Or, "I Don't Need No Internet Friends."

Anyone to whom I have shown this blog knows that I don't use tags in the conventional manner; there is no ejaculatory stream of keywords underneath my posts meant to dance to ju-ju voodoo beats and attract elusive search algorithms.  Rather, I prefer to use that space more like a tooltip, as a punchline or a last little tidbit of bitter social commentary.  It's less productive in the conventional sense; I'm not jumping up and down saying Tiger Woods and John Goslin over here, woohoo, oh wait it's actually just a low-res YouTube video of me making potpourri except I didn't have a tripod so I put the camera on top of a stack of books but it's tilted the entire time in this anguishingly neck-craning way sorry I lied about the Tiger Woods and John Goslin thing but you're here, aren't you?  By the way you want to twist the orange peels counter-clockwise to best release the essential oils, whereas twisting them clockwise releases Gul'Hruk, the vengeful djinn who seeks to enter the spirit world and annihilate the ectoplasmic incorporiality of the wizard that imprisoned him a thousand years ago, thus reversing the flow of time.  We are all Benjamin Button!

  Take my recent post about Modern Warfare 2's "No Russian" level (and then go read this one by someone more qualified).  There are no tags at the end (because I could think of no jokes.  Dead Russians are dead Russians).  I did not put a block of tags longer than the post itself including every possible permutation and misspelling of "Call of Duty," "Modern Warfare," and "Two."  That would accomplish nothing beyond flushing the post down the toilet to float merrily along with the rest of the Modern Warfare 2 media coverage in the sewers beneath the delapidated city of sensible discourse and intellectual stimulation.

 I like being disconnected from "the tech hipster megoplex known as the blogosphere," as tech sorceror Andy Manoske put it, in my own small ways.  Google can read all of my Mail and see what I'm Reading, but I think I'll keep my Docs and my Calendar to myself, and opt out of the data usage collection.  And I'll plant my tagless flag here at Open Salon instead of Blogspot.  Not that it makes any difference.  We are all open source citizens now, having traded the privacy of old for more access and more information faster.  I love the internet but I dislike Big Things in general, and so I like to have a buffer—no matter how illusory—between me and the riptide.  A lifejacket without any air is still something to cling to.  Sometimes I'll browse themes and skins for my Google Chrome browser in Incognito mode, and pretend Google can't tell that I'm watching it.  But my ISP still knows.

 This is where I put this post down for six months.  Before dropping it like a potato full of nitroglycerin (wait—what?  It's like a hot potato remixed with this time my friend James had carved a hole in the top of a watermelon and stuck a bottle of vodka in it upside-down and I was like James I don't think the vodka will just replace the water inside just by being there but maybe it will who the hell knows it's not like the laws of physics apply all the time.  By the time I left school to come home and work at this fading Stanford position it was still debatable what was going on inside that melon—or any of our melons) I left a small note to myself beyond the horizon of this post.  Here it is in full:

I aspire in some small way to what this "Gavin" fellow does with his endnotes: http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/29210.html

 And damn right I still do.  That's an epic epilogue in size ten and reading Tim Roger's Fukubukuros on insertcredit.com which is like the Six Gallery of New Games Journalism where everyone shows up to snap their fingers and finds Truman Capote reading In Cold Blood not aloud, just to himself, alone on the stage on a bare wooden stool in a brightly lit pool and everybody goes Aha all at once, New is exactly what we were doing all along because how are you going to see the New for what it is when you're New?  We don't know we're New until somebody points at us and shouts, New! but really they said, You! as in to get your attention but it's too late, a movement has been born.  Busy fording the river etc hope the oxen don't drown lest you stop moving and look around and think to yourself Hey, is this water?

 This post is now metacognitive.  It is either titled the same or it is titled "This Is Why We Can't Have New Things."  This writing, the sort that comes out my brain running too fast for my fingers making me wish I could just stream my consciousness directly onto the "page" (and have we really not come up with a better word for it yet but a new word would feel hollow made anyway), and where's my jetpack anyway and can I please get something subcutaneous and sublime that I can still see.  This writing is getting more skeletal, in the sense that I strip away all the sinews that bind the marionnete to its puppeteer and let the bones crumple of their own accord, say Ta-dah and the curtains close.  Six months prior I would have tried to write out everything I felt about Gavin's writing at Sadly, No! even though it drags me ever further away from the original topic at hand which is/was that I don't need no internet friends, I don't want to optimize myself to get noticed, get read, get liked, get shared and reshared and retweeted and reddited and Dig-Dugg wherein I detonate underground lizards by means of internal overpressure for the entertainment of who again?  Who actually has fun playing games now anyway and isn't just mistaking a manufactured sense of nostalgia or ego-stroking self-referentialism or just plain budget-busting prettiness for what used to be the trigger to your brain's pleasure zones?  Indications point to No, entertainment doesn't have to be good anymore, it just needs to look good or sound good or everybody but you needs to think it's good, choose two of three.  The distinction between liking something and something being good has fallen to crippling me-me-me subjectivity in a well-controlled and formulaic market in which we express our approbation by means of the Dollar and whatever to which we give that sluttish and rutty green note becomes good by virtue of that vote.  The election is always rigged in favor of insular selfishness.

 Therein is the fatal flaw of the New, the contrary, the revolutionary which necessitates breaking people open and asking them Hey, how about we talk together about what we want because we have been divided and conquered by the market and, well, look at you now, running around with pieces of dead trees like they mean something.  It requires a bully pulpit from which to lecture the masses, and it is the tool by which the avant garde becomes the elite guard, vanguard of the New culture and it means either rejection of the breakaway message as arrogant, self-indulgent, deviant and other rudish things, or subsumation as the mainstream mainlines the cuddly cartoonish corporate colonization of the original concept.

 Herein comes the utter unknowability of anti-fame, and being blessedly unskilled enough to not be recognized.  In practical terms, it means I will be in that corner over there, grumbling.

 In which I got distracted.