Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

Adeline did not get pregnant on the couch in Jeremy and Minerva’s living room. Adeline knew that good houseguests don’t have sex on the premises.

No one who has opened their home has any desire to wake up at 11 in the morning and discover the nude entangled forms of their guest and another person or persons. No one who has opened their home wants to wake up at 11 in the morning only to find the blurry, drooping visages of the freshly fucked.

Adeline screwed out Nash Mac’s brains in Nash Mac’s apartment out in the Sunset District near the Pacific Ocean.

Nash Mac’s parents were a pair of Iranian doctors who flew a little too close to the Sun and had to flee their native country during its Revolution.

Iran had vexed America for decades. It had been ruled by the Shah, a despotic King propped up by the CIA. The CIA was the same American organization that had funded the development of literary fiction and the good novel .

Anyway, in 1979, a bunch of Shi’a Muslims led the country into Revolution. The Shah was deposed and died in exile. The Revolution ended up installing a repressive Shi’ite Theocracy, which was a rather different outcome than the general American narrative of revolutions.

In 2009, a full thirty years later, the American and European users of Twitter and YouTube convinced themselves that they understood the political protests occurring in Iran and that the apparent use of Twitter by the protesters heralded the dawn of a new democratic era.

But this was wrong. Barely any Iranians were tweeting.

Almost all of the tweets were coming from Americans and Europeans taking a break from freaking out about the Doctor’s next regeneration to tweet about democracy in the Middle East.

These tweets by Americans and Europeans against the Theocratic regime in Iran contained all the power, force and velocity of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.

Nothing changed.

Nash Mac’s parents moved to Virginia and became Americans. They brought their ten year old son.

Nash Mac did his undergraduate degree in computer science and then moved to the Bay Area, where he ended up working at LucasArts, a division of LucasFilm, the company owned by George Lucas.

George Lucas was the director and writer of the film Star Wars. He didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.

Star Wars was a total piece of shit that had spawned billions of dollars in merchandise and sequels and books and games and pajama bottoms. It was an infinite reservoir, it was an endless void. It was responsible for a cornucopia of made up words like Jedi, the Force and lightsaber.

A lightsaber was a sword made of light. A sword was a weapon used to murder people.

A Jedi was a knight who believed in an idea of relative good and performed supernatural feats using the Force. A Jedi used supernatural feats and his lightsaber to murder people with opposing ideas of relative good.

The Force was an ill-explained mystical energy which ran throughout the fictional universe of Star Wars . It was a device which allowed characters to perform supernatural feats whenever a lull was created by poor writing in the screenplay.

As might be imagined, the Force was used with great frequency.

In 2012, Star Wars and LucasFilm were sold to Disney.

George Lucas was different than Ub Iwerks, who created Mickey Mouse, or Jack Kirby, who created the comic book industry. George Lucas had worked in a Hollywood where there was a Director’s Guild and agents and managers and lawyers who negotiated every deal. He had worked in an industry where labor had made some efforts towards organization.

When Disney bought Star Wars , they bought it from George Lucas because George Lucas owned Star Wars.

He made $4,000,000,000 on the deal.

Two decades before the sale of Star Wars to Disney, George Lucas was paying the salary of Nash Mac.

George Lucas was paying Jeremy Winterbloss’s salary. Jeremy Winterbloss was also working for LucasArts. Which is how Winterbloss met Nash Mac.

It was Jeremy who introduced Nash Mac to Adeline.

During the months when Adeline was screwing out Nash Mac’s brains, Jeremy proposed the idea of Trill. It’s entirely possible that Adeline became pregnant with Emil on the very same day that she started drawing her comic book.

Both Jeremy Winterbloss and Nash Mac joined LucasArts about a year after a guy named Ron Gilbert had left the company. Ron Gilbert was the only genius who’d worked in video games.

He was responsible for Maniac Mansion. He was also responsible for The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. These were the three greatest games ever made.

Ron Gilbert didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. All of the intellectual property that he created at LucasArts was owned by George Lucas until it was owned by Disney.

Adeline’s relationship with Nash Mac was never good. It was a thing that Adeline did because she was in San Francisco and bored.

1993 was a confusing time. She wasn’t talking to Baby. She was estranged from Suzanne.

Adeline never understood much about Nash Mac. She never cared to understand much about Nash Mac.

Her lack of understanding became a problem after she flew home to New York City and discovered that she was pregnant.

The + sign on the pregnancy test, bought in a Korean deli on Avenue A, reminded Adeline of being a teenager. She remembered being 14 years old.

The first year of high school. Her father was dead. She lived with Suzanne in Pasadena.

Adeline was deep in her deathrock phase, listening to beautiful and terrible bands like 45 Grave, Monitor, Flap, T.S.O.L and Christian Death. She hung around the Atomic Cafe. She saw The Castration Squad, the greatest band of all time, play Halloween gigs at Lazaro’s Latin Lounge. Her hair was dyed black with blue highlights. She wore an unbelievable amount of kohl around her eyes.

She was dating this preppie guy named George Whitney. George Whitney attended the Buckley School. A deathrocker dating a preppie was one of those teenaged relationships that no one understands and no one can explain. Being young is terrible.

Suzanne was a realist who’d lived through her own adolescence and the chaos of the 1960s and 1970s. She knew that whenever George Whitney visited, he and Adeline were getting up to funny business in Adeline’s bedroom.

Suzanne couldn’t remember the mixture of terror, bluffing and desire that characterizes early sexual interactions. She couldn’t remember a time when every sexual encounter didn’t end with a male ejaculating into, or on, a woman.

She presumed that Adeline and George Whitney were having full-on penetrative sex. This wasn’t true.

Adeline was only giving George Whitney handjobs and wondering about the quality of sex-ed classes at Buckley, as George Whitney had some difficulty identifying the clitoris.

Suzanne was worried about Adeline becoming pregnant. She resolved to deal with the issue.

“Adelllliiiiiiiiiinnnnnnne!” she screeched from the living room.

Adeline was in her bedroom on the second floor. She opened the door and yelled, “What?”

“Adeliiiiiiiiiiiiiine!” yelled Suzanne. “Please come down here and talk with me.”

This all happened before Adeline developed her Transatlantic accent. This happened before Adeline saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Adeline still sounded like a regular Californian teenager.

“Okay, fine,” said Adeline. “Like, whatever.”