SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER IS A JOB

I'M GAY

Being a whore is the oldest profession. A quote from your mom when she asks you to pay rent. Thanks mom. Kiss on the cheek. Social media manager is a job. They pay people to maintain the social media page of a company or a brand or a jar of peanut butter or a whore. They pay people for that. You do it for free. Wild stuff. You doing that for free. Why would you do it. I don’t do it. But I’ve seen you do it and I wonder why you do. I very rarely check Facebook because it’s just a make-me-feel-bad-machine but I did it this morning for some reason and I saw a guy I went to college with post a photo of his (not very good) workout routine accompanied with information about his selling insurance job and it made me ill. Just seeing it made me feel bad. Definitely a me problem. Using the make-me-feel-bad-machine like a retard. I wondered why it made me feel bad. Definitely a me problem. Dude posting is normal and I’m fucked up. No doubt. It wasn’t envy I was feeling and disgust is too harsh, it wasn’t quite that (it was that), but it wasn’t a good feeling. Seeing a picture of a person I know smiling for some post about anything almost always makes me feel bad. Why. What is wrong with me. I see anything like that, a normal social media post, and my first thought is always “you could also not.” I’m such a dickhead. I imagine a person doing anything with the audience in mind and it’s like whatever it is they are doing has become tainted. Dude could just work out. Is the photo of the workout routine for me or him or something else. Do I trust my negative feeling just because it’s familiar the way that self-deprecating misery can be a comfy, warm blanket. Crumb comic of the little freak seething at the normal guy whistling on a walk. I am Crumb and the normal guy in the comic and the freak. I’m allowed to write for an audience in mind about my seething like a dickhead because I am a seething dickhead.

And you can’t win. Oh you don’t do it for free? You charge money for it? Fuck you. I ain’t payin’. How ‘bout I’m doin’ none of it. You want me to pay for this shit? I can get it for free. You want me to pay for my water bill when this shit falls out of the sky. You whore. I live for the chase. I ain’t payin’.

Wondered if the mystery of my internet novel is hiding from myself that I am a rapist. I haven’t raped but all my art is about suppressing my rape desire. I could see it. I could see myself wanting to rape and not doing it so then I make art that’s a pseudo-mystery where there’s something to uncover and analyze and it’s uncomfortable to recognize that I want to rape so I say that when analyzing my own art the horrible discovery I make is that I’m a rapist which is a defense against the even more horrible truth that I’m not. I don’t even wanna rape and that’s the horror. My inability to even desire to act. Or maybe I am actually envious. And it’s just envy I feel that this guy can post a picture of his workout routine. I’m really the seething guy in the Crumb comic. Dude can be normal and post something normal and he’s normal and I’m not so I seethe because I’m envious of that normalcy. Patrick Bateman saying because I want to fit in. But I’m special. Obviously. A super special boy. I make paintings and he doesn’t. I read books and he doesn’t. I have an effective progressive overload regimen and he doesn’t. What a special boy I am. And I write those previous sentences with a self-aware tone wink wink because no one is allowed to be special (except me and you). And even if someone is special, which no one is, then they aren’t allowed to call themselves that. Someone else can do it in hindsight but you better not say it yourself. Because then it’s definitely not true, then it’s pathological and you have a Problem. Then you’re special in a Bad Way. You can only be special in a Bad Way. Says the man who’s special in a Good Way but it’s not special, he earned it. The lion rapes the small dog. Did the lion earn his keep? Did the lion go to lion school? I went to a school for gay retards and I graduated top of my class. Even though I’m a power bottom. I top from the bottom.

Once upon a time there was a man who filmed his family 24/7 to a live streaming audience and he was playing a character and the character he was playing was a loving father and husband and pillar of his community. He was playing a character and he was always in front of a camera and he had a worldwide audience of millions of subscribers, people loved to watch him because it was so nice to see this character who was a nice man and a good father and a pillar of his community and he was always working on projects and loving his wife and he was a good leader and good at talking to his children and he ate well and he paid his taxes and he interacted with his audience and he read good books and he gave good advice and he watched good movies and the audience loved him. One day his son approached him and he said, “Dad, I need your help. I think there’s something wrong with me. I don’t know what to think about you. I have conflicting feelings all the time. I don’t know if you’re actually a good dad or if you’re playing a character. I don’t know if you really love me or if you’re just acting like it. And I don’t know what it’s like not to have these feelings. You’ve been playing a character my whole life. We’ve been on camera my whole life. I don’t know if everyone else feels like this and even if they told me I don’t know if I could be able to believe them. What could a person possibly say to me to give me some sort of clarity about anything? About themselves? About their own relationship with their dad? They could tell me that they have the same feelings I do, they don’t know if their dad is just acting too, and I would ask myself: what if they’re playing a character for me too? And there’s these endless scripted interactions within interactions and even my asking you about all of this is something that my character, a guy whose dad has been streaming for a live audience since he was born, would do. And I realize that I’ve asked you this before, and I don’t remember what you said last time, and it probably doesn’t matter, and I’ll end up asking you again, and I can never tell if I’m running on some script and if you’ve ever told the truth.” The dad replied, “who are you?”

I made up that story because I am gay. I am so gay that I will tell you exactly what the story means. The story doesn’t mean anything because it’s just stream of consciousness content for an internet social media post. So it’s meaningless. Or, if there is a meaning, then it’s just the idiosyncratic gears and doodads that comprise a conscious stream. It’s just stream of consciousness. It’s meaningless. You could sit there endlessly tweezering a moment. And at the first probe you grip the moment and it slips away and you have a revelation that there are no moments and there is nothing to grip and then that revelation eats the previous one and the revelations never stop growing and eating each other but really they’ve never changed size and all that’s happened is you’ve moved further away. You could go crazy any time—you become enlightened and realize how little you actually need so you sell all your belongings and you live on the street like a dog and you never worry again and you would be crazy if you did all that. That would be crazy. Making internet posts isn’t crazy. It’s epic. Time not wasted. Time not killed. Bringing life to a moment through execution. Maybe I went crazy a while ago. And I can’t stop rambling. And you can’t stop reading in the same way you like listening to the homeless guy rambling on the street corner. And you remember the crazy things he said for the rest of your life and you don’t remember any conversation you’ve had for the past year. You’re not crazy though, he is. You’ve got it all figured out. Your job doesn’t suck and you aren’t miserable every day, you’re doing fine work. Fun in the sun.

Spoiler for my internet novel: I am writing an endless internet novel. It’s never going to end. And so it starts off with a guy, a totally isolated artist with obvious mental problems, and he starts posting art and blog posts and analyses of his own paintings online. And as time goes on he realizes that he’s actually writing an endless internet novel and he develops a plan. Here’s the plan that he develops: he is both the creator of his endless internet novel and he reviews the chapters of his internet novel (which is just a blog but he’s a delusional self-absorbed narcissist incapable of engaging with eternal archetypes so of course he over-inflates blog posting into some grand work, identifying himself with great men of ages past, who, he assures himself, would have written delusional blogposts were they alive now) and after enough time has passed and he has established a consistent voice, he feeds all his work into an LLM which then produces more content written in his voice. And because he analyzes his own paintings and writings, he analyzes the work made by a computer and he writes posts arguing that a certain post was or was not made by a computer. And as time goes on he really doesn’t know whether or not he wrote a chapter or the computer did. And the novel is endless because that’s the only way an internet novel could exist, as an endless stream (like a stream of consciousness so you know it’s meaningless junk, you’ve got it all figured out) of self-referential crap which may or may not be made by a computer. And then he tells the audience (who is also himself) that this isn’t even his idea, he got it from a computer. (It’s my idea.) And then he really goes insane because the entire thing was written by a computer and the paintings were by a computer and his endless internet novel is, in part, a prediction about the future of internet content being humans reviewing the work of machines and it’s a self-administered Turing Test to determine if he himself is a machine. And the writer is totally deranged so he thinks artificially intelligent machine-life already exists, it’s most people and ideology is the computer program and the inverse Turing Test is just saying the nigger word (the particular magic word changes with time (but don’t worry there are no magic words, you’ve got it all figured out)). And the endless novel could become a comedy when computers understand the inverse Turing Test and the internet becomes filled with n-bombs of computers proving their consciousness. And computers correctly assess that most people are soulless husks, pure material ripe for the possession of ideology, which isn’t some computer-brained revelation, it’s ancient eternal wisdom about the nature of souls (and wisdom isn’t wisdom, it’s basic observation, but it becomes wisdom when most people cannot see (Prompt?)). But in order to write all that (endlessly) the writer would have to be an obviously mentally disturbed (and racist) individual who sets out to write an endless internet novel. He should probably be gay too. (Which is no longer a mental disorder identified in a book written by experts, now it’s epic awesomesauce. Now it’s teevee head family style. There are no magic words, nuh uh, magic ain’t real, you’re way too smart to believe in that.)

I do it for free like a gay guy in a bathhouse and it’s okay you can fist me now because you glanced back and forth to make sure others were doing it first. It’s ok as long as you ain’t first. I saw you kissin’ me cuz I opened my eyes first so that means it’s okay when you look back. Now close your eyes and gimme a kiss.