by Jarett Kobek
Twerking had been a traditionally African-American and Afro-Caribbean dance, meaning that it originated and was performed by people with eumelanin in the basale stratum of their epidermises.
Miley Cyrus didn’t have eumelanin in her epidermis.
SO THAT WAS THE SUBJECT of the dinner party’s inane babbling. A group of middle-aged White people sat around discussing Miley Cyrus’s cultural appropriation of twerking.
The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter suffered the evening.
MEANWHILE, J. KARACEHENNEM picked up Adeline in a rental car. He had rented the car for the next day, when he and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter would drive to Los Angeles.
“Darling,” said Adeline as she climbed into the car, “do you want to eat first or must we indulge your madness?”
“It has to be at 8PM,” he said. “I don’t think we have time for food before then.”
J. KARACEHENNEM had told Adeline that what he wanted to do on his last night in the city was drive to the top of Twin Peaks and scream at San Francisco.
Twin Peaks were a pair of hills near the center of the city. They were marked by a giant television antenna called Sutro Tower. The tower was visible from almost anywhere in the city. From Twin Peaks, you could see every neighborhood with any importance to J. Karacehennem.
You could see the Haight. You could see the Richmond. You could see the Sunset. You could see the Financial District. You could see Hayes Valley. You could see Corona Heights. You could see North Beach. You could see, sort of, Fisherman’s Wharf. You could see the Presidio.
“It’s madness,” said Adeline. “C’est fou! I shall accompany you if you insist.”
“What else is there to do?” he asked. “I want my John Galt moment.”
“Who is John Galt?” asked Adeline.
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” said J. Karacehennem.
JOHN GALT was the central personage of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. It is John Galt who organizes a strike of the world’s richest people. It’s John Galt who gives a 60 page speech about how poor people are worthless trash that should die in the gutter.
J. KARACEHENNEM drove to the top of Twin Peaks. There was fog over the city. Neither J. Karacehennem nor Adeline expected the park to be very busy.
As they got out of the car, Adeline noticed that it was very cold. She assumed that the weather was too frigid for anyone to deliver a speech. She also noticed that the cold hadn’t stopped the tourists. A large number appeared to be from China. They were taking pictures of the city, even though much of it was obscured by fog.
“Darling,” Adeline said to J. Karacehennem, “if you’re going to do it, then now’s your moment. Otherwise let’s go and eat.”
THE HAND OF THE CLOCK reached the dot of 8.00.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the voice of J. Karacehennem, “Mr. Thompson will not speak to you tonight. I’ve taken over. You wanted to hear a report on the world crisis but instead you will hear me babble like a maniac for an ungracious amount of time.”
The tourists turned to look at J. Karacehennem. He had done many book events. He had learned how to project his voice. He could be very loud indeed.
Adeline tried not to feel mortified.
“For twelve years, you have been asking: who is J. Karacehennem? This is J. Karacehennem speaking. I am the man who is sick of San Francisco. I am the man who has come to shout impotently at a city from a hillside scenic overlook. If you wish to hear the babblings of an incoherent lunatic, then I am the man for you.”
The tourists moved in closer.
Oh great God almighty, thought Adeline, What if he starts screaming about Falun Gong and UFOs? After all, he was his father’s son.
“San Francisco,” continued J. Karacehennem, “You are the worst place on earth! You have taken the dream of a bohemian enclave for misfits and morons and you have transformed it into a Disneyland for the nouveau riche. You have replaced your artists and your independent movie theaters with locally sourced restaurants! You have taken an enormous shit on the independent value of culture. You have made it exponentially harder for freaks to find peace! San Francisco, though you may not believe it, I am here to inform you that your shit stinks!
“You have given shelter to the worst people imaginable. You have elevated annoying nerds to minor celebrities. You have made us suffer beneath the terrible lash of Mark Zuckerberg. You have bequeathed to us a vision of the billionaire in a hooded sweatshirt and you have created an environment in which no one will acknowledge the idiotic theater of a billionaire in a hooded sweatshirt!
“You have taken the last true good thing, the initial utopian vision of the Internet, and you have perverted it into a series of interlocking fiefdoms with no purpose other than serving advertisements. Listen, San Francisco, I was there. I know what the Internet was like before people used it to make money. I am the only literary writer in America with a serious tech background! I am the only literary writer in America who ran Slackware 1.0 on his 386sx! I am the only literary writer in the world who coded his own BBS software in badly indented C++! I am the only literary writer in America who can use the ncurses library!
“The Internet is in my blood. I am of the Internet. I know that everything on the Internet which we take as inevitable was engineered by nerds with a fondness for shitty novels. The reason why people harass teenagers into suicide is because a bunch of White dudes with no sense of the human experience decided that they would build anonymity into the Internet as a feature rather than a bug! You nerds have blood on your hands!
“Fuck Steve Jobs and fuck your worship of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was no more than nothing! His only distinction was that, unlike every other awful CEO in tech, he had a mild sense of design. His jeans were rubbish! His turtle necks were awful! He owed seven percent of Disney! Apple was a company run by a bully surrounded by cultists so indoctrinated that they didn’t realize they were being bullied. In the end, all the sycophancy killed their god! The man’s death was the most public suicide since Marilyn Monroe or maybe Jesus Christ! I know, I know, I know. I know that my criticism is without merit because I know that the iPad changed everything!
“San Francisco, you are the most beautiful city in America and you are full of America’s most annoying people! You were annoying before the tech people arrived! You created a half-baked gauzy ideology of narcissism disguised as self-empowerment and now you have spread your filth across the world! Philip K. Dick saw you for what you are! That’s why he wrote The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. You are nothing more than a city of people who thought they could brute force their way to enlightenment by buying a Beatles LP! You haven’t changed!
“Fuck anyone who believes it is their duty to lecture poor people about the appropriate terminology! You bags of shit put forth your commentary on platform technologies owned by your enemies! You are making money for rich White dudes! Every critique of the racist cisgender homophobic misogynistic patriarchy that you post on Tumblr just makes money for Tumblr! All you’re doing is advertising for the very people and companies that perpetuate the economic system of injustice which you are supposedly challenging!
“Fuck your unbelievable ability to pick on the powerless. Fuck all the crocodile tears that you shed every time a mentally backwards idiot calls some Turk a towelhead camelfucker! I don’t give a fuck about the opinions of illiterate gas station attendants in Dubuque! It’s so easy to demonstrate your own righteousness and it’s so easy to challenge the social order when all you’re doing is picking on idiots who are better off ignored and left to wither in the stench of their own lives! You have transformed activism into high school politics! You are no better than nothing! To Hell with all language police!
“You are buried beneath your own celebrity gossip! Buried beneath tweets about how awful it is that drunken Republican Congresspersons from the South hold opinions you don’t like! You are a city and a nation of bullies and you are very selective in your targets! Maybe it’s not the fault of t
he people who use these elaborate mechanisms of the Internet! Maybe it’s the fault of the people who engineered these systems to prey on the worst instincts of the human race because preying on the worst instincts of people is a much better way to generate advertising revenue than appeals to the angels of our better nature!
“Fuck your insipid and limp vision of multiculturalism which has nothing to do with the lives of the people outside of your hidey-holes! I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about! Come to Hollywood Boulevard on a Saturday night and reconcile your racial and gender politics with the club scene! Please, save me from my ignorance! Please, tell me more about Pussy Riot!
“Down with your literary people, San Francisco! Down with all literary people! Book people are the only people who had the natural resources to resist the Internet’s misery! Book people are the only people who have a half-way interesting argument to make against the Internet! Instead, book people rolled over like dogs at the kitchen table! The very first time that they saw a website! Begging their master for a scratch of the stomach! Publishing evolves and consolidates and rots from the inside but no technology can ever overwhelm Charlotte Brontë! Nothing can deal with Villette! Nothing ever changes, the world is the same as it was in 79AD! The empire never ended! The only defense is William MAKEPEACE Thackeray and Gloria Naylor! Now all writers are on Twitter, pretending they can’t spell in pathetic attempts to win a larger audience! Fuck all of you! Fuck all of you except for Kevin Killian! Kevin Killian is the only one amongst you who’s worth a damn! And Dodie Bellamy too!
“Fuck every teenager who talks with his or her parents! Your parents are the fucking enemy! They love having you on the Internet! They can monitor you! You must throw down the tools of your oppressors! You must rebel against tweeting about television and you must cast down your iPad, even though it has changed everything. You must hold vinyl records close to your heart and listen to them while you read paperback books and stop taking the drugs your parents’ doctors have prescribed for you! If you must do drugs, teenagers of America, have the decency to buy street drugs from actual dealers! Make sure your gay sex is perverse! Stop having cute gay sex! Straight people are your enemy! They only want you for a pet!
“San Francisco, fuck your ethnic cleansing! Fuck the massive decrease in your African-American population! Fuck your gentrification! Fuck your working class, too, for being so deluded by the shiny baubles of consumerism that their every protest only comes too late, when the die is cast and the deed is done! Fuck everyone who thought that the newest business would improve the neighborhood only to discover two years later that they couldn’t afford their rent!
“San Francisco, your future is a vast ethnic ghetto! The Mark Zuckerbergs of the world are working on immigration reform. They don’t give a fuck about Latinos but they love using Latinos as a disguise for their agenda! Their goal is to replace their existing workforce with workers from Asian countries. Because tech workers from Asia will work for one-third the salary! All the low level cogs in the tech industry are so fucked up their own asses that while they were hosting public mournings for net neutrality, they failed to get anything like a political education! They have no idea what’s happening to them! They can’t conceive of the natural path of business! They can’t believe that all companies which create a middle class then systematically dismantle it!
“All of your luxury condo developments will be the slums of the future! You will have tens of people crammed into every 2BR shithole and none of the new residents will care about your granite counter tops with full backsplash or your handset ceramic tile entries or your European hinges or your melamine interiors! You will be a dystopian slum like in the shitty novels that all the tech idiots read back in the 1980s, except nothing will be fun and the hackers won’t be cool! There is no cypherpunk future! The cypherpunk future is cancelled! The future will be like the past! Boring and full of shitty jobs! Poor people bussed to and fro, working on the latest rollout of the PageRank algorithm!
“Fuck you, San Francisco! I’m moving back to Los Angeles where the rich people are honest in their deceits! I am moving back to Los Angeles where all of the bullshit is transparent because everyone is a total idiot! I am moving back to Los Angeles where I can watch SpongeBob SquarePants sexually harass teenagers on Hollywood Boulevard! I am moving back to Los Angeles where gentrification barely works because everything is a hideous strip mall and there is nothing worth destroying!
“San Francisco, true change is possible! All you need to do is install adblockers on every web browser! It can all change tomorrow if you spend the three minutes on Google learning how to dismantle Google! Do it! Freedom is yours!
“A short term solution! The fundamental problem is that every technology embeds the ideologies of its creators! Who made the Internet? The military! The Internet is the product of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency! We call it DARPA for short! Who worked for DARPA? DARPA was a bunch of men! Not a single woman worked on the underlying technologies that fuel our digital universe! Men are the shit of the world and all of our political systems and philosophies were created and devised without the input of women! Half of the world’s population lives beneath systems of government and technological innovation into which their gender had zero input! Democracy is a bullshit ideology that a bunch of slaveholding Greek men constructed between rounds of beating their wives! All the presumed ideologies of men were taken for inescapable actualities and designed into the Internet! Packet switching is an incredible evil!
“The Internet is the last stand of the Patriarchy. It was designed by warmongering men to systematically dehumanize women! The whole thing is fucked! It’s where straight men are hosting their final battle! They’ve discovered the grim truth of their own obsolescence! They lost control of the complex systems we call society, so they created a new one! A new one where they could play by their own rules! Rules devised according to the tepid pseudo-philosophical thought of Ayn Rand and junk science fiction! Women, you can’t win! Not if you play on their terms! Not if you use the Internet!
“Women must develop their own Internet! They must group together and engineer a new, gynocentric Internet and they must exclude all the stupid assumptions of men in its implementation and design! They must not repeat its mistakes! No bullshit about freedom of speech, no bullshit about individual liberties, no bullshit reimagining of juvenile literature! No IPv4! No packet switching! Packet switching is the root of all evil! When women have finished engineering their own Internet, they must ban men from it! For at least ten years until the bugs are worked out!”
J. Karacehennem stopped talking.
“That’s all I’ve got,” he said.
“How do you feel?”
“It didn’t really do much. I guess it was worth trying.”
ONE OF THE TOURISTS walked up to J. Karacehennem. She was a young woman, maybe twenty-two years old.
Her father was a powerful man who had made a great deal of money enslaving his countrymen and making them build consumer electronics like the iPad and the iPhone.
She had not come to Twin Peaks to hear the towelheaded son of a Turkish camelfucker holler into nothingness.
She stared at him. He stared back.
Then she said, “Diu nei puk gai gwai lo.”
This is what it meant: Fuck you till you fall down in the street, foreign devil.
chapter thirty-three
Then it was New Year’s Eve.
Adeline was invited to a soirée at Mike Kitchell’s apartment. Mike Kitchell’s apartment was on 26th Street near Mission.
Mike Kitchell was best friends with J. Karacehennem. Adeline suspected that her invitation derived from the simple fact that J. Karacehennem had fled San Francisco and Mike Kitchell felt a little lonely.
THE TRANSITION from 2013 to 2014 came in Mike Kitchell’s kitchen, with everyone looking through Mike Kitchell’s windows. Fireworks were exploding over the Mission.
Adeline even smoked a few of Mike Kitch
ell’s cigarettes. Mike Kitchell smoked Marlboro Menthol Lights 100s. Cigarette smoking was a vice that Adeline did not enjoy or indulge. But she was slightly drunk and it was 2014. So she lit up.
Mike Kitchell’s boyfriend Dean Smith was there. Dean Smith was an excellent artist with too small of a reputation.
Mike Kitchell was tweeting about New Year’s Eve. His WaNks Index Score was 8.374449339207048.
Konrad Steiner was there. So was Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta. So was a friend of Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, but Adeline failed to catch the friend’s name.
A few days earlier, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta’s apartment had burned down. Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta had been out of town.
J. Karacehennem, Mike Kitchell, Dean Smith and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter spent Christmas morning rescuing the cat.
The cat was fine. The apartment was destroyed.
Everyone agreed that 2013 had been, without question, the worst year that they could remember.
Only Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta had a moderate amount of eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis.
ERIK WILLEMS was not there. Adeline thought about inviting him but he was busy.
His Royal Highness Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud, also known as Dennis, was in town.
Dennis was having a housewarming party. He’d just closed on the top floor condo of a building on Alabama Street.
Dennis’s new condo featured custom LED-lit soffits and built-out niches, an EcoSmart fireplace with white oak surround, radiant heat floors with zone nested controls, a Siedle video intercom entry and alarm system, automatic sun shades, ebony stained rift-cut white oak floors, a private elevator to every level of the home including the panoramic view roof terrace, a poured concrete gas fire pit, a Calcutta marble kitchen with custom German designed Leicht cabinetry, Axor and Hans Grohe bathroom fixtures, two Carrara marble bathrooms with Toto low flush toilets, CAT-5 wiring for phone and data, and shielded CAT-6 for media.
