why should I care what the founding fathers intended when none of them ever heard a saxophone
* * *
■ ■ ■
It’s true that they were no longer as close as they once were. “If I get shot in a Walmart, put my ashes in a sugar bowl and let Dad stir a big spoonful of me into his coffee every morning for the rest of his life and I hope he likes the taste,” she had squealed to her mother during their last phone call, in a voice nearly two octaves higher than usual. Not that she hadn’t always thought that, or some variation on it. But at some point it had been possible not to say these things out loud.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.
* * *
■ ■ ■
That these disconnections were what kept the pages turning, that these blank spaces were what moved the plot forward. The plot! That was a laugh. The plot was that she sat motionless in her chair, willing herself to stand up and take the next shower in a series of near-infinite showers, wash all the things that made her herself, all the things that just kept coming, all the things that would just keep coming, until one day they stopped so violently on the sidewalk that the plot tripped over them, stumbled, and lurched forward one more innocent inch.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Even a spate of sternly worded articles called “Guess What: Tech Has an Ethics Problem” was not making tech have less of an ethics problem. Oh man. If that wasn’t doing it, what would??
* * *
■ ■ ■
Increasingly we were worried about the new sense of humor. Unlike the old sense of humor, which had mostly been about the difference between the way black people and white people drove cars, wasn’t the new sense of humor just a little bit random? The funniest thing now, it seemed, was a fake ad for a product that couldn’t exist, and how were we supposed to laugh at that, when the thought of a product that couldn’t exist made us so unhappy?
* * *
■ ■ ■
I have eaten
the blank
that were in
the blank
and which
you were probably
saving
for blank
Forgive me
they were blank
so blank
and so blank
* * *
■ ■ ■
We were being radicalized, and how did that feel? Like we had just stepped into a Girl Scout uniform made of fire. Like the skies had abruptly shifted to the stripes of an old Soviet poster, and the cookies we carried through green and well-watered neighborhoods had been cut by the guillotine. We were being radicalized, yes, even though we owned personalized goblets that said Wine O’Clock, even though we still read the Old Gray Lady every morning with not nearly enough of a sneer on our faces!
* * *
■ ■ ■
SHOOT IT IN MY VEINS, we said, whenever the headline was too perfect, the juxtaposition too good to be true. SHOOT IT IN MY VEINS, we said, when the Flat Earth Society announced it had members all over the globe.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Sperm it up my hole, she tried once, as a variation, but was roundly condemned by purists. It was so tiring to have to catch each new virus, produce the perfect sneaze of it, and then mutate it into something new.
* * *
■ ■ ■
A war criminal committed suicide by drinking poison in The Hague, and this was somehow the funniest thing we had ever seen in our lives—something about the teeny little vial he used, in combination with the wild barb of light in his left eye, and how after he drank the poison he declared, “I just drank poison.” Oh my God, it was so good! His suicide, which should have been an act of privacy as complete as folding his hands above a kneeler, now belonged to the people. The poison, catchy, sang through our veins.
* * *
■ ■ ■
She and her husband would often text each other throughout the day to say Glitch. Glitch. The simulation is glitching again. This was different from last year, when they would text each other headlines to say Proof. Proof? Isn’t this proof? Proof that we’re living in a simulation?
* * *
■ ■ ■
Around the time the dictator captured the nomination, she had gotten high with a friend and tried to escape for an hour into Leprechaun in the Hood. But as soon as the credits rolled, the Leprechaun, in grotesque 3D, emerged from the television to talk to her about economic conditions, both in the hood and in his home country at the end of the rainbow. A doorbell in the center of her chest rang and rang, until she was convinced that her father had showed up to arrest her. “What is going on with this weed,” she asked her friend, who had been sitting frozen with the same nacho in her mouth for the last thirty minutes, and they looked at each other and realized that Gatsby was dead in the pool. There were things you couldn’t laugh at anymore, windows you couldn’t climb out of, jazz baby outfits that no longer fit. The party—had they been at the party? they had been at the party this whole time—the party was definitively over.