I Hate the Internet

by Jarett Kobek

  It was rocky until it wasn’t. At some point it became solid.

  J. Karacehennem went north.

  HE MOVED into the apartment of The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, which was located on Bryant between 23rd and 24th in the Mission District, a historically Latino and working-class neighborhood which was ground zero for gentrification driven by obscene Internet wealth.

  The apartment sported several strange features.

  It was 1,000 square feet but it had no interior walls.

  It was one giant room.

  The floors were all grey masonite.

  The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter had installed a 15-foot tall tree into the middle of the room.

  Moving into an apartment with no walls and a giant tree required not only a lot of love but also a great deal of trust. But that was his relationship with The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. All love and all trust, with a dash of pointless arguments.

  MOSTLY, J. KARACEHENNEM hung around writing, performing the daily chores of the common law househusband, and thinking about the lack of eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.

  Before he moved to California and the Sun exacted its terrible vengeance, he was as pale as milk. This was unusual as he was Turkish.

  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 r
esolved, 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.

  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.

  chapter nine

  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.

  Adeline was kind of famous and had enacted the social faux pas of being a woman who expressed unpopular opinions in a society that hated women. She’d committed the only unforgivable sin of the Twenty-First Century.

  So there Adeline was on YouTube.

  Now she was making money for Google.

  KEVIN KILLIAN'S STUDENT had not uploaded the video with bad intentions. The uploader was thrilled to meet someone responsible for a beloved childhood classic. He’d read Trill in the Scholastic omnibus.

  Adeline spoke with such candor and wit. It was nice, wrote the uploader, to see someone with an opinion.

  The uploader had emailed the video to websites that reported on the comics industry. These included Newsarama and Comic Book News and Bleeding Cool.