, how about they eat at all.
How about the standard whereby no animals get slaughtered in factory farms or where the owners of the means to mass communication don’t smurfing buy and sell your ass a million ways before the sun goes down each day. How about a standard where there’s a chance in hell that you will have an original thought on any given day. How about a standard where, even in an imperfect world, you are willing and able to do what you think is the right thing to do. A standard where you are not constantly giving in and sinking down further, knees and elbows and neck and face and soul. How about a standard where, when you really think about it, the world doesn’t quite resemble the smurfing Matrix.
Human beings bred and harvested for what amounts to their raw work energy. Making people believe that they’re making choices for any reason other than pure manipulation. Deceiving them with a façade of a reality so that they don’t think about the bigger questions. A reality where Christ imagery is “deep” and Paris Hilton is notable but we’ve quite forgotten why and even if we haven’t we don’t usually put the pieces together about how manufactured it was.
Somewhere out there, I smurfing promise you, buried past the smog and bull
, there is a standard. There is a standard by which we could live and everyone would be just fine. I am so positive about this.
There so is.
I work down the street. It’s pretty easy and it’s fine. I’m fine. In fact, I’m more than fine. I could be half as fine and still be fine. In a way. I mean, I could be a lot better. But I guess that’s capitalism for ya. Could always be more than fine.
Writing about the biggest problems in the human world is very hard. You’ll always come up sounding like a tremendous faggot. I won’t mention this stuff again. It just really bugs me sometimes that everything is so smurfed up and I have no way to do anything about it, nor to I particularly have any drive to do the things that I think I should be doing. I know that the fact that I’m too tired to take any smurfing action is exactly the thing that is bringing me down and it is exactly what They want. I know that but it’s easier to go along with those in power than to fight it. I’m smurfed. I’m smurfed. Excuse the language, by the way. “Faggot” as a derogatory term has been reassigned to anyone that you do not like on the internet. It no longer has a sexual meaning.
Except that’s not exactly true, is it? Whenever you elaborate on “faggot,” what do you say? Your conversation sounds like one I overheard at work the other night.
“Jesus Christ dude, that guy was a smurfing. Faggot.” He pronounced it like that. I wish there were a more adequate textual description for it.
“Yeah, he did seem mighty gay.”
“You didn’t even see it, man. He smurfin’ threw my out the smurfin’ window.” I’m not sure what his “” was, but it is important to note that “” is generally used as an all-purpose word in much the same way that “faggot” is generally used as an all-purpose insult. “” could refer to narcotics, too. I’ve heard that one. I think George Carlin mentioned that.
“Jesus, that guy must’ve sucked like eighty cocks the night before. “
“smurfin’ A.
So you see, although it is an all-purpose insult, and it doesn’t have any specific meaning, it’s still calling someone a homosexual. You can elaborate in any fanciful way you wish.
I heard a stand-up comic on Dr. Katz (the cartoon that used to be on Comedy Central, before they had production values, whose spiritual successor, Home Movies, will remain on Cartoon Network until they get production values) say that you can make a hilarious euphemism for homosexuality by appending “ass-“ to any profession.
Ass-gardener.
Ass Brigadier General.
Ass Systems Analyst.
You get it.
I live in the year 2005 for another two months. I’m in a profession where I have to check peoples’ ID a lot. Sometimes a guy will come in, and he’s really 2005 Indie. His hair is jet black, The Strokes style swooping all over him. Sort of formal casual hipster dress. Maybe a piercing that looks like a thoughtful facial blemish. And then he shows me his ID and the picture was taken on his sixteenth birthday in 2000 and his hair is spiked to smurf and he’s got a Blink 182 song stuck in his head. This happens often enough.
I don’t know what to do with girls. They don’t really care about anything important like constructed mediated reality. You can’t make them care, either. They just want to live a normal life and have a house and kids and fun. You can’t convince them that that is exactly what’s wrong. Because that’s what they want.
I should put some action into this. A guy came into the store with a gun the other day. He told me to give him all the money, like they do. I asked him why, and he told me because he’ll shoot me if I don’t. I picked up the phone and he asked me what I was doing and didn’t I know that he was going to shoot me for doing that. I said that I couldn’t open the register by myself and that I needed to call the manager to come and do it for me.
He said that there was usually some kind of emergency bar code that I could scan to open the register for people like him, or at least some kind of emergency mechanism in place to open the register. There was supposed to be, but I couldn’t find it, so I told him I was going to go call the manager. He said not to bother, and to just perform a cash transaction so that the register would open so I could give him the money. I asked if he was going to buy anything, because I didn’t have any cash on me. He told me to stop being a smartass or he’d shoot me in the face. I said okay.
Long story short, I only had fives in the register. The rest of the money was in the safe, so we had to call the manager anyway to open the safe. The guy with the gun was pretty angry that I told the manager we were being robbed. He said he was going to shoot me for sure now. So I asked him, what was the incentive to give him the money from the safe now that I was going to die? He said that he’d threaten the manager to open the safe. I said that I’d stop him because I was going to die anyway, there’s no reason to let him have any money now. I’d tackle him so he couldn’t put the code in the safe. Then he’d have to shoot me, but I’d use the manager as a human shield so he’d have to shoot both of us and then he’d have a double homicide with the cops on the way and no money. He said not to do that or he’d shoot me.
I’m looking at someone right now. He is wearing white earbuds, a neckbeard, and a “Vote for Pedro” T-Shirt. He probably loves Donnie Darko, and he’s probably listening to The Arcade Fire. He knows exactly what it is like to live in the year 2005. I wish I was born with that sort of certainty, or that it was something that could be learned somehow.
That stuff about the robbery never happened.
In 1999, I jumped on the Internet Thing. It was well-worn territory by that point, but still only a novelty to the average consumer. There were still companies figuring out how they were going to make it into an integral part of our lives so we’d have to buy more of them. But it was fun. The first night we had the computer, I discovered Internet Porn. I had known it existed, but you never really understand until you experience it for yourself. It’s not like going over to your friend’s house and sneaking a peek at his dad’s Playboys. That’s entertainment. Discovering an unlimited source of nude women at your fingertips, available to be called upon at any time of the day, for any reason…this was revolutionary. I was fourteen.
I live a boring life, which is why I would feel like an idiot trying to write a novel about dragons or gangsters. I leave the escapist dragon fantasies to the 8th grade girls high on Tolkien and Weisman, and the masturbatory firearm operas to the professionals. I kid myself that, if I strip away all of the bogus bull, I’ll be left with something that’s real, and that that will be profound. But that’s not the case, because we know what reality is, and we spend every second of every day trying to run away from it because the real answer is that it’s just too horrible. It’s just nothing that we want to have to deal with.
And even that is romanticizing it. It’s not that what I write is too awful to even mention and that my minimalist art is something that the cro magnon mentality of modern culture would scoff at because of its supreme, uninhibited truth. It’s just smurfing boring. Boring as . This story needs a smurfing dragon or a gangster. I think I’ll add some because those two things are what it needs.
Kurt Vonnegut once said that the only way you could ever end a story about people was not with “the end” or “fin” but with “etc.” because it just goes on and on like that. I wanted to name my first novel “Laughterhouse Five,” but I’ve grown out of that stage so this novel will be called “Turkey Turkey Turkey” because that is the farthest that you could possibly get from something serious or interesting, and since this novel will fail to solve all of the world’s problems, I don’t see why I should deceive anyone into thinking otherwise.
I used to do a lot of walking. I was never fit, but I used to walk a lot because I didn’t have a car, and that was how people who didn’t have cars got around. Because of this, I didn’t really go too many places. I had a library, a couple fast food restaurants, and a video store in my immediate area. There used to be an arcade where people went to play Street Fighter so that they didn’t have to actually fight in the streets, but most of the arcades went out of business due to lack of interest. It’s just as well, I guess, as those places were greasy pits anyway.
The library had a bookstore, and sometimes an old nerd would die and his wife would donate all of his science fiction books to the library and they’d sell them for usually around fifty cents for a paper back, and two or three bucks for a hardcover. This was the environment in which I developed an imagination. Between the bookstore and the library, I was able to keep my nose in a book all through middle school.
The last book I read before I got a computer was Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. After that, I developed an unhealthy relationship with the Internet. I can’t say that my relationship with the internet was as intellectually fulfilling as the one I had had with books, but it allowed me some much-needed intellectual growth by way of connecting me to other human beings who were just as smart, and smarter, than I was. Jessica was one of the people I’d connected with early on. I’m not even going to bother changing anyone’s name because, honestly, who gives a at this point. This is real. The dragon and the gangster that are coming are also real, but in a much less real sense. Jessica was a few years older than me and she had a kid and a little sister named Vanessa and we’d talk online about video games and life. She had to drop out of college and get a job because of financial concerns, but we kept in touch for a while. Angela was a year older and I met her once. Dan, I met twice.
In middle school, I developed imagination, but in those first two years of high school, I developed personality. I learned how to express some of the new thoughts I was having. In the preceding years I had had a crisis of faith. I downplay it in my mind, but it must have been gigantic back then. In those first couple years, I learned how to deal with my new concepts of the universe. I also learned (much too late) that it was entirely natural and acceptable to be attracted to a girl. What I didn’t learn was that it was possible for a girl to be attracted in return. That’s fine. Some people don’t. I didn’t.
Some time during my ninth grade year, Jessica stopped coming online. I was still a kid, so I never really had her phone number. It wasn’t something that came up because everyone on the Internet was a Stranger and you don’t exchange phone numbers with Strangers. We knew each other more deeply than we knew the people in our real lives, but we were all strangers. In a way it was like everybody had their finger on a button, and this button would trigger human interaction with these inhuman people, and we were all waiting for someone to push it first and then the entire thing would explode like a Mexican Standoff.
Angela and Dan pushed it first and the entire thing exploded like a Mexican Standoff. Angela and Dan were in love and that was perturbing to me because I was in love with Angela, but my tiny little tenth grade heart didn’t quite understand how to deal with such feelings. But about ten of us met up at a mall and it was great. After that, everyone met everyone, more or less, if they could. Love knew no boundaries. Planes, trains, automobiles, the whole works. It was interesting.
I lost contact with Jessica. I don’t know why. One day she said she couldn’t figure out how to un-break her instant messenger, and gradually, she went away. Dan told me much later that she told him that she had developed some type of lung cancer or something and she didn’t want to pretend to be happy for the Internet and she didn’t want to burden me with it. That’s fine, I guess.
Before the dragon and the gangster got into it, I had my first airplane ride.
I’m looking up at my stucco ceiling right now, and my brain is trying to make coherent sense of the random bumps and light and shadow. I can see the Pink Panther eating a bowl of cereal. I can see a wise owl, spreading its wings. I’m sure if I squint hard enough I’d be able to see me in a hotel in Jessica’s hometown, spread out over a phone book, wondering if I should call the six phone numbers under her last name and ask about her.
I wasn’t there to stalk her. It was completely unrelated, actually. I was there with me dad to visit some of his childhood friends and celebrate the renewal of their wedding vows. It was fun. They are great people. I wonder how they’re doing and how many of them are alive still. It’s only six years later. Good food, too. Those people know how to party.
But all I could think was that she was out there somewhere. She said she was working at a “Take-and-Bake” pizza establishment, which was completely unheard-of in Southern California at the time, and is still wholly unpopular and unnecessary. We have supermarkets with refrigerators. If we want something specific on our pizza, we get it pre-cooked and stop smurfing whining about it. All I could think of was finding the right Papa Murphy’s and bursting in and saying “HELLO!”
She’d say hello and “Welcome to Papa Murphy’s, what can I get you this afternoon?”
“Gimme a large pepperoni and pineapple, a side of garlic bread and a BIG HUG DON’T YOU RECOGNIZE ME!”
But she probably wouldn’t. She only saw my picture once. Towards the end of our contact. My already paranoid ego didn’t bounce back from that. I was never confident. I never felt attractive or even presentable. When I heard people laughing from behind me, I always figured that they were laughing at me. Yeah, I was one of those smurfing kids. I hate that that is a part of me.
So I walked down to the lobby of the hotel and I sat in the phone booth with two bucks in change in my pocket. The coins were hot in my hand, slick with palm sweat. I looked up every number with her last name. I sat there for five minutes, thinking about what I would say to her, what I’d ask her, and if I could even get a hold of her. I sat in that phone booth for a long time. Then I bought an oversized M&M’s cookie from the vending machine across the hall.
I wish I could say that it tasted like defeat, or cowardice. But honestly it was the most delicious M&M’s cookie I’d ever eaten. Some objective reality overrules delicious irony.
The next morning, I watched The Breakfast Club with my dad on cable in the room. That’s irrelevant.
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A dragon came into my work the other day. He said that he was looking for someone, and he described the person: tall frame, slicked-back hair, gun. I informed the dragon that a person fitting that description had robbed me on the night previous. Also, he was a mythical beast, and as such, was not allowed to write checks. It was a bad joke, but the creature brushed it off without a nod. I knew that it was a bad joke, but I felt rejected nevertheless. He asked if I might know where his friend had made off to, and I corrected his grammar. He informed me that he didn’t think that the company paid me to be a smartass. These guys really were friends.
I asked what he wanted with the guy who had robbed me, and he said this: “I have to eat him and spit out his bones into a grave pit unsuitable for even the lowliest doglike human.”
“Well, look,” I said. “I don’t think you should do that.”
He didn’t know what I was talking about.
“Yeah, man. You should just calm down, have a soda, and stop thinking about killing people for once. I bet all this worryin’ isn’t doing ya any good. Here.”
I handed him a soda from the cooler.
“On the house.”
Employee Theft accounts for more than 70% of recordable losses according to the Loss Prevention Manger for the District.
“Consider this,” I told him. “You catch up with this guy. You eat him.”
“Yes.” The monster gleamed with satisfaction.
“You do all that, and you even got a soda out of it. What then?”
“What do you mean?” His outward smugness was crackling.
“I mean, do you just go on to another victim? Isn’t it a bit cyclic? What do you hope to gain? I dunno man, I’m just throwin’ stuff out there. You may have a perfectly legitimate reason for tearing the punk to shreds. I just think you should think it about a bit more, because I can already tell that this was sort of a split-second decision. You’re an impulsive guy. All I’m sayin’ is maybe you guys can talk this out.”
Hours later, when I was chained to a wall, half-naked and badly bruised and beaten and bleeding, I’d wonder why I had said any of this.
