A disclaimer: I originally wrote this essay as part of a creative nonfiction class, working from David Foster Wallace’s incredible Consider the Lobster and its predecessor, M.F.K. Fisher’s Consider the Oyster. I’m perfectly aware I don’t so much as touch their masterworks and that this has turned into a creature of its own. I’m also aware that neither footnotes nor writing of this length are friendly to deal with on this here blog. I won’t be hurt if you wave the flag of TL;DR and go running back to the comforting embraces of infographics and Facebook personality quizzes, but for those of you who muscle through it: thank you! I hope you goddamn love it.

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An incredibly French gym teacher in a swishy Le Coq Sportif tracksuit is here to teach us a lesson about soda. He stands before my eighth grade class with perfect posture, a highball glass and a one-pound sack of refined sugar. He rhythmically doles out ten tablespoons, then looks out at us like a falcon trying to choose which fidgeting tween to subdue and shred alive for dinner. Finally, predictably, he announces, “Voila! Every can is zhees much!”

It doesn’t take performance art to know that sodas are sugary beyond reason, bricks in a wall of death if you drink enough to build one. On the other hand, Splenda and its ilk remain shrouded in scientific mystery even to scientists; to be certain, no physically fit Frenchman with a spoon and stage time ever taught me (or will teach me) what is in my Diet Coke. That soda, what is currently the marriage of Coca-Cola and Splenda, has dominated the low-calorie soft drink market since its debut in 1983, its revolving door of artificial sweetener partners notwithstanding. Saccharin, aspartame, sucralose, cyclamate, perillartine, miraculin,[1] alitame — as long as the label bears the Coke logo and a bunch of zeroes, as a public, we’re willing to drink it. I’ll drink it. I put my faith in something every time I buy a diet soda; the porky, business casual-clad Sunday Funnies character that lives inside me quips to no one, “Well if it’s so bad for you how come the good people of Evanston Gas & Food keep a whole cooler of it?”

The answer gets political fast, which is probably why I spend some ninety-seven percent of my beverage-consuming hours plainly not considering the issue. Most of the time, it’s enough to assume that an authority out there in the American abyss (maybe the President or Deepak Chopra or Ashton Kutcher) has penetrated the minutiae of its chemistry and signed off on its safety for the rest of us – not ideal, but enough.[2] After all, diet soda is entirely about satisfaction of a very limited variety: temporary, immediate, ironically short of splendor. Nobody ever remembers that magnificent diet soda they had that one time; often we’re just thirsty for another. But now, it’s not that I don’t want to trust the Amorphous Bureau of Trustworthy Somebodies that allow for over five thousand grocery items to include Splenda, it’s that we’ve brought such a chemical into existence in the first place.

Without writing the words “selective chlorination” any more than I just did, I can tell you that Splenda is six hundred times sweeter than anything nature has come up with. It begins with sucrose, a natural sugar, but given two chlorine atoms our metabolisms don’t process it as a carbohydrate or secrete insulin, making it safe for the diabetic population. The differences in its molecular structure cause it to appear flakier and taste sourer,[3] texturally closer to pills pulverized with a credit card than the comfortingly uniform crystals of granulated sugar. Year-long tests on creatures ranging from starved rats to artificially inseminated rabbits to Marmoset monkeys and beagle dogs showed no harmful effects[4] apart from a few pregnant female animals that experienced gastrointestinal distress from undigested Splenda. Still, between its long shelf life and its stability in processing, it remains the most versatile artificial sweetener, a door opener for the food and drink industry eager to meet our endless demand for sweet things.

Radical believers in the cult of the yellow packet not only deem it more evolved than other artificial sweeteners[5] but as an improvement on nature. An average Diet Coke drinker won’t call it a food: “It’s a seasoning, a flavoring,” one offers, as though he’s introducing me to the gospel of Chef Paul Prudhomme over a roasted chicken. People in deep Splenda denial will throw around the word “efficiency,” implying it was borne out of the Great Sugar Famine as a solution and its consumers are eco-conscious forward-thinkers – but even to them it doesn’t merit being called food.[6] The fabrication and quasi-euphemisms swelling around the word “additive” point to a distinction between food and edible nonfood: the former has a necessary relationship with nutritional value, bulk and naturalness while the latter is stuff we nebulously deposit into our mouths and happen to digest without dying.

Where it gets murky is that the category of edible nonfood is burgeoning in tandem with technology and diet-related diseases, really preventable ones that are killing an incomprehensible number of people. The way edible nonfoods are commonly categorized by food manufacturers makes them seem even more bizarre in concept: there are gelling agents like agar which make our food firm in texture, bulking agents like guar gum which create the illusion of there being more without actually increasing food’s nutritional value,[7] and glazing agents like carnauba wax which render food shiny.[8] Granted, it’s easy to make groceries with these ingredients sound as though they’re grade-D People Bait strategically placed in our paths by diabolical aliens, but it’s just as easy to subconsciously deem these qualities positive and desirable in food. Somewhere amid our carnivalesque delight that the solid squirt of filling in Combos can be made to taste like a whole pizza, the question lurks: should we be eating things that are not food?

The part of the edible nonfood-eating experience we’re most confident about is that it doesn’t have short-term consequences, but it would make good sense if it’s contributing to the shortening of our lives in a way that a jog or a trip to the farmer’s market can’t counteract. Still, so long as the Amorphous Bureau of Trustworthy Somebodies (or worse yet, an actually identified, actually trustworthy somebody) doesn’t specifically identify the consequence, the risk in each bottle or packet feels intangibly, almost pathetically low. Casual consumers of the stuff are more or less comfortable with the idea that, in this hand, we have seen true food and raised it health and pleasure. If we haven’t improved on nature, we’ve still granted ourselves practically unlimited access to the gustatory and aesthetic sensations of sweetness and shininess and jiggliness and so forth, all behind nature’s back.

Given the ubiquity of Splenda, even implicitly suggesting its slogan ought to be something like “the edible nonfood shortening our lives” feels sensationalist and condescending to everyone and no one, the sort of belief that can earn you snide social labels ranging from elitist to hippie to vampire. “I get immense satisfaction out of saying I haven’t had soda in over two years,” said a dear friend who has become more diet-conscious since being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Even still, pressure to beat society to the punch was palpable as she added, “I’m also an asshole.” Despite the blueprints of sucralose’s molecular structure and almost-conclusive heath warnings before me, I’m tempted to beat my chest like a frat boy at a NASCAR-themed party and bellow, “Just shut up and drink the shit!” followed by a hearty “AMERICA!” There is something very American about the concept and culture of Splenda: the idea that we can have a free pass sparing us the need to exercise discipline and self-restraint similarly underpins everything from Eight Minute Abs to Internet porn to the lottery, each a gas-fiery burst of shallow enjoyment[9] that doesn’t promote responsible behavior of any kind. What Splenda does promote is that we can get something for nothing; that it’s fine for indulgence to mutate into a given; that we’re entitled to having an unreality realized for us just because. We can scrape the depths of our willingness to be ignorant and put patches on our desires and weaknesses, but stacking quick fix on top of quick fix can’t possibly work.[10] Our fantasy of “getting away with it” has to backfire when we’re trying to make a fool of our own physiology, as does the self-delusion in treating “good” as synonymous with “nontoxic.”

In theory I can talk myself into thinking of Splenda as rubber-flavored Satan dust for the mind, body and soul, but in those moments of droopy-eyed dehydration I still reach for it. Why? At the risk of sounding petty and irresponsible, I assign partial blame to the Frenchman and his swishy tracksuit. It was he who first inculcated the message in me that real-deal soda is a danger beverage, wicked and off limits.[11] Nine years later, his voice reverberates in my mind issuing stern anti-sugar warnings as though we’re connected by invisible can-and-string telephones long distance. By contrast, though the troublesome aspects of Splenda abound, I don’t have a distinct enough health reason to shun it. Somehow, the consumer testimonials and my own speculative fears and even the image of beagles in a lab don’t meet the burden of proof in the fleeting moment when I decide I’d like my coffee sweet. Despite that it’s the tip of an unsettling moral and cultural iceberg and that it’s neither sugar nor seasoning nor food, I do derive a distinct enough satisfaction from it. It constitutes one miniature daily pleasure, like remembering an old favorite song or having an interaction with Comcast customer service that doesn’t leave you completely infuriated. Of course it’s unessential in the grand scheme of things, but the life-enhancing quality is there, humming just a little louder than the vague medical concerns and the tinny chemical off-notes of Splenda’s taste. It’s not a habit I can be proud of, but I can act like discreetly opening one more packet won’t make a difference to anyone. I’ll take the small pleasure where I can find it and hope the shit misses the fan.

[2] Never mind that the FDA has a track record of granting artificial sweeteners approval for the market before implicating side effects, some as minor as headaches, some carcinogenic. The list includes saccharin and aspartame, which are omnipresent nonetheless.

[3] During a product assessment in 1997, a year before its FDA approval, chemists claimed it had a drying effect and described its flavor as being slightly rubbery. One would think diet soda’s purpose is to escape such sensations.

[4] Besides the moral discomfort of having fed a bunch of beagles Splenda for a year.

[5] Particularly in that its flavor palate has far subtler notes of poison than those of Equal (aspartame) and Sweet ‘n Low (saccharin.)

[6] Actually, the scientists who discovered Splenda didn’t even mean for it to be food. As its history goes, a young Indian chemist named Shashikant Phadnis misunderstood his adviser when she instructed him to test the substance and instead tasted it. That may not have been the most prudent choice given that their original mission was to create a new variety of insecticide. I suspect Dr. Phadnis would make a fine reality television contestant given his blind willingness to lick powders of undetermined toxicity.

[7]Like the ingestible equivalent of the mark-to-market accounting that preceded the Enron collapse.

[8]So really, it’s only a matter of time before we’re all on the Free-Floating Zero-Calorie Glow-In-The-Dark Jelly Jiggle-Cubes Diet.

[9] I suppose re: Internet porn “enjoyment” really depends whom you ask, should you choose to ask at all.

[10] If it does, they’ll have to revise the entire story arcs of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, Laura Numeroff’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and the Martin Lawrence movie Blue Streak, among others.

[11] Fine, I suppose the tracksuit didn’t do anything wrong.

Oh, this crowd. My roommate and I are here because she called into the radio station and won tickets, and now to my right is a girl who has taken her shirt off, wearing just a leopard print push-up bra and jeans. This is what we won. Her dance move of choice is some sort of fist-pump/vadge-thrust combo and I spy thong straps. Within moments she’s been hoisted up onto the shoulders of a tall blond boy and she’s doing the same move minus the legs. All that thrusting against the nape of his neck makes it look like he’s suffering from whiplash. “She’s going to fuck his head off,” I worriedly think to myself as I run for cover.

In the process of fleeing the hell away from this two-headed tower of human promiscuity I accidentally bump into another collegeish boy who has decided to take his shirt off. It feels like walking in on someone else having sex, er, not just walking in, more like tripping and collapsing into bed with them; in other words, sticky and horrifying. He’s “in the zone” or whatever and doesn’t notice me, meanwhile I can’t decide whether it’s a good idea or a sort of kamikaze of body parts if I use one of my hands to brush his sweat off my arm.

I escape to the bar where water – poured from a bottle of Crystal Geyser into a plastic bathroom cup – is five fucking dollars; beer is three. I ask for a cup of ice (free dollars and ninety-none cents) and wait a minute until it’s melted into ice water. Feeling satisfied with my resourcefulness I re-enter the crowd, only to have the cup snatched out of my hand and flung into the audience. The song playing has only one or two audible lines of lyrics: “All I do is party, ha, ha, ha, ha,” and back to the bar I go for attempt #2 at hydration.

Speaking of concerns of hydration, here’s where I really slip into being a geezer, because fuck it: The band, or DJs, or Apple store Geniuses or whatever they are up there, is called MSTRKRFT. Or MKRJFJRTKFRT or FKTFBLARKMARKFART or something, but it is pronounced “Mastercraft.” Despite how energetic the music is, this whole genre is a bit of a shrug for me. It’s fun and explosively dancey but usually lacking in the structure that I think makes a song a song. What? I like melodies. With this, you can’t exactly tell when one is starting and another is ending except for when they change the color scheme of the iTunes visualizer projected behind them; it’s constant thumping and sound effects. All 7,000 of us are facing the stage but there’s certainly nothing to watch if you’re more than 30 feet away, or, if you’re like my roommate, you’ve danced your contact lenses out.

But I’m still having fun. I vacillate between just sort of going with it and seeing this whole event like a festering bacterium under a microscope; sometimes wondering if everyone there knows I have no idea what I’m doing, sometimes wondering if everyone there knows I know they have no idea what they’re doing. Some people say they’re there to hear the music live (live…from…laptops….) but this whole scene is full of people making out and dry humping, like a multi-county middle school dance where every patron has a rocket vibrating in his ass or something. While dancing with one guy, I endured a swipe at my crotch so forceful I think I sustained an instant urinary tract infection. All I do is party, ha, ha, ha, ha.

As the show ends I realize just how drenched in sweat I am and how randomly crunchy my hair feels (crunchy! AAH!) and decide that this experience has been close enough to athletic activity to merit a Gatorade. We go home and retreat to our rooms. I put on fleece pajamas and turn on Feist like a fucking sucker.

Some heroes look like Cary Grant. Mine looks like this.

I. I think I’ve just seen my hero walk past me in a Barnes & Noble. He is almost middle-aged, wearing a ferocious beard with square-rimmed glasses, a white t-shirt stretched over his pudgy frame, normal jeans, squeaky voice (he just asked the clerk where the bathrooms were) and has now walked past the security detectors, out of the doors, and down the hallway. I consider two things: a) it would be slightly creepy to start following him; potentially, if we meet in the bathroom, it will be more weird than cool and b) either way, I absolutely have to do it. I start walking behind him – 10 feet at least, see him get on the escalator, follow at the top like the world’s least subtle spy, and begin to wonder. Is he going to the bathroom? What is he thinking right now? If he sees me standing behind him, will he assume I’m a normal person or a fan? If I get close enough to say something, will I? (How are you? How’s it going? I loved your stuff. You’re my hero. Be mine forever. Okay, probably not). Predictably I get distracted by my thoughts during which he turns a corner, walks out of my sight, and it finally dawns on me that to follow him is an act of lunacy. There would be nothing more awkward than saying any of the things I had thought a moment before. So I stop, walk over to the rows of chairs in front of a podium where he’s scheduled to speak in twenty minutes, sit down, and take a deep breath. I take out my phone and text to my friend, “I think I just stalked Chuck Klosterman down an escalator!”

II. Yes, you read that right. My hero was Chuck Klosterman. I was 17 and 18 once upon a time and had never read a writer who blended pop culture and existentialism like he did, assuring me that matching all of my observations on life to pop culture phenomena was not only forgivable, but logical. To some, Klosterman is a talentless hack who goes for the low-brow every time and is only meaningful to people without ideas or ways to think about life; to those people I would respectfully say fuck you. What separates Klosterman from any other pretentious pop culture essayist is that I truly don’t think he believes what he’s writing all the time; that if someone proved him wrong, he would accept it and go from there. He isn’t trying to enforce his ideas as much as offer them to the universe, a perspective I find enviable. So what if he wrote 5,000 words on why Billy Joel is a genius? He’s just trying to get you to see where he’s coming from, even if you don’t believe him.

But ANYWAY (to borrow a popular Klosterman-ism), at 17 I didn’t have Derrida or Heidegger or even Bangs; I had Chuck, who wrote things I was already thinking and made me think, “Geez, someone is thinking just like I am” (not a unique phenomena) and also, “Geez, I can make a living doing this!” (also not unique). But this was important. This was the kick I needed, heading into my freshman year in college (I bought Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs the summer after high school) on a tepid interest in journalism, a stronger taste for creative writing nascent in my brain but a seemingly otiose thing to pursue formally in college. Why do I need to pay $50,000 to learn how to write a story? I thought, and so I was going to college with no real idea of what I wanted to do. I didn’t know what front of the book or back of the book was, had no concept of AP style, had never heard of the inverted pyramid, thought “hed” was misspelled, thought “lede” was double misspelled, and so on.

I was not a natural journalist. I wanted to write, and Klosterman was that bridge between creativity, fact, and reality-stretching that, to be fair, hundreds of thousands of other teenagers also recognized and said, “I want to be like him!” And so, everything I wrote in my freshman year in college was decidedly Klostermanian, to coin another bullshit phrase. I once wrote a 5,000 essay about attending a Chicago Bulls game in which I compared our front court to albums by the Replacements (a gimmick I’d picked up months earlier, when Klosterman drew analogies between every woman he’d ever been with and members of KISS). I wrote pop culture columns for the paper in which I tossed off analogies like, “This album is slower than Shaq in transition,” “Wilco is like Gram Parsons meets Pavement only they don’t actually want to kill themselves,” and “American Idol explains where our society is at” (yeah, seriously).

These were not good things to write; important maybe for me to realize how absurd my own sense of superiority had come by recoiling from my opinion in printed form, but as far as making the campus think I was awesome, I failed pretty hard. I got a bunch of hate letters, the student group that organizes the concerts at my school (and fails miserably) started a feud with me that has never ended, and to this day I still think a third of the people who actually pay attention to campus media would like to punch me in the face. I get where I erred now, but in 2007, the failure to ingratiate myself to my peers through my dazzling pop culture observations seemed like bitter failure. I was embarrassed then; in retrospect, I’m embarrassed now. Following Chuck had led me nowhere successful; I took my patchwork style, mostly (okay, completely) influenced by his and ditched it for something more pensive, and moved on.

III. I had a minor revelation two years later one night while sitting very stoned in my room, unable to even hold a videogame controller or reach for the bag of Cheetos (SHOCK!). The crisis was such: Being that I didn’t know everything (everything as in every piece of art, thought and history that had ever been created, expressed and occurred), how could I comment on anything? What authority did I have – what authority did anyone have? Was there ever a point I could reach where I could speak authoritatively about anything? As a writer, how could I even pretend I knew what I was talking about, ever?

By accepting my own limitations and ignorance. By being able to be wrong, learning from my mistakes, and going from there. By being un-self-conscious enough to cast away bitterness from going the wrong way and having the strength to go the better way. It didn’t matter whether or not I was absolutely right, as long as I thought I was mostly right and could accept being mostly or absolutely wrong if the time came. It’s like having a guilty pleasure; this revelation was enough to cast away irony and the need to feel guilty for liking something or even needing to justify why this thing is worthy of being objectively liked (see: Slate on Creed, Robert Christgau or Christopher Hitchens on anything). Those Lester Bangs pieces I read where he dissed Exile on Main St. only to laud it as brilliant a year or two later weren’t the sign of a weak writer afraid to stand by his convictions; they were the mark of a strong writer unafraid to look silly if it made him a better person, overall (as much as listening to the Stones can do that).

In this light, Klosterman’s aspirations and my own were much easier to reconcile. Klosterman always maintained he wasn’t trying to get anyone to think a certain way; when ESPN columnist Bill Simmons asked him in an e-mail exchange, “Don’t you think this is disingenuous? You have to know your personality influences people to agree with you,” Klosterman responded that it wasn’t his responsibility to account for the malleability of his audience’s brains, a fair claim considering he wasn’t exactly trying to get anyone to kill the president. When I had written like a mini-Chuck as a freshman, I wanted people to think the way I think, to see the connections I was drawing between culture and life and to accept these connections as omni-present in everything.

Reading Klosterman, I agreed with him so much, his writing mirroring things I was literally writing at the same time (before I bought his book, I wrote a mini essay on why I hated soccer that roughly covered some of the same things that Klosterman’s essay did, or at least I’d like to think so) that I never considered the other truth: Plenty of people think Klosterman is an idiot because they think he is trying to convince them that what he thinks is fact. If he was trying to make his objective case, then yes, his failure to appeal to these people could be seen as a failure of persuasion. But persuasion was never the name of his game; general rhetoric and idea-sharing was. As long as I thought in the latter, I couldn’t lose; if I tried to persuade people, I would always fail.

IV. Back to the hero thing. After hearing Klosterman speak at a panel this summer, right after I had considered stalking him to the bathroom/Starbucks/wherever he was going, I had the opportunity to stand in a line and get my shit signed by him. Normally this never matters to me because you never get face time at a meet n’ greet, so why waste the time for a pleasantry and a scrawled signature? But Klosterman was different. Klosterman had been my hero. He wasn’t anymore, but he had been so important to my development as a writer that I needed to validate my sputtering 18-year old self reading passages from Killing Yourself to Live in a room full of girls by standing in this line for 15-20 minutes and meeting him.

So I waited and waited (making a fool out of myself trying to small talk Nathan Rabin, the semi-genius writer of the A.V. Club who, despite writing an entire book about how awkward his life was, came off smoother than me trying to ask him how to get a job) until it was finally my turn. I put my book down (Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs – the first book I bought from him and the most worn out), and asked him about the NBA, like a ton of other people had, I’m sure. We shot the shit about the draft for a bit, I tried to shoehorn my post-modern conception of the Minnesota Timberwolves (which he brushed off) and then, like a total herb, I busted out the following words:

“I just want to let you know that you were a really important writer for me. I’m really glad I got to hear you speak, because when I was younger, almost everything I wrote was influenced by you in some way. I guess I’m out of my ‘Klosterman’ phase now (full air quotes) but it was a place I needed to be for a while, and I’m glad I was there. Also, can I suck your dick?” Okay, not the last sentence. He looked sheepish and thanked me for the words, then shook my hand, wished me well, gave my book back to me, and let me skip away while thinking, I’m never going to wash this hand (I did about a minute later, after going to the bathroom).

Now, I’m not fooling myself into thinking this was meaningful for him at all; it’s entirely possible he thought, Oh God, another fanboy, tuned me out, and then went back through the motions once I had thankfully gone. It is possible he thought my haircut tragic and my clothes pedantic and that later than night, he told the anecdote of the dork who had wassailed him with love to a UChicago grad student he eventually banged. That much is possible. But it didn’t matter to me. I hadn’t said those words for Chuck – I had said those words for myself, and completing the circle of hero worship by actually meeting the hero was all I needed. I realize that possibility everyone in the line felt the same way, or not at all; it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it happened to me, and that I felt that way, and nothing else.

V. So how did I react in a post-Klosterman world? By freaking out when I unwrapped a copy of his newest book, Eating the Dinosaur, in the office of my fall internship, debated stealing it for about 10 minutes before asking the editor whether or not I could borrow it and being absolutely giddy when she said I could keep it. Goodness gracious! I started reading it on the train and finished it the next morning after staying up all night reading as much as I could, and immediately started it again on my way home later that day.

How is it? Pretty good, I think. It’s sadder than his other books because Klosterman, like Jonathan Lethem (another New Yorker who writes about pop culture and smoking weed), seems to be realizing his limitations as a human being in the techno-driven world we live in, and is becoming increasingly depressed about it. His other books may have seemed mildly opinionated; by contrast, I think he even admits to not really believing most or some of what he says in this one. Doesn’t matter; it’s going to sell a lot of copies, get some fawning/spiteful reviews, be successful for other 17/18-year olds like me, and the cycle will continue. I liked the essays about the Unabomber and the David Koresh/Kurt Cobain comparisons, didn’t fully get the ABBA chapter because I only know “Dancing Queen,” and appreciated what he had to say about football. You may find my criticism very dull; fair enough. At this point, Klosterman doesn’t have to convince me to keep reading, and unless he throws up a giant stink bomb (like the ‘09 Cubs or Season Two of Heroes), I’m going to keep reading.

Later that day after finishing it, I was at a female friend’s, catching up in the years since high school. Her alt-chick roommate stepped in the room and joined the conversation, which turned to the perks of my job. I mentioned getting Klosterman’s new book, and the roommate got excited and asked me how it was. I responded by taking the book out of my bag, opening it to a page, and reading from it out loud as I had when I was 17, when I was 18, and now, 21, to people who I thought had to “get it.” Once a Klostermaniac, always a Klostermaniac.

I am so sorry.

I stepped into a crowded subway car around ten this morning to see that a long stretch of seats was occupied by a urine-drenched person with his head in a box. People love to do the farmer fist gesture and say “Only in New York!” about things like this but let’s acknowledge that this is a rare and sad morning sight, not just a souvenir in story form. The crowd swelled with each stop and gradually I was pushed toward the center of the car, where I had a better view of the slumbering box-headed stranger. As it turned out, the box was full of hamburger buns, loose and packaged.

Non-homeless people love to jokingly evaluate the urban survival tactics of the homeless, be it through off-hand remarks about spelling errors on their signs or the attitude with which they approach you on the street, but this man deserves a golf clap for his ingenuity. Hamburger buns, in all their refined flour fluffiness, are probably as cushy a pillow as any Tempur-pedic product and the box shields his face from the fluorescent lights well. And for him to take advantage of the chicken-shitty nature of the work crowd by stretching out and smelling like pee, you can’t help but say “Well, guy, you’ve earned your territory.”

Things didn’t get really interesting until he suddenly bolted upright and awake, gasping with the box still over his head in what was a small-scale explosion of a couple dozen hamburger buns.  The last time I can remember waking up like that — the bolting awake part, not so much the box on my head or the buns parts — was during a dream where tens of Donald Rumsfelds were blowing curare darts and heaving live shrieking rodents at me while the queen bee of the Donald Rumsfelds read through my entire Internet browsing history, because, holy fucking everything, right? Those Mexican mushrooms rocked my socks (Ed. note: I have never had any of those and don’t know where to get them.) But where were we? Yes, the guy woke up with a box on his head like a primitive robot costume. Most people jumped backwards and guarded their kids to avoid stepping on the stray buns or catching a motion-activated wave of pee stink. I know, you guys are like “Now we’re talking!” Shoulda been there.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about the sensory experience of stepping on one of those buns; it seems on par with feeling mud between your toes or snapping bubble wrap and hey, we like those things. The kids probably felt similarly but didn’t want to admit it now that their parents had acted like each bun was a land mine of contaminants and social unacceptability. Before I could act on it and possibly set the precedent for them to set feet on them too (I assume little kids think I’m an adult and that everything I do is allowed) the star of this captivating one-act slowly rolled off the bench and onto all fours like a drowsy cat. He got up, tossed the box against the wall and flopped out onto the platform. The relief in the car was palpable.

What was left in his place was a scattering of pieces of soggy cardboard and clean white hamburger buns; it took up almost exactly as much space as he had. And amazingly enough, for the ten stops afterward (which I spent seated across from the mess, watching) nobody moved anything. Nobody tried to take those seats. People gathered around for seconds at a time to observe the scene more closely as though it were an installation in a museum, as though the action of briefly staring at it and moving on was enough to communicate the message “I understand this” to everyone else. Right.

Though entertaining, the most uncomfortable part about this whole thing was how quickly commuters were rendered passive audience members at the unfortunate show. Is there a moral to this story? The closest things would probably be “I guess weird shit happens all the time,” and “Man are we scared on public transit!” What does it take to get people to loosen up and not be terrified of each other if a man with a bread pillow can’t do the trick? I’ll have to place an order for Mexican mushrooms with intent to distribute (but, yeah, still have never had any and don’t know where to get them.)

The realest dude, gold lamé and all.

Michael Jackson is dead but I am not. This should be enough to make me happy about life, and I am. But plenty of people are not happy about life in the week following the King of Pop’s death, and analyzing the cultural impact of his passing is more interesting to me than being torn up about the death of a man I didn’t know who hadn’t put out any artistic material in almost a decade. It’s certainly sad that Michael Jackson the Man died, as sad as it is when any father of three passes because of unfortunate circumstances, but more uniquely profound is the death of Michael Jackson the Idea, the Cultural Entity, because he was wholly singular – you could argue that he’s the most notable pop culture death of all-time, depending on how strongly you feel about Elvis and John Lennon’s reach in non-English-speaking countries. At the very least he’s the most significant death since Lennon 1980, and there we find profundity: It’s the biggest event in twenty-eight years. (Addendum: It’s gauche to compare deaths, but it’s a quick measure of scale of impact, because I think this will be one of Those Days that everyone refers to in the future, whether or not recounting their own personal history ["I remember where I was when MJ passed..."] or featured on VH1’s I Love the New Millennium Again).

I know a lot of people who profess to be genuinely torn about his death, and watching the news coverage of bystanders milling around his Los Angeles hospital or mourners decorating the outside of his Gary, IN, childhood home, it’s clear that real tears are being shed. On the other hand, a lot of people I know find this stupid: One friend was cracking jokes about the situation the day after he died, bemoaning that anyone would take offense to them or even care about his passing, and another friend took the moral high road and excoriated those moved (or at least, those who appeared to be moved) by his death, saying that he hadn’t done anything creative in years and that crying over the death of someone you’ve never met is idiotic.

It’s very easy to be glib about stuff like this, to say that being a fan doesn’t entitle you to any real empathy or sadness over your idol’s death, and that any shed tears are excessive. But I don’t think this is true, because it minimizes the personal connection that can be forged in relation to a work of art, especially something as awesome as Thriller. For many people, an album like Thriller or a song like “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” is related to a moment of their childhood, or their teenhood, or their adulthood, even; that Jackson was a pop star means millions of people had this experience. It’s not a unique experience, but a personally worthwhile one–while many people may in fact be overreacting to Jackson’s death, his material provided an important component of their lives. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that many of the people I know nay-saying any reaction to his death are the emotionally detached alternative milieu, who scoff at pop pablum designed for “the mob”; of course, if Stephen Malkmus or Connor Oberst were to die tomorrow, they would be aghast. The death of an artist matters depending on your relation to the artist; for people who never grew up loving Jackson’s songs, or never had any experience with his music outside of just listening to it, the reaction isn’t as intense. This doesn’t mean more serious reactions aren’t worth having, if you believe in celebrating the artists as much as the art.

My own experiences with MJ: Singing along to “I Want You Back” and “Billie Jean” with my friends in London nightclubs, laughing at Chris Tucker singing “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” in a Japanese Yazuba bar in Rush Hour 2 as a grade-schooler, doing a freshman-year high school health class presentation on vitiligo (the condition that discolors your skin’s pigmentation) and using Jackson’s photo as an example in at least three slides (my teacher was amused), bumping Thriller while studying for exams in my sophomore year of college even though it prevented me from concentrating, rediscovering the over-dramatic video to “Black or White” last year after seeing it as a kid and thinking, “Ha ha ha, this video is hilarious, hey wait a minute, this song is kind of great.” Experiences that millions of other people had in some way or another, more muted or more serious than my own. That these experiences aren’t singular doesn’t bother me; what I find profound is that (deep breath, eulogy time) his music served as a common cultural tether for millions across the world. He may have been better at this than any other entertainer in history, especially that his music has translated so well to modern audiences.

Above all this, I think comments like “I can finally listen to Jackson’s music without the stigma” are totally worthless, and I know people who have said things like this, which is just beyond me. If someone’s death and subsequent eulogizing enables you to enjoy something, then grow up and learn to separate an artist’s output from his personal life. Just about every creative mind in the world has been into some fucked up shit at one point or another; Kurt Cobain was a gun enthusiast, Jason Kidd beat his wife (if you don’t think he’s creative, how do you explain this?), Craig Finn is a huge Springsteen fan, etc., etc., etc. That O.J. Simpson killed his wife doesn’t mean he wasn’t one of the best college running backs ever, you know? And while one’s artistic contributions don’t cover up their personal life, they have to be viewed in separate lights, unless you believe in extreme authorial intent where the artist’s life always crosses over in the work (if so, how do you explain “Bad”?). A similar reaction to scoff at is, “He was weird and I made fun of him, but I still loved him!” Puh-lease. Own up to your own shameless bashing of a man you had never met for entertainment’s sake. I mean, I’m not going to cry when Scott Stapp kicks the bucket, but I’m definitely not going to pretend I haven’t spent hours and hours making fun of Creed (because I have!).

So what does all of this mean? Well, something has happened, and the myriad ways in which Jackson influenced culture (whether through the bold synthesis of pop, rock, R&B, and funk in his music, breaking racial lines on MTV, making a studded glove look good, etc.) will take a while to parse through because he was the King of Pop and now the King is dead, boys. It was so lonely on a limb out there, and now he’ll be buried or burned, away from all the naysayers and leeches who poked at him in the latter days of his life, draining him until the world’s once-best dancer was confined to a wheelchair, unable to move. Pop music may never see a similar titan of culture ever again.

Blog poets society

I spent almost my entire nineteenth birthday in the bathtub experiencing the First Great Meltdown of my adultish life. I’ve selectively forgotten what that was all about, but I need not invent any metaphors to illustrate the fact that I was soaking in lukewarm meta-pity. After such a raging anti-birthday, the following year I overcompensated; I treated it like a 24-hour hot potato threatening to explode into another steam cloud of existential ache and gloom. I singularly containerized the anxiety of a strained couple trying to make it through a family vacation. I don’t know how it got to be so agonizing to turn a year older.

Luckily my twentieth birthday didn’t establish the bathtub crisis to be a pattern. I made a point to spend the day doggy paddling in average-ness, if for no other reason than to take the edge off the expectation that we have birthday expectations. At the time I was an intern and I went about the day pretty obediently, puttering around sterile cubicles and handling the sort of tasks that leaves about seventy percent of your brain free to amble. I happily allowed the busy-work to serve a private adjunct purpose during the day — as it were, just having minor responsibilities sealed the lid on my annual tub o’ sorrow.

And so brings us to this birthday, my twenty-first. After a smooth twentieth, I grew suspicious that the pattern was in fact biennial and some sad stinky shit would descend upon me this time around. So I chose to go to work on a day of the week I normally don’t just to pass the hours a little less self-consciously. Then I spent the night with three good friends, let some fancy margaritas kick my ass a little, motorboated a taco and called it a birthday. The scales tipped more in favor of warm and fuzzy than wild and crazy. I feel a little guilty for not barfing on something I’d paid for.

Besides being chicken-fried dickheads, people who say “You only turn 21 once!” almost had me thinking I’d betrayed myself by behaving sort of tamely the one night I’m not supposed to. Then I remember how many friends’ 21st birthdays I’ve celebrated already, a school year’s worth at least. One difference, I guess, is that I can shelve the practical bouncer-dodging skills I’ve honed over the last 3-4 years and settle comfortably into being a legal turd, opening turd-blaster fire on younger generations for their meager knowledge of ’90s family sitcoms.

It’s eery though, this is the first time in my life where the most newly recycled fashion trends are ones I’ve already lived through (little floral prints, acid washed denim, leggings, crop tops?) and shows syndicated on Nick at Nite are ones I watched on their original air dates, so help me God (oh, and I just ordered a pair of orthopedic shoes from a comfort footwear supplier because I thought they were cute, actually cute. And wearing all these LifeAlert devices around my neck and wrists is making me look like a crazy marionette in my own home.)

But mostly this birthday has reminded me of the experience of thinking there’s one more stair to go when you’ve already reached the porch, a gawky little step forward whose impact is at once shocking and pretty easily dismissed. And so I conclude this on a “bleh” and try not to think about how much ridiculous needless apprehension I’ll subject myself to next year.

The eclipse of the mind and the heart that occurs when one comes across Extra Long Twizzlers for the first time.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Inner Child: OOOH, look at those!

Person Wearing Ball and Chain of Reality: Good grief, these.

IC: They’re as long as I am tall!

PWBCR: On the big list of Things I Need, I’m pretty sure “three pounds of extra long Twizzlers” doesn’t rank.

IC: I could tie them all together and throw them out the window and climb down and run away from home!

PWBCR: A package of strawberry licorice whose width occupies an entire shelf? Hats off to you, America.

IC: And once I’m on the ground, I’ll tug the whole thing down and attach a grappling hook to the end.

PWBCR: So how about some fucking fruits and vegetables?

IC: And I’ll shoot bad guys, pew pew pew!

PWBCR: Whatever, my prescription’s ready.

IC: Grab this rope and waterski behind the Kawasaki Om-Nom-Nom-a-tron 3000, where we’ll show you the best gingerbread mansions ever, the most drawn-out Lady and the Tramp reenactment ever, the most delicious hair extensions ever, and so much more!

PWBCR: Shut up dude the pharmacist thinks you’re weird.

IC: CAN I SIGN THE CREDIT CARD MACHINE?

PWBCR: Fine.

100% real To Do list

It’s summer, and chances are your routine is changing a little bit. It’s supposed to be the happiest season of the year, but maybe you feel inexplicably bogged down with stuff. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out exactly what’s doing it, so to aid you in your summery transition I’ve made a To Do list. Get going on it, results guaranteed or your money back! (Ed. note: invisible money has, in fact, exchanged hands.)

1. Throw out your old underwear.

Shriek shriek shriek shriek!

(See, similar but less pressing: Old and/or randomly pair-free socks)

Not trying to gross you out, reader, but everyone forgets to toss out underwear. It’s not like you grow out of them (sigh, if only every garment we wore could be elasticized, we could all be a little less stressed, and probably fatter) plus they’re such hamper-dwelling items as is.  But the day inevitably comes when you take a look, reeeally look at your underwear collection and begin to realize how much shit they’ve been through (high five!)

So here’s your litmus test: Hold up each pair, and if they look like they’ve fought in a war, toss ‘em. Toss them. Fucking toss them. Do not donate your wounded, scarred panty-soldiers to anyone/anything anywhere.

2. Take the important objects out of your bag, turn the whole thing upside down and shakeshakeshake into a trash can.

But wait, you really need the tobacco flakes from 14 crushed cigarettes down there! Ditto receipts and all those coins — you probably have enough coins in your bag to make all your wishes come true via flipping them into a fountain and piss off a clerk somewhere and join the army of Nader voters who think the penny should be discontinued. And who are you kidding with that condom! You should carry at least three more just in case.

3. Oh yeah, and maybe get a real trash can.

Does not count.

4. Figure out what the hell you’re doing with your hair.

As my adorable Hungarian relatives might say if they ever met you, “Vat ees thees herstyle you vear?” But really, whatchoo doin? Bangs or no bangs? Long or short? You should probably make that decision. Also I can see your split ends from here; they are woefully spiky and reaching out to me like something in Alien vs. Predator. It’s the summer, get yourself a trim and move on with life.

5. Delete random contacts out of your phone.

(See, similar: Deleting buddies off AIM buddy list, or Gchat contacts if your name is 2009ey Deschanel)

You can suss out the good ones based on whether the info is entered all wrong (a solid indicator that your phone was hijacked by some bumbly person with kielbasas for fingers) or if the name is incomplete. Personal favorites that I definitely don’t need anymore:

• GaBriEL — Wh…what? He must work for dELiA*s or something. I’m scared if I try calling this it’ll redirect me to a Xanga page full of blog poetry and anorexic people with Azn mullets.
• apt dude – Sup dude, heard you have an apartment. Pass.
• Skype — 000123456. Excuse me, I have to call Skype now. The whole company. Hope the CEO doesn’t mind that I just posted his direct extension here.

See what I’m gettin’ at? Surely you have some of your own to erase.

6. Toss all those vitamins you bought, never took, and allowed to expire in your medicine cabinet.

It's 2009!

Space in your med. cab. is so precious, how could you allow those Vitamin D gel caps sit there for three whole years? Back when you bought them you promised yourself you’d take them every day, and that 2009 expiration date felt like eons into the future. I thought that by the year 2009 there’d be a wind turbine on every streetcorner, holograms of Will.I.Am on the news and a robo-narrator ominously prefacing everything with “In the year 2009…”

Buuut as it turns out, your vitamins are still sitting here and all we got was that stupid Will.I.Am hologram.  So maybe you blew it, but damn does it feel cool to flush them down the toilet — just like Girl Interrupted lol!

7. Dig out your old (not old like childhood old, but recent-old) journals, reread them and DESTROY! DESTROY!

We all go through phases where we think keeping a journal is a great idea. I mean, you’re a really reflective person, so why not write about your day and how strange it can be to watch your parents age? Unfortunately, like vitamins, the journal-keeping habit is a hard one to genuinely cement, and in the wake of your vagary is a sprinkling of composition books and stupid-expensive Moleskines throughout your bookshelf.

Open any of them and you’ll notice a pattern: the first page is all THIS IS MY GURNAL ME ME ME and maybe you wrote 1-5 entries before you got absorbed by Vh1 clip shows and left about 80% of it blank. Oh, the other pattern you’ll notice is that whatever you wrote was fucking horrifying and if anyone ever found it you’d die. Your mom/roommate/sibling probably has already, so might as well cut your losses and set them on fire.

8. Make your Facebook photos private (if you’re under 30.)

By the time my childhood best friend’s mom Added Me As A Friend, I couldn’t help thinking that she doesn’t need to see 649 pictures of me that together create a fascinatingly inaccurate narrative of my college career. Photos from real life have a greater likelihood of being PG and representative of you as a person, but camera-carriers on campus? Pretty crapshooty. My highly precise scientific findings indicate that college kids who take photos and post them to Facebook are:

• Found at parties, especially themed and/or shitty and/or sweaty ones
• Probably not your real friends.

Of course there are exceptions to both points, and in the abyss of photos there are a few I actually really love. Luckily I can still look at them when the mood strikes and not lose sleep wondering how my former basketball coach is interpreting the Eurotrash night photos or the time we publicly and retardedly staged a clothed version of the Eiffel Tower. Privacy settings, y’all. They’re good to use.

Oops, yeah, probably don't need to spread this one around the Internet...oh, fucking oops again.

–

Anyway, do all of these things and I promise you’ll feel like weight has been lifted out of your pants. They’re not particularly fun, but you’ll be glad you took care of shit. The More You Know, or something.

This is the future of communication.

I’ve been working at a Chicago comic book store for the last five years which has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, getting to hang out with mostly-interesting people talking about nerd shit 24/7 and serving a mostly-cool clientele that constantly reminds me one thing: In the real world, no one cares how smart you try to be. Intelligence is a valuable commodity in that everyone wants to have it, but when you’re talking to regular-ass people, no one cares about the art installment or the foreign film you’ve just seen unless you can talk about it, not the act of experiencing it. Whenever a slew of posts of unwarranted narcissism clog up my feed (#firstworldproblems), I can get a respite from this at my comic store and realize that no one cares about the Internet. So why should you?

Well, it’s important to be in the know. It’s important to know what a Tumblarity is, or why Twitter is revolutionizing the means of communication (even though most people just use it to follow Shaq), or why Sasha Grey matters. The more you know about things, in that the more you know these things exist, the smarter you will appear to be. I’ve decided to prepare a guide for the Internet-challenged to follow along, so that the next time my mom’s friend calls me on the phone to tell me I should start social networking myself (this actually happened) I can point him this way and spare him the awkwardness of knowing that I am far ahead of him.

Twitter

What’s Twitter? Twitter is where you condense your personality into 140 characters and share it with dozens of people you vaguely know in real life, thousands you don’t know at all and maybe four or five people you might actually call a good friend. While blogs are about self-indulgence through the overuse of language, Twitter lets you disseminate whatever half-cooked thoughts you have to dozens of people who probably just don’t care. It’s about telling people about the stuff you care about in the least meaningful way you can – just telling them. I just read this article! Check it out. I just ate this sandwich! Buy it. You’re not giving anything personal about yourself, but you’re alerting the world to the signifiers you choose to identify yourself with  – I read this magazine. I eat this sandwich. I watch this movie. In the year 2009, these things are important and so am I. It can be interesting to get inside the head of a public figure–you know, if knowing Demi Moore’s inner thoughts is super important to you–but for your friends, it just replaces the conversations you could be having.

We hear a lot (those of us unfortunate to be college students or recent graduates) about how the Internet is making us less personal, that everyone is using this artificial reality (Twitter, AIM, Facebook, Friendster, Hipster Runoff) to sidestep the conventions of actual reality (having conversations, laughing in real life, giving hugs). This is sort of true, but that ignores the purpose of the Internet: to communicate. And how do you make the act of communication a worthwhile one? Well, communicate something you think is important – not a hyperlink, but your real thoughts, not something you did that day but how you felt as you did it, and so forth. The Internet suffers from people oversharing meaningless ideas (Tumblr, Julia Allison’s blog, this website i’ve already countermanded your burn so don’t even try) just as much as it suffers from people under-sharing important ones (Twitter, durrrrrf). So get on the Internet and start actually communicating, you dummy!

Tumblarity

I have no idea why you would care about Tumblarity, which is Tumblr’s new set of metrics to show how much time you waste. If you have a use for it, that’s great – everything you need or thought you needed to know is wrapped up into a vaguely important set of numbers (I am, for example, ranked somewhere in the teens of thousands in popularity among the Chicago area, which is so insignificant I can’t even come up with a suitable sarcastic analogy). If you don’t have a use for it, then don’t use it, or at the very least try to think about why you don’t like it and what Tumblr could do to get better (not that this is immensely important either, but it’s better than just grousing). All too often, when an Internet giant makes a change to its layout or interface, like Facebook’s visual overhauls (2007 or 2009 or 2010–pick!) or Jezebel’s moderation of its comments, people are super quick to ta-ta and no-no the change as if the quicker they can be sarcastic the more valid their opinion will be, the more entrenched in truth their smugness will be. The worst thing I can think about Tumblarity is that it got people to start caring about a made-up word.

Hipster Runoff

I think the revelation that Carles is just some dude working an unimpressive job is the best thing I could have hoped for, because it means that HRO isn’t an ironic in-joke but a more depressing extended riff on this gaudy faux-intellectual culture: Not the fashion trends, or the fluffing of unremarkable bands, but the insistence that their tunnel vision of ideas and pursuits are the only things worth doing, like why care about Africa if there’s a house party on the West Side this weekend? Why read a new book if I can mainline until I can’t see anymore? Why get stressed about public education reform if I can take photos of myself and Photoshop them all over? HRO doesn’t just lambast the absurdity of excessive entitled party culture, but the mundanity of hipster routine – that like any subculture that gets some kind of mainstream recognition, the copycats have come in to regurgitate all the old tricks and the original kids are left to gripe about how they did it before it was cool while not doing anything new.

Sasha Grey

Sasha Grey is a porn star who watches Werner Herzog and loves to be pooped on, apparently. I find this immensely appealing, because in my attempt to legitimize pornography as “the new feminism” or “empowering” I have forgotten about the subliminal rape culture it endorses and welcome any attempt to justify my addiction to fetish porn as I find it harder to find my non-existent girlfriend attractive with each passing moment. But Grey is interesting not because she’s a porn star with intelligence, but because she’s an intelligent person who just happens to be a porn star (suck on that parallelism!). The more articles I read that marvel at how this porn star is doing it for herself, dropping facts about the French New Wave as a young stud drops a deuce on her face, the more I wonder whether or not Grey is just acting some depraved fantasy for sad young literary men and women everywhere who want to fuck and talk about Kerouac but are too afraid to appear smart and sexual at the same time. For straddling the line, I think Grey is interesting, but unfortunately I think most of the people who talk about her are just afraid.

Animal Collective

Look, I’m not one of the cool kids – I only started listening to AnCo after hearing “My Girls” even after being aware of them for years. You’re not a shittier person if you only start listening to a band after they get popular – you’re shittier if you start pretending to like them after this happens. You can’t listen to everything, man – just take what you can and figure out what you like. Of course, I could just be justifying my own laziness for not giving them a try years ago, or for ignoring their output after hearing some clicky-clacky animal sound bullshit when I was in high school and scoffing as I went back to the comfort of my boring post-Highway Dylan records. Stop judging, you turkeys!

Blogs: Are they self-indulgent?

Yes, which is why I just wrote 1400 words on things I decried as meaningless in the opening sentences of this post. Life is only worth it half the time.

Let’s recap:

• No website, despite an online listing
• A gmail address that randomly has the word “sushi” in it
• A preference for “graffic student”
• Passion for fashion
• Requirement that candidates “be multi-task”
• Know how to GOOGLE

Listen, this place sounds like it’s run by a bunch of methed out LOLcats, and you can count me the fuck in. I’m totally multi-task, I’ve watched the Tyra Banks channel until my eyes smiled blood, and I can Google so well I’ll probably have all the sushi rockstars in that flophouse playing MMORPGs by the time they can process my nonexistent paycheck.  BRB updating my resume.