Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

In 1985, four of the goats tortured by Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart went on tour with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The most famous of these goats was named Lancelot.

The circus said Lancelot was a unicorn .

But Lancelot wasn’t a unicorn . Lancelot was a goat that had been tortured by the person who would later invent the word polyamorous.

This is 100 % true.

Neither Minerva nor Jeremy liked threesomes. Threesomes required an awful lot of negotiation. You had to work with the feelings of the other person in the marriage and with the feelings of the third party. There was an unfathomable amount of checking-in and touching base.

Talk before the sex, talk during the sex, talk after the sex.

There was the twosome sex after the threesomes, with Jeremy and Minerva making sure that the original equilibrium wasn’t disrupted.

Then there was dealing with the inevitable development of better chemistry between the third person and either Jeremy or Minerva.

They gave up on threesomes and started seeing other people on an individual basis.

Jeremy met women through a website called OKCupid.

OKCupid asked Jeremy banal questions about his hobbies and religious beliefs. Then the website compared Jeremy’s answers with the answers of its female userbase. The website calculated a percentage of shared banality.

Jeremy would send messages to attractive women with whom he shared a high percentage of banality. Or the women would message him.

If the messaging worked out, Jeremy would meet the women in person.

If he met a woman in person and the interpersonal interaction worked out, Jeremy and the woman might have sex.

If Jeremy and the woman had sex, then they would be sharing a new banality beyond their original shared banality.

They would be sharing the futility of the orgasm and its pursuit.

Most of the women on OKCupid were not interested in having sex with a married man whose wife knew that her husband was having sex beyond the marital bed.

Still, Jeremy learned that if he was upfront and told women about the situation, a sizeable amount would be intrigued and interested. A subsection of that sizeable amount would have sex with him.

The arrangement worked, despite its shaky moments, because Jeremy and Minerva had developed a fairly realistic assessment of human biology and the nature of relationships.

They had been having sex with each other for almost thirty years.

Many of the people with whom they slept did not have a realistic assessment of human biology or the nature of relationships.

Lots of Minerva’s sexual partners, by-and-large men, were almost psychotic in their need.

Some became jealous of Jeremy. This would happen when a new sexual partner had known Minerva for, at most, a few weeks.

The situation with Jeremy’s partners was different. There was a sizeable number of White women who were interested in having sex with a Black man for very unpleasant reasons. These women were to be avoided.

Some of the women he dated had eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises. These were Black women and some of them found themselves unhappy about being in a situation where they were having sex with a Black man who had a White wife.

The whole society was idiotic and had created an enormous amount of madness around people from one social construct having sex with people from other social constructs.

This is because American society had an extraordinarily warped idea of beauty that tended to exclude and marginalize women of color.

Especially Black women. Which was manifestly fucking nuts.

Even without Adeline’s ill-fated excursion as an online race commentator, Blackness had been on Jeremy’s mind. More than usual. And race was always on Jeremy’s mind.

In addition to Wild Dog, he was working on a new creator owned comic.

There wasn’t a title but Jeremy had written a few scripts.

It was going to be a comic without any supernatural or supranatural or crime elements. It was going to be a realistic depiction of a middle class African-American family.

He’d thought about asking Adeline if she wanted to do the art.

Now that her WaNks Index Score was so low, he was having second thoughts.

Despite the thousands and thousands and thousands of titles published each year, despite almost a century of the comic book, Jeremy’s idea was new to the medium.

Comic books were as valid a medium of expression as any other and thus could encompass the simple joys and mistake of a family. Regardless of race.

But it was 2013 and it still hadn’t happened.

Jeremy grew up as the youngest child of two parents who had attended Howard University.

Much to their later discomfort, Jeremy’s parents had met at a brown paper bag party , a campus event where the only individuals in attendance were people whose skin color was lighter in shade than a brown paper bag.

Anyway, because of the eumelanin distribution in the basale strata of their epidermises, and because they had earned degrees from an elite institution of higher education, Jeremy’s parents had entered the Black middle class and moved to a White neighborhood in Virginia, near Washington, D.C.

They were the only family in the neighborhood with eumelanin in the basale strata of the epidermises.

When Jeremy met Nash Mac, the two men bonded over the fact that their childhood homes were less than forty miles apart.

Jeremy was raised with access to money. The money had fostered a love for junk media like comic books and Science Fiction.

At his private high school, Jeremy’s interest in junk media helped carve out a protective niche.

He was part of a group of kids who sat around and talked about the shifting loyalties of Raistlin Majere, a chaotic-neutral mage, and the seemingly doomed love between Tanis Half-Elven and Lauralanthalasa Kanan, a princess of the Qualinesti elves.

Students at Jeremy’s high school hated and feared him because he was Black, but everyone found the situation more socially acceptable if the kids who hated Jeremy pretended that their hatred emerged from his interest in the novels of Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis.

On the face of things, Jeremy was not a target of victimization and bullying because of his race. He was a target of victimization and bullying because of his Red Sonja t-shirt.

When Jeremy went to work for Marvel Comics, he wasn’t particularly surprised by racism in the comic book industry.

With the exception of Larry Hama and Jim Owsley, both of who had eumelanin in the basale stratum of their epidermises, the employees at Marvel were adult versions of the people from his high school clique.

And despite a superior attitude derived from their dogged adherence to corporate owned intellectual properties, the kids in Jeremy’s high school social clique had been clueless about race. Jeremy had suffered some awful shit at the hands of his friends.

People touching his hair without permission. People who talked about their parents marching with Martin Luther King at Selma and then remarking about how Jeremy acted so White. People calling Jeremy their “Negro High Bard of Endor.” People asking him if John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting was a popular novel in the ghetto. People telling him that Octavia Butler’s Kindred was okay, for what it was. People asking him if Samuel Delaney was his favorite author.

Jeremy’s inspiration for his new comic was “My Black Mama,” a 78 record by Son House.

Son House was a blues musician from the Mississippi Delta. Son House recorded for the Paramount record label of Grafton, Wisconsin in 1930. He had tons of eumelanin in the basal stratum of his epidermis.