How the Internet told me the truth about who the fuck I am.

By Christian P. Bélanger


I recently realized I have been using the word decimated incorrectly. The internet taught me this. The internet also taught me that my parents are in all probability cognitively retarded by comparison to the asian intelligent quotient curve. This is based on their age group, which the internet taught me is the base measurement for the standard intelligence quotient test. The internet has taught me a lot of things, some trivial, some, the internet would argue, absolutely essential for survival.

        Despite this over abundance of knowledge acquired through the internet, I still find the number of things I am acutely proficient at alarmingly low. I sometimes spill a substantial amount of milk or juice or other beverage well outside the confines of the desired receptacle. I hurt myself attempting to complete tasks involving little to no physical excertion whatsoever, I mean, this happens fairly consistantly, like when putting on my socks, or sneezing.
       
        My memory, like FOX News, is biased, unreliable and fundamentally Christian. I sometimes think my memory would be delighted to employ Gretchen Carlson. She could ramble on tirelessly about my traumatic childhood, justify my juvenile mediocrity and greatly exaggerate my athletic prowess through that creepy, spastic, home coming queen smile.  

 Gretchen Carlson

Most likely to become anchor woman for Christians memory. 

"My vagina is on fire, and I killed a girl because she was poor"

 I make a terrible first impression. When speaking to visible minorities, I feel an abnormal sense of urgency to somehow prove to them that I am not a racist. This I am told, is a predominantly caucasian neurosis. That said I feel the same overwhelming urgency to somehow suggest I am, in fact, a racist when speaking to caucasians. I have no confidence in my taste in music, in fact I have such a narrow scope of musical insight,  to properly convey the kind of ignorance I feel when faced with music as a topic I am more or less really discussing "Shit I heard that startled and then confused me."

 The internet taught me that I am not an expert. Experts live in their parents basement and have manga figurines that depict sailor outfit upskirts and can "work code." I am not an amateur. Amateurs have bad judgement, real boobs and vengeful ex-boyfriends that post pictures of their real boobs taken in moments of bad judgement.  The internet taught me that Google has a church, a kidney is worth an iPad in China and when it comes to stomach pain, there is no possible affliction between ulcer or stomach cancer, it's a 50/50 split. The internet taught me why I lose at rock, paper, scissors, and how to win at being a stalker. I love the internet because it told me who the fuck I am, and I didn't even have to ask.

                                "To win at Stalking, threaten people she cares about unless she breathes into the rag."

I did what in retrospect no musically ignorant circumstantially racist twenty something amateur porn enthusiast should ever do. I looked through my browser history in excrutiating detail. It was like looking in a mirror that reflects a distorted version of who you think you are. It is nothing less than a promethean excercise of infusing life and making real a text based, archived, two dimensional electronic Mr. Hyde.

My moral compass went apeshit trying to justify half the gruesome reality and socially awkward fantasy I had subjected myself to in the clutches of the internet. How was I, someone with parents of such strong moral fibre, someone who knew right, wrong and the other thing.... uh... the Holy Ghost. How had I been led a stray? Was it the allure of being the 9,999,999th visitor and the chance to win a million dollars that brought me to maturegangbangisland.com? Was it the vehement promise to enlarge my penis that later guided my journey to a video of a deer that put an old school beat down on an old guy in hunting garb who, despite starting the encounter armed with a gun, just kept getting thoroughly trounced and intice me to watch it on repeat for twenty three minutes?

      Super Upright Deer Attack of Sublime Lust Level 18!
     
        Was it a default setting of MSN Messenger to send me on a John Cusack cocaine crusade through Google because I couldn't remember if he was the cocaine guy or not (It was Tim Allen)?

"What happens in Kalamazoo, makes me think you're John Cusack."

      The answer is no. The thing that is impure, unbridled and unfortunate about the internet, is that it is an illusion. It works under the guise of some kind of jacked up, steroid saturated uber libriarian, kind of what Encarta was supposed to be until Funk & Wagnalls let it get impregnated with Bill Gates over funded corporate spunk of failure (or as I call it, Bill-Spill). It isn't that though, I mean it is, on the base level, but really what the internet does is  take in all your reservations, your innocence and your preconceptions and then holds on to them for a while so you can explore the darker recesses of your personality disorder with a psycho-analytical safety net, in that, it's all through a screen.

       In the end, the internet taught me that I think senior citizen deer rape deserves a thrice over, that I DO want to enlarge my penis, that I am not stupid enough to believe I'm the 9,999,999th anything, and that I would definately agree to a solid hang with Tim Allen. I'm all about saggy, wild titties roaming free on Islands with names I can't pronounce, and Russian dudes with ridiculous accents firing sniper rifles at watermelons. That hazy, fearless browser history reflection is me, and I, it. The internet is a fake place, where you can easily discover your true self, even if it's a disturbed and likely socially harmful self.

       The fact of the matter is, decimated is a term in reference to a punishment in the Roman military in which one in ten men were executed. It is generally accepted to mean roughly ten percent of something being lost. I was incorrectly using this word to express devastation, which typically means less than ten percent of what originally was, remains. I have devastated my self image by surfing the web, and you have decimated an hour by reading this.

The internet taught us that.