On the Internet, We’re All Roommates. Shitty, Shitty Roommates.

So Say You Write Some Essentially Throwaway Piece of Satire. And You Post It. Alakazam! It Becomes BOTH an Overture to Libertarian Nut Jobs AND Grounds For Intervention By Literal-Minded Scolds.

So I wrote this thing day before yesterday. That the kind folks over at bullshitist were good enough to publish. You may find it HERE, if so inclined.

Now, I know that on the Scale of Proven Dumbness, reading the comments on anything is a broke-dick move. But this I did. I was curious — this piece was similar to many others I’ve written, but its readership was like nine times bigger than my typical range, in a very short span.

What an eye opener. In the the same way that slicing off your eyelids would be.

I cannot escape the conclusion that it honestly could not matter less what sequence of words a writer strings together, or in what spirit they are strung. Because every Craigslist hobo that shares our Internet apartment with us will read what it is that they have resolved to see. And that All Words Everywhere, No Matter Their Sequence Or the Intention Underlying Them, Shall Serve As Supporting Evidence For the Point I Wished to Make Anyhow.

So the thing itself. The thing that I wrote. Is so plainly over the top. Like stratospherically. Like the top is undetectable with the naked eye from the height by which the piece is over it. Like you’d have to be the most flat-footed dipshit to take this as even remotely near to any kind of literal truth.

But. In the Apartment of the Internet We All Live In, out comes goddamn Gladys or whatever in her sad housecoat and balding furry slippers to affix passive-aggressive Post-Its to stop us stealing her Snackwells, and to monotone a Finger-Wag-In-Passing at us about how it “would actually be really irresponsible to let your toddler take the wheel in that demolition derby like you were saying earlier.” As you heave a face-palming sigh, and poise to explain to her for the thousandth fucking time what hyperbole is, you look with despair at the ceramic harlequin mask hanging on her door, which is a strong contender for Saddest Goddamn Thing You Have Ever Seen, and you’re sapped of the power to speak.

And strutting down the hallway from the other direction, brimming with the misplaced confidence of a gun-toting white man with a mild learning disability, and a command of political nuance of your average Libertarian Atlas Shrugged-skimmer. He just wished to inform you that he concurs with your sober and right-thinking analysis of the country’s wrongheaded tax policy on an over-regulated product that FREE WHITE MEN SHOULD BE PERMITTED TO CONSUME UNFETTERED BY THE NANNY STATE. He throws you a wink that somehow conveys “in the looming race war, I’ve got your back” and makes you feel gross and despairing. He shuts his door and you can hear the faint narration of promo video of the guy he’s hiring to make his custom cane sword.

And even though all you wann do is sit in the grubby kitchen of your Internet Apartment and drink your goddamn coffee, here comes Uncle Rectitude Skype-ing in to bitch at you about all the motherfucking swear words you use. Like a fucking joy-kill dick wound. “Someone who’s REALLY creative doesn’t need to rely on profanity to make a point.” In your mind’s eye, he has a face tattoo that is not small reading “Useless Fucking Pin-Dick Asshole.”

And when you close out of that window, there’s a knock on the door. You groan-walk your way over that way, but before you can even open the goddamn door, in walks Sanctimonious Beat Off from down the hall, on his way to Bullyrag Strangers On the Street With His Fucking Clipboard and Earnest Hard-Sell Guilt Trip. He spends his days impeding the progress of others with his loaded greeting “Hi, do you have two minutes to get bummed out with me about sea turtles getting throttled by six-pack rings?” He is a straight-up Glengarry-style sales weasel, a guy who should be phone-banking time shares — who mistakenly believes that the sickening white boy dreads he’s got cuttlefish-ing out of his bandana with the random strands of Jack Sparrow beads in there makes him interesting, which he very much is not, and that putting the sales-clamps on in service of Some Noble Social Issue will get him laid. Which it will not. “Listen, bro,” he says, eroding all borders in the faded Republic of Personal Space, granting you a whiff of his Spectacularly Ineffective Deodorant by Tom’s of Maine®. “I know you’re kidding around and everything, but did you even know that every fourteen minutes in this country, a lab monkey, blinded by the Axe Body Spray® they’re testing on him, kills his cage-mate to get another piece of nicotine gum? How messed up is that? Listen, if there’s anything you could do to help out…” And you push him by the face back out into the hall. Never once does he stop talking.

So you return to kitchen, attempting in vain to finish your fucking coffee in peace when your phone rings. It is a number you do not recognize. Gritting your innermost teeth and cursing yourself in advance for what you know to be a shitty decision, you answer it. “Hi. It’s Larry Lonelyhearts. I know you were until four seconds unaware of me entirely, but I’d like to launch without preamble into a deeply personal story involving the Unhappy Death of My Mother That Has Some At-Most Tangential Connection to the Piece You Posted, Which I Have Latched Onto As Flimsy Evidence Supporting My Badly Mistaken Belief That You and I Are Now Linked, Somehow.” And though you awoke today with ZERO intention of hurting some stranger’s feelings, that is precisely what you must now do. You hang up on Larry’s desperation without a word.

In the dingy, sequestering Apartment of the Internet, we would all do well to stay in our rooms, consuming as unobtrusively as we’re able our pornography of choice, emerging only to answer the summons of the food delivery guy. Because hanging out in the Common Areas is a recipe for disastrous misinterpretation and crossed wires of every description. Putting Ourselves Out There, as the shitty advice would have us do, serves only to remind that our Roommates are out of their minds, which is no crime, certainly, but a feature of their madness is to see it mirrored in everything you do and say, which, again — no harm, no foul. The danger in this Apartment is that each Roommate, in their madness, seeks to enlist you in its cause, to misapply your words to dovetail their manifestoes, to ascribe to you motivations and intent that are miles away from you, but which provide them fleeting comfort.

This Apartment is Plato’s cave — it causes us no harm when we each keep to our cavern and heed the flickers of our own shadows. It is when we pass out the mouth of our own cave to forge bonds with the other hermits that we run afoul — my misinterpretations of the potential meanings of the shadows are my own, yours are yours. When we try to braid them together, we make a snarl that means nothing, a tangle of lies we don’t intend, and shoddy reasoning we cannot help. It may seem cowardly of us to remain in our rooms. But we are too unskilled, too dire and doomed, to live among one another.

You can find longer essays, satire, fiction, and info on the workshops I teach in Chicago on my site: ianbelknap.com — also, check out the WRITE CLUB podcast