Right Now, On the Internet
Right now on the internet someone is typing an e-mail to his mother. The e-mail says that Los Angeles is wonderful, that at his job as a production assistant an influential executive hinted at more lucrative and fulfilling job opportunities in the near future, and he’s happy now, he promises, tell Dad not to worry and to maybe if possible and I know it’s asking a lot but just this one last time wire him three thousand dollars. He has a black eye and is using a 2002 Dell PC, in a public library in Ankeny, Iowa.
Right now on the internet a man is watching a 26-year-old woman with fake braces and a ponytail consume the semen of a succession of faceless men, and he’s realizing that the satisfaction of his increasingly sadistic and baroque sexual desires, along with these days it seems most of his life—his sporadic e-mails with high school friends, his watching the various high-profile cable dramas his co-workers enjoy talking about at the lunches they occasionally invite him to, his keeping up with his country’s wars both foreign and, it seems now, domestic—is tied up in this tiny machine, stolen years ago from an Apple store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A graduate student in Ithaca, NY is watching the same video as part of research for a paper on pedophilic undertones in contemporary underground pornography, but can’t really make it past thirty seconds of the whole grotesque display before Xing the box out and checking her Tumblr.
Somebody somewhere is covered in cherry goop and bits of pie crust, and on the recipe for “Explosive Cherry Pie” is writing an unhappy comment to the effect of “recipe did not specify that pie would actually explode, my husband has a heart condition.”
And right now on the internet somebody is hovering over the GChat username of a boy who once worked with her on an Art History project. “Heyyy!” she types, then deletes it. “What’s up,” she types, then deletes it. “YOOOOOOOO,” she types, then deletes it. “Do you ever feel like the whole courtship process is just, like, two lonely people, each of them trying to convince the other that they like them less, or casually or whatever, so that sometimes they just won’t say anything to each other and a proverbial door will just close right there?” she types and sends it, and six hours later he’ll respond with “hi sorry wasn’t there” and then a minute later he’ll say “err not really?”
Someone is looking at the Facebook profile of a former high school classmate who, according to the alumni e-newsletter he keeps meaning to unsubscribe to, now owns a national seafood chain valued at twenty million dollars. But it’s okay, he figures, because the guy lists 311 as his favorite band and appears to wear unfashionable hats.
Also right now on the internet someone is making a meme that will make someone somewhere laugh before they die twenty-six years later from undiagnosed primary immune deficiency disease.
