Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

As a result of this clandestine rendezvous, the next few weeks of J. Karacehennem’s life got very weird.

He entered into a conspiracy with the other neighbors that necessitated his attending a secret rendezvous above a fried chicken store on 24th Street.

He went to a contentious meeting in City Hall. He went to an even more contentious meeting in a nearby cafe.

The Owner was in these latter two meetings. The one at City Hall happened in the office of David Campos, the neighborhood’s elected City Supervisor, who had some eumelanin in his epidermis. It was unpleasant.

J. Karacehennem never thought that they would win the fight against Local’s Corner.

America was open for business. The civic statutes governing new businesses were written with the explicit purpose of encouraging as much commerce as possible.

You can’t stop the gears of capitalism. But you always can be a pain in the ass.

Anyway, The Owner ended up opening Local’s Corner.

It was an upscale, locally-sourced seafood restaurant crammed into 590 square feet. Its interior decor, which looked like someone’s Victorian grandmother had puked up a diet of reclaimed wood and handprinted wallpaper, was designed by the architects at atelier KS.

The space was too small for an industrial oven. The restaurant seated about thirty.

By the end of 2014, it was closed.

J. Karacehennem’s involvement with the anti-Local’s Corner faction had caused a split with his landlord. Through an arcane process of mutual seduction, the giant penis went from being someone who had signed a petition against the restaurant to being one of its biggest supporters.

The landlord accused J. Karacehennem of not breaking down recycling boxes in the garage. The landlord accused J. Karacehennem of leaving the garage open at bizarre hours of the night.

The landlord refused speak to J. Karacehennem on the street.

Actually, that last one was kind of a relief.

It was the morning after Adeline spoke in Kevin Killian’s class.

Adeline woke up late. She was in her apartment near Dolores Park.

Erik Willems had spent the night. Now he was gone. That was one reliable thing. He was always gone in the morning.

She had come to the conclusion that Erik Willems was an empty vessel. There was nothing behind the eyes. No soul, no intelligence.

This conclusion was long building. It arrived when Erik told Adeline about a sexual double entendre common amongst his social class.

“We call them,” he said, “the cupcake and the pastry.”

“You call what the cupcake and the pastry?” asked Adeline.

“The pussy and the ass. They are the cupcake and the pastry. Because one tastes sour and one tastes sweet.”

“Darling,” said Adeline, “which is which?”

“That’s the mystery of the cupcake and the pastry. No one knows. It depends on your personal preference.”

Adeline had long believed that good sex was possible only with people in possession of a primal intelligence. There needed to be something behind the eyes.

Yet Erik Willems was empty and still he fucked like a beast. He understood both the cupcake and the pastry. The sex was a revelation.

She was approaching the end of her socially acceptable sex life. She was a woman in a society that hated women.

Men could fuck well into their seventies without anyone blinking an eye. Women past a certain age were allowed to fuck but only as long as they adopted certain names of war.

Like: MILF . Like: cougar .

MILF was an Internet acronym for Mother I’d Like to Fuck.

A cougar was an older women with sexual interests in younger men.

Both terms categorize a woman’s sexuality by its explicit relationship to men. Both terms suggest that an older woman’s virility exists only as a tutoring device to school younger men in the art of lovemaking. Both terms contextualize an older woman’s sexuality based on her willingness to offer men a taste of the cupcake and/or the pastry.

It was the same old intolerable bullshit dressed in a red pleather skirt.

But, really, are there any sexual colloquialisms for women that don’t embed some intolerable bullshit about men?

Adeline was old enough to know that some fights aren’t worth having. She understood that time and energy are limited commodities.

And, to her mild embarrassment, most of her recent sexual partners had been younger men. Erik Willems was a full decade her junior.

So she let the world’s intolerable bullshit wash over her.

“Oh, darling, here I stand, I cannot do otherwise,” she’d said to J. Karacehennem. “I’m a MILF. I’m a cougar. I accept everything.”

Adeline got out of bed. There was an impression where Erik Willems had slept. He’d crushed the pillow.

Adeline went into her kitchen and made some breakfast. Yogurt and uncooked oats.

It was about one in the afternoon.

She underwent an enforced social ritual necessary to her professional life.

She checked her email.

On the average morning, Adeline received about twenty emails. Fifteen of these would be junk, which is different than spam. Spam was the name for unsolicited emails which attempted to seduce the receiver into spending money.

She had received a lot of spam until she switched to GMail, a free e-mail service offered by Google.

In exchange for its free e-mail service, Google scanned its users’ emails and served its users advertisements targeted to the content of the scanned emails.

If someone emailed about a table, then GMail would offer Adeline a deal on a table. If someone emailed about a musical performance, then GMail would offer Adeline a deal on concert tickets.

The junk came from organizations to which she had given her email address. Some prime examples of junk email were the daily inanities which she received from the Parsons School of Design.

Adeline had graduated from Parsons in 1990. She was an alumna. In a fit of nostalgia, she’d given Parsons her email address.

Parsons soon made her regret this unexpected visitation of school spirit.

The other emails would be work related. Stuff from Jeremy about Trill . Stuff from people with whom she’d worked in the past, offering new work. Requests for interviews. The usual crap.

Adeline checked her email. She discovered hundreds of messages.

This had happened before. Her old email address had leaked to members of a Yahoo Group dedicated to Trill.

She never discovered who’d leaked her email address. But she’d experienced its effects.

The countless stream of messages, the unfathomable tide, the tsunami of want and need and questions. The infinite desire for affirmation, for validation.

And from whom?

From someone who had drawn an anthropomorphic cat.

She started reading her email.

One of Kevin Killian’s students had recorded Adeline’s every word. He had used his cellphone. The student then uploaded the video of Adeline to YouTube, which was a web service owned by Google.

YouTube’s users uploaded video files in various formats. Other YouTube users then watched low quality versions of the uploaded video. Google made money from YouTube by serving advertisements both before and during the video.

The most popular videos on YouTube were: (1) Pretty girls giving hair-and-makeup advice. (2) Fast things captured in slow motion photography. (3) Ugly cats meowing in bathrooms. (4) Celebrities in the act of committing a social faux pas. (5) Ray Jay Williams crowing about the size of his genitals. (7) A Swedish videogame reviewer calling himself PewDiePie, who was indistinguishable from Božidar Boža of Petnjica, Montenegro, a man kicked by a mule as a child and doomed to live out life as the village idiot.