Jarett Kobek: I Hate the Internet

His relatives in Turkey were loaded with eumelanin. They were dark. They were Brown.

The lack of eumelanin in J. Karacehennem’s epidermis was a real world manifestation of the question asked on page 8 of the September 30, 1909 edition of the New York Times : “IS THE TURK A WHITE MAN?”

To answer this question and others, J. Karacehennem had checked Stormfront.org, which was the premiere website of the White Nationalist Community. It was a one-stop shop for racist discourse.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for the premiere website of the White Nationalist Community, the general consensus amongst its members was that Turk was not a White man.

The general consensus was that the Turkish people did not, alas, belong to the Aryan race. The general consensus was that the Turkish people were a mongrel breed.

The strangest thing about the apartment was its landlord. The landlord owned the building and lived above J. Karacehennem and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.

The landlord was five-foot-five. The landlord was a stocky middle-aged immigrant from England. The landlord was completely bald. There was not a scratch of hair on his egg-shaped head. There was no eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.

The lack of hair and the stocky build made the landlord look like a single column of flesh that tapered upwards from his thick waist to the pointy crown of his head.

San Francisco was in the middle of massive economic upheaval. Its poorer citizens were displaced every single day. Its rents were rising. There was a housing shortage. This created a situation in which a person’s life was defined by their apartment.

Rental agreements were documents of inequality codified under American law, which had always favored property rights over liberties of the individual. This made any landlord the most important person in his or her tenants’ lives, capable of enacting terrible vengeance on the slightest whim.

Basically, the most important person in the life of J. Karacehennem was not The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.

Basically, the most important person in the life of The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter was not J. Karacehennem.

Basically, the most important person in the life of J. Karacehennem and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter was a man who looked like a giant penis.

The landlord spoke with a Received Pronunciation accent, which was the accent of the British Royal Family and actors who study with the Royal Shakespeare Company. To American ears, this accent sounds like the utter heights of refinement.

This is because each member of the human race is an idiot impressed from birth with a series of cultural assumptions that skew in favor of the upper classes.

In actuality, each language and dialect is as equally expressive any other language or dialect. There is no evolutionary difference between any language or dialect.

The only, like, exception, is, like, you know, the California dialect, which just, like, sucks.

For an American to accept the fact that there is no expressive advantage between languages and dialects would require this hypothetical American to admit that Received Pronunciation was as valid a tool of expression as Black English.

Black English was a dialect used by some members of the social construct called the Black race.

If there is one lesson that every American learned by the time of their fifteen year, it was this: to speak Black English is to speak improper English.

It’s common sense that Black English is improper English, because common sense dictates a formal, unchanging relationship between the alphabet and spoken pronunciation.

This is one of the thousand places where common sense veers into intolerable bullshit.

The landlord not only looked like a giant penis but had begun to act like one as well. He had come to hate both J. Karacehennem and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.

The hatred started about a year after J. Karacehennem moved to San Francisco.

In December of 2011, J. Karacehennem had been standing beneath the giant tree. The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter came into the apartment and said that the vacant storefront a few doors down, at the corner of 23rd and Bryant, was getting a new tenant.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” she said.

Several days later, one of the neighbors came and knocked on the door. She had a petition against the new business.

She said it was going to be an upscale luxury restaurant called Local’s Corner. There would be a great deal of outdoor seating. Its clientele would be workers in the tech industry.

The neighbor started a petition because she found it strange there had been no discussion between the owner of the new restaurant and its neighbors.

The petition asked the city to consider blocking Local’s Corner from moving into the location.

It may seem odd that anyone would expect a new business to alert the neighbors of its existence.

It is odd. But that’s San Francisco.

Not being on the lease, J. Karacehennem did not sign the petition.

The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter signed the petition.

Their landlord signed the petition.

In response to the petition, The Owner of Local’s Corner held a community meeting in a location across the street from his proposed business. The Owner did not have eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.

This location for this community meeting was an arts space called Million Fishes.

Two years later, Million Fishes would be evicted. The building would be renovated. A tech startup called Bloodhound would move into the space.

Bloodhound had received $3,000,000 in a round of venture capital funding led by Peter Thiel, who was a co-founder of PayPal, a billionaire weapons profiteer and an incompetent hedge fund manager.

In addition to funding startups named after animals bred to hunt other animals, Peter Thiel wanted to build independent nation states on floating ocean platforms, where the citizens of these independent nation states would organize around the Objectivist principles of Ayn Rand.

Million Fishes paid $5,000 a month in rent.

The lease signed by Bloodhound would be for $31,667 a month. Plus $564 in fees.

By May 2014, Bloodhound would stop paying and skip out on the building.

The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter and J. Karacehennem went to the community meeting. The landlord did not.

About seventy people attended.

The meeting played out in the manner of all community meetings. It was a forum for grandstanding and irrelevant grievances.

Only some of the grandstanding was about the restaurant.

As the night wore on, residents of the neighborhood expressed their concerns, or their compliments, and The Owner responded. Nothing was resolved, platitudes were offered. People talked through each other.

So J. Karacehennem asked The Owner if he felt like there was any reason to have a meeting.

To which The Owner replied.

So then J. Karacehennem asked The Owner if he felt like his restaurant was a fait accompli and if he believed that the concerns of the residents were things to be brushed off.

To which The Owner replied.

So then J. Karacehennem pressed the issue even further.

The Owner ended the meeting.

Because he had been obnoxious at the meeting, J. Karacehennem was approached by other people in the area, none of whom he had seen before. They asked if he wanted to go to a smaller meeting about Local’s Corner.

So he went. The meeting was in someone’s apartment.

The attendees were a ragtag group. Some were very old. Some were young. One of them had Alzheimer’s disease, which was a disease that caused human consciousness to turn into mush. There was a whole spectrum of eumelanin and its lack.