extremely online guy

I’m gearing up for another war with the post office. They’ve lost three pieces of mail this week, the most important of which is my discreet shipment of “Custom Medicine” from a dick pill company that I do business with (they sponsor my ironic(?)ly(?) racist podcast). The others are birthday presents from friends and family. And while I’m excited and loud about the dick pills, when I think about the gifts from friends and family, I feel embarrassed and thoroughly ashamed. The implication of sentimentality makes me uncomfortable in a way that a broken dick doesn’t, probably because my dick worked at some point. My heart, not really.

Today I am 30, which is old. I feel old and I look old and I’m old (don’t ever let anyone tell you you’re not old). And now that I’m old, I don’t need or want parties or gifts, but I do need those dick pills, and I don’t know how to make this more clear to the United States Postal Service. They’re fucking me. Meanwhile, I can’t fuck anyone. I can’t even fuck myself. 

But I don’t actually want any of my packages. Not the gifts nor the dick pills. I don’t want anything. I don’t want it to be my birthday and frankly I’m annoyed I’m not already dead. I don’t want to die, either, of course. I just want to live, in stasis, never progressing or regressing in any direction at all, indefinitely. Like a fungus. 

Practically speaking, the nicest thing I could ask for is something or someone to act as a healthy receptive outlet for my generally impotent aggression. I hate being old and it makes me hate myself for allowing this to happen. Why didn’t I just stop a couple of years ago? I must have done something wrong. It’d be nice to sublimate those feelings; lay them on someone else, blame the world, etc. It would be nice to be vindictive, and I don’t have a child or coworkers, so, in a way, packages dropping off the USPS tracking tool into the unaccountable void of lost parcels is the perfect gift. I can sit here and refresh the page every day, see that there’s no updates, call in, talk to someone who hates me, someone who can barely hide it, and listen to the sweet sound of boilerplate condolences from a momentary enemy whose empathetic faculties have been completely rotted out by a life wasted in customer service. And I hate them too, and that’s a happy birthday. 

Who remembers GameMasterAnthony? 

Like most people, I mocked this man and then told myself I was doing it because I’m appreciative of his earnestness or naïveté or whatever. He’s simple and innocent and that’s something I don’t have or lost and I have to deal with the heavy burden of constantly considering myself and my position. So I look at GameMasterAnthony and I do the thing we do with every sweet-mannered online retard, like beebee or that chiclet-toothed Canadian guy that does weather reports. I say look at this adorable retard, ha-ha! Who I, of course, uh, care about, by the way. I can relate to this man, who is not me, through empathy. And maybe some people mean it when they say this. Maybe they really do, but I know I don’t, at least not in even remotely altruistic terms. I see this man and whatever normal human impulse drives people to bully is let out, just a little bit, and then put away, and its nature is rewritten as something different and kind. Like taking a pit-bull for a short walk and petting it and kissing it on it’s head and telling yourself it wasn’t bred to kill other dogs. 

When really, I’m tethered to GamemasterAnthony by fear. It’s not empathy nor derision and it’s certainly not a healthy balance between the two. It’s a sense of there but for the grace of God, go I. He zips past my head like a hot bullet. I can feel him on the tips of my ears.

How close have you come to being an unfuckable loser, turning 33, alone, posting about a fictional birthday party with your only friends, Mickey Mouse and Sailor Moon? How often do you look up from your own life, thinking about how just-ok it’s going, and have the same feeling you get when you realize you almost stepped off the curb in front of a bus? What happened? Could that have been you? Is that you? Did I die and this is the afterlife? Am I GameMasterAnthony, sitting here, eyes closed, turning 33, imagining friendships and contentment built on terms other than my own? He’s terrifying; a near death experience, oblivious to himself. I hate him, I want him to go away. I hate myself. 

Oddly enough what always struck me more harrowing than GameMasterAnthony’s solitude and infantile delusion was his age itself. Thirty three! God, fuck, what an awful age. Too old to die young and too young to die wise, and probably the age more apparent than any that if you were going to do something and haven’t yet, you never will. Even the secular narcissist will see Jesus as a benchmark, and he was wrapped up by 33. Thirty three you might as well kill yourself, but then again, if you were gonna, you would have by now. At least feel it. Don’t have a fake birthday party for yourself, and certainly don’t use so many exclamation points. You should know better, by 33, than to be happy. 

And I’m sure I am someone else’s GameMasterAnthony. All this exposition is too dumb, too sincere, too embarrassing, too self-serving and navel-gazing and myopic and whatever else you want to throw at it. Infantile and delusional in its own right. But how close were you to being this miserable? Are you afraid that you’ll end up like this, or that you already are? Are you me? A quite-literally-custom-medically unfuckable loser, alone, turning 30, incapable of even imagining fictional friendships with cartoons for babies? 

Uh oh, it’s my birthday and I’m thirty so you know what that means! Bring it in, guys! Everyone I’ve ever feared comes in for a HUGE party! Every girlfriend, relative, colleague, idol, authority figure, naive victim of my cruelty, you; we all sit down and lose our patience while navigating the USPS customer service automated help system.

Anyways

I’m going to the batting cages today. There’s hip Brooklyn fathers there, with their hip Brooklyn sons, and they don’t seem to be much happier. 

Well, I called it. They’re bringing back Roseanne. Kind of. They’re bringing back “The Conners,” which is everyone on the show but Roseanne. Think Garfield without Garfield but instead of just one gay man it’s like three or four and a couple of lesbians and a black baby. I think the black baby is named Odie so my comparison is true in many ways.

It pretty much goes without saying that bringing the show back without Roseanne is a ploy by ABC to posture as anti-Trumpist without giving up all that sweet advertising cash that said Trumpism courts through viewership (they’re cowards). But that shit doesn’t bother me. It’s just business. In fact, my only problem with the Roseanne-reboot-reboot is that it will never be able to address the underlying conflict, question, and spirit of the show: does Dan have bigger nipples than Roseanne? This was one of the key through-lines on the series, and it kept people watching week after week. Is this the nipple episode, we’d ask ourselves. Fuck, I guess we’ll find out on the next one.

I’m just joshing everyone. I’m joshing around. The biggest problem they face is explaining the disappearance of Roseanne. And they won’t do it well, because they can’t. They couldn’t come up with an explanation for the reappearance of Dan even though they killed him off in the last season of the original run. Luckily I’m a television writer, so I’ve listed a couple of my ideas, and if they use any of these on the show they owe me money.

1. She’s get’s Knock Out Gamed
   Okay I know this one seems simple but hear me out – she’s not knock out gamed by black teens. In fact Dan will get the call that Roseanne is dead, punched to death by wildin’ boys, and the whole family will assume it was black teens just like you did. Even ole pussy-muching aunt Jackie will become a little bit racist. But then the surprise twist – it was actually white men. Grown white men, from Wall Street, who are straight by the way. And then all is made right when they confirm what we all know to be true – that white men are bad and only white men are bad, but that brief moment in which we thought black teens were at fault for killing Roseanne gives us some insight into Roseanne’s mindset, and we can have some empathy for the character, even though she was wrong, and deserved to die.
2. Her Racism Makes Her Attempt To Out Eat Kobayashi
   We never really got into Roseanne’s anti-Japanese sentiment in the series but I think this would be a good way for her to go. She can spend the first act yelling about a trade war with China and then she travels to Coney Island where she shits herself to death trying to cram hot dogs in her mouth to bring back the Harley Davidson factories.
3. She’s Killed By Burning Kites On Birthright
   Roseanne’s tough. She can make breakfast for her kids and call her goth daughter a lesbian. She can handle herself in this world. But can she handle herself in Israel? Roseanne wins a trip to the moheland in one of those raffles next to the new Chevy Malibu in the mall, but things take a turn for the worst when her girthy American hubris becomes her downfall. “Krav Maga? How about crab rangoon?” she snorts, pulling Chinese food out of her pussy as she defiantly mocks the IDF instructor on birthright, begging her to take the threat of Gazan children seriously.
4. She Gets Run Over By A Christian Ice Cream Truck
   And we think we learned a lesson about how Christians do the most truck running overs of people but then it turns out the guy just happened to be Christian and he was doing it because he wanted to make some point about childhood obesity, and Roseanne’s old lady haircut and tired eyes made him think he was running over a seven year old stout Korean boy.
5. Molested To Death By David Geffen
   Same Korean boy issue but this time its molestation. This one is mostly for me.
6. There’s A Family Trip To Saudi Arabia
   They take a family trip to Saudi Arabia to prove to Roseanne that Arabs are just like us. Roseanne insists on driving the rental car to get raw hot dogs for the hotel room (for her mouth and pussy). After becoming frustrated when the fourth grocery store explains they don’t have hot dogs considering they’re all muslim and they don’t eat pork, her blood sugar gets fucked up and she smashes her car into one of those radicalizing mosques, accidentally killing the young terrorist boy from the C storyline. Women are no longer allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia and she never learns her lesson about hot dogs.

I don’t think I would have come up with dancing had I never seen it.

I think that’s what I mean.

What I’m saying is I don’t think I would’ve ever had the impulse to dance had I not see someone else do it first. If I lived in a vacuum – which, if I were to live in a vacuum, it would be the most expensive vacuum money could buy (The Dyson V10 Absolute, available for $699.00 on Amazon) – if I lived in a vacuum, it would never have occurred to me to move my body to music. Music doesn’t do that to me. Music doesn’t do much of anything for me. But I never would have thought to vibrate myself. It wouldn’t have crossed my mind to kick my legs around or close my eyes or swing my skull left to right like a limbless man trying to remove ear buds.

This either makes me different or retarded – special either in the traditional or pejorative sense. And the older I get the easier it is for me to accept myself as the stupid-retard kind of special. Unfortunately, this acceptance rings in your head and calls itself growth, self-awareness, progress, and eventually, the other kind of special. There must be a better way to hate yourself, to self-loathe in a way where internal criticisms don’t immediately transmute, becoming negative but novel markers of a unique identity, reinforcing the narcissism that made you a stupid-retard in the first place. How do you fully realize yourself as a stupid-retard without making yourself discrete from the rest of world?

If the disease is ego you have to delicately employ self hatred, and curate it. Like some old Japanese man, pruning a tiny tree in a tiny cottage on a wide rolling expanse of rice fields and hills in a distant, better place where it rains only when it would be cute to do so and he’s got no thoughts, no feelings, no anxiety because he’s never heard of Playstation and doesn’t know they have a new one now (PS4 Pro God of War Bundle – $539.00 on Amazon). And he looks like, well, mostly shit, but he’s probably got abs and he’s probably living well into his 130’s because of fish and tea and some kind of martial art where you slowly punch invisible men. He’s there, in what I imagine Japan to look like, pure and inhuman and a bit racist – somebody that you’d want to be because he’s simple and dumb and he doesn’t need to accept himself because he doesn’t know he exists. I just want to be that kind of retard.

I’m sure a lot of us would prefer to be conceptual; an anecdote.  It would be nice to get to a place where everything you thought and did were nakedly predetermined by what simple expectations people had of you, not spurned by internal volatility and limbic impulses. Is emotional maturity and stability of self just the process of death? Maybe you can’t say “this is who I am,” until they’re removing the feeding tube.

They call them baby steps but if you’ve ever seen a baby learn how to walk you know that’s a bad analogy for making progress. It’s linear and doesn’t take much effort. They struggle for a bit and then it comes. Very few babies are incapable of walking after two or three attempts and the ones that fuck it up are quickly tossed into the lake or fed to pigs. I haven’t researched this and my family does things differently than most (Jewish).

I twisted my key off in the lock last week and just the other night I tore my shoelace in half while trying to remove my shoe. I take these as baby steps. Some day I’ll be able to rip a man’s head off. My own, hopefully. I’m going to develop the strength to walk right into the middle of Times Square and remove my head as if I’m Elmo or Luigi and it’s time for my lunch break. I’m going to rip it clean off of my body and the police will call it terrorism and congratulate themselves for picking up my head and putting it in the garbage.

They’ll have a press conference and answer questions. They’ll move quickly with professionalism, dedication, maturity, and whatever else it says on the side of the brand new police cars they receive every year. Like most people, I hate cops and I’m excited whenever one of them is killed and I can’t relate to how their violent impulses have sublimated but I do like how much police departments love buying new things and when race riots happen, and I see one of those fancy new tanks or the grenade launchers or that pretty robot that delivers bombs to people, I think about unboxing videos and how the police and I might bond over them and it gives me hope.

That’s community outreach that might work for them. It would be more honest than their weird forays into black culture. Get a youtube channel for every police department and do unboxing videos of their ACOG Dual Illuminated Rifle Scope ($1097.99 on Amazon) or their rebadged MRAP armored transports straight from Iraq. It would certainly be a lot more relatable than a video of a 42 year old white sergeant trying to nae-nae with a black toddler. No one trusts this bloated man who’s been wearing a bulletproof vest and utility belt for so long his spine has been reabsorbed back into his body, awkwardly launching his meaty forearms to the left, looking more like he’s saluting hitler with both hands rather than “hitting a dab”.

Or maybe it’s just that I hate dancing and it doesn’t make sense to me. And the cops and the other retards all know something that I don’t.