“First, there were no smart girls on television, period.
All the girls were better looking than me, but dumb.
I didn't mean the actresses were dumb, but that was sort of what you had to be in those days.
So, a smart girl, brash, did not know she was A LOSER, which was sort of the theme for all the characters on Dobie Gillis…you just keep doing what you are doing because you don't know there's anything wrong with you.”
— Sheila Kuhl
I have thus far maintained this space as something largely Apart from the broader shit-sphere of the Internet, particularly the insidious “social media
Unfortunately dangling particles like “tweets” are easy entrypoints for “conversations” aka strawman soliliquy post-op-eds ginned up by Fucking Hacks seeking wieldable sock puppets: decontextualized corpses that can dragged back to favorable corner caves for purpose of “content creation.” PLIANT SUBMISSIVE
DECEITFULLY INTERPRETED
SENSELESS NOISE
Wasting your time, sowing unhelpful dissonance in your life, pushing your buttons.
(NO YOU ARE)
Take a Bad Opinion and and beat it up! Argue against premises no one is advancing!
Claim CREDIT for someone else’s WORK, IDEAS — HELL — maybe their EXPERIENCE!
I feel that it’s a testament to my discerning taste1, reverence for origination, free-flowing ideative capacity, the endless reward of noveltaic dalliance, HIGH VOLTAGE:
MY TRUE YEAR ZERO DESIRE FOR A NEW FUCKING WORLD UNBOUNDED BY THE DULLNESS OF THE PRIOR —
that the only “tweets” (I hate these) that have thus appeared flowed as mine own tears.
We are standing on the shoulders of withered replicant homunculi who are themselves piloting the holographic malfunctioning mechs of What Weren’t Giants.
The Golden Age was always piss vintaged BUT contemporaneity’s a bottomless race.
In lunatic-full acknowledgement of this debasement:
Let us now embrace externality and become porous, allowing the invasion of a “tweet” with the broad hope that no infestation should follow:
I’d begun composing this draft day-of-tweet — 12.8.21, apparently — initially titling it ADVENT 1.7, meaning to include it in the time-bound Initial Prophetic Offering at jamesquentindevine dot substack dot com
INSTEAD,
ADVENT 1.7 ended up being a discursive meditation on vandalism, art, and understanding.
Allegedly it is now 1.18.22, time having never so strangely slipped.
I had intended to use this bit of information about Chinese PhDs to discuss the concept of propinquity, which I’d planned to tie back to the late ‘50s television series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which in childhood I’d watch on Nick at Nite.
here you see why
And I’d intended to ponder the meaning of the crush I’d nourished upon a lesbian actor who, in being industry-shunned for failing conventional beauty standards — having aged into the adult tomboy for which there was simply No Network Fit — became a corrupt politician.
“TOO BUTCH,” APPARENTLY, for the industry:
What does it mean to want, as a child, to fuck someone who would go on to abuse power heinously, and who would — hypothetically — have no mutual desire for you?
WE MUST EMPHASIZE:
This precedes anything like a contemporary search engine. If you wanted to know something of an actor’s life you’d better hope the library had some Very Old Books on hand, and they be of an UNUSUALLY TELL-ALL VARIETY.
Nnnnnnowadays, [shuffles, seat of pants rips], you catch a background glimpse of some somebody you can be nose-deep in their grandfather’s colon and pulling real estate and genealogical records in two twitches of a killswitch.
SATELLITE ⃝⃝⃝❍PHOTOS
I’d spent elementary/middle school awake for days at a time2 with terrible insomnia, vaguely convinced I’d find some Zelda Gilroy-like life companion inamorata to complete me in my own heightened schooling — though I think in truth I’d most heavily fixated on Patty Duke, Barbara Feldon, Mary Tyler Moore, god, Mary Tyler Moore (casing correct) — wanted to be her and to fuck myself, I think, the normal fantasia ANY red-blooded ‘90s baby remembers, “that feel when,” who doesn’t want a closet full of colorful coats and blouses and scarves, I —
YOU WERE THERE! I’M SURE YOU DID THE SAME!
Raise your hand if you’ve never beaten it to I Love Lucy!
Spot the losers and the liars, everybody.
Ha, ha, ha.
Let’s ALL have a LAUGH at THEM!
So, so, so —
I’d vaguely presumed high school would be some combination of mid-century television and Saved By the Bell, and as it turns out — this was exactly correct.
And then the post abruptly ends.
JUST KIDDING! (“j/k”)
Ha, ha, ha.
Let’s ALL have a LAUGH at US!
EVERY ZELBIE SHIPPER (Dobie and Zelda, pay attention) KNOWS
THE FATED FEELING OF PROPINQUITY:
They lined your little ass up for years and years in desk-rows or table-strips by last name, sort by alpha:
GILLIS & GILROY. IT HAD TO HAPPEN. ENGINEERED SORTING.
You were made to sit on numbers or marks on the floor.
Cattle-predestined.
I can only speak for me.
I can only speak for the D, but I can tell you thusly:
A D shall befriend a C,from back-head stare and wonderment, while hated by an F behindfor want of a cheap answer hintYou’ll meet and you’ll mate and you’ll date and you’ll fuck in the wake of the fate of
Your birth certificate, your shoot name, your government name, your ancestry, your teacher, your school administrator, whoever draws up the rules —
whose bodies go where in which spaces where
whose little growing bodies grow next to each other year-after-year
whose shampoo invades you
whose ponytail tempts a yank
is it mine?
no i fear an up-do
whose underwear’s hanging out
who’s got on new shoes
who
WHO
BACK, NOW, HERE, OUTSIDE, TYPING:
From the other side of the fence, the steadiness of piercing shovels in resistant earth:
“Well, I definitely believe in the devil . . .”
“Eh-hee-hee-heh,”
Chuckle.
“First word out of his mouth . . .”
“Lawyer. “
“Lawyer, lawyer, lawyer.”
“Dick ain’t even the word . . .”
“I wonder how many rats we are displacing from their home . . .”
“I hate to even think of that.”
“Raaagh! God!”
“It’s beautiful . . . Beautiful.”
You don’t ask because you shouldn’t.
The bitter tongued will tell you that taste isn’t real.
They don’t even see the smoke in the room anymore.
I spent high school awake for days at a time with terrible insomnia, too, but I didn’t watch Nick at Nite anymore.
Anyway don’t let your children have televisions in their rooms. Or at all.