it makes no sense, right? it makes nonsense. the space between nonsense and making no sense- how we negotiate that- what we try to understand, or what we think about when we encounter people with whom we disagree with, fundamentally, when we see the validity of their existence, but not its soundness- the paradoxes bug me.

this “we” I talk about so fondly- it’s all you, dear reader. you smart, cute reader. you are wearing glasses, because laptop glare hurts those pretty blue eyes. I am fawning, yes, over you, reader who would prefer it if the internet came in book form, bothered by the ease of owning a kindle, yearning for a world where people do to every book what they did to gravity’s rainbow- unauthorized paintings! greyscale! the gross and scope of what happens on the page- every last one- like genius speed-readers teach for three installments of eighteen dollars, ninety five cents, why not nineteen ninety five, because we are honest and compassionate people. you, beautiful reader, who may or may not exist, whose thoughts, even if you do exist, might not be there, or about other things.

what bothers me is IF YOU ARE READING THIS STOP. performance art bothers me. separation of dance and dancer bothers me. that everything is second-to-last until your next second-to-last: I am bothered by that also.

or: why lure you, you gorgeous cherub, deeper and deeper into the internet, knowing that this column isn’t what you’ve got to do on the internet? shouldn’t I aim for a higher function- a greater utility, a pitch higher or at least other than the static on these machines? should I remind you to check your email, if you have not done so already, or to maybe limit how many things you watch on youtube, or that the daily show is funny, yes, and very free, but outside can be also very funny, and is free, or that even if you do check your email and in your inbox there’s a message a person wrote for you and you, what certain native american tribes once called a “real human being,” wrote back, personally- even then, odds are one of you misunderstood the other, so why communicate at all.

this is the eighth or ninth wonder of the world, depending on if we call computers the eighth or something, or if we decide these machines are as filthy and grubby and soul-destroying as probably they all are. or we decide that there are only seven wonders in the world, we are content with the internet only theoretically existing, sick of its white noise, eager to go behold some nature and for nature to behold us or some shit like that.

I am unsure if the question, adorable, sapient reader, comes down to if souls are important or not. ambivalent is a better word for what I am about that, because ambivalence is, I don’t know, connected to the whole what-are-we, life-death-faith thing in more beautiful ways than confusion. frankly, I am sick of confusion, convulsions, the Constance Garnett translation of anything. I would like to float out of nineteenth century Russia or the Belgian Congo in a cloud of tylenol, nyquil and marijuana, watch all that darkness shrink inside a greater darkness, an even bigger nothing, where nobody cares what it means to have a soul, or to not have one.