Hi! My name’s Jan and this is, for lack of a better term, my ‘blog.’ In the spirit of seriousness (yeah - taking what you put online seriously, picture that), I’ll go over what to expect and some questions no one has asked…
What’s the big idea?
I’m bored at work and I don’t like writing longhand. A side-effect of being part of the last generation, I’m afraid. I write almost daily in a physical journal but find typing easier.What’s this all about?
Who knows? I sure don’t. This question might become more clear by next year, when I have ‘posts’ and ‘takes’ and ‘content’ for your viewing pleasure. Until then, this is just what goes through my head while I’m at work.You’re at work? Right now?
Yes! My job isn’t exactly trying. Lots of sitting down. I am getting paid, in a sense, to write this. (Fifteen bucks an hour, actually. Not bad!)Who are you?
”Jan E. Stanek”. Normal person. I write short stories for fun and (to hopefully) entertain people. Stories I have written have been in or are forthcoming in Misery Tourism (RIP!), Rabid Oak, and Expat (specifically EXPVT sometime later this year. I’ll be in print! Buy EXPVT when it comes out!)Age? Sex? Location?
First one’s not hard to find (or even figure out based on what’s here!), second one’s classified (no deeper reason other than privacy and, again, probably an easy guess!), third one I’ve probably alluded to on Twitter. I am assuming that I am undoxable.You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
[suddenly agitated] What’d you mean I’m not helping?
And now for what this post is really about: YouTube comments.
When I was a kid, YouTube comments were the Wild West. At least to me circa 2009-10-11. After that point, I graduated to bigger and better things (Encyclopedia Dramatica, shock websites,1 Tiny Toons scat porn lovingly gifted to me by a man twice my age,2 the mainstream media, et al) but at the time, they represented freedom. I could say anything! Call anyone any combination of bad words I could think of! The world was my oyster and inside said oyster was not a pearl but a small child telling strangers they smell bad!
It gets better.
I wanted to be there first; to be down below in the unmoderated chthonic agora, waiting. I was never clever about it: “first” sufficed. No punctuation. No capitalization.
Just presence.
And I’m probably still there; some preteen version of myself, no longer accessible, on videos with sub-hundred viewer counts. I’ll be there until the collapse of civilization or some hitherto unthought of wiping of YouTube’s servers, whichever comes first.
I can’t say why I was interested in being first - especially on videos that frankly had no value to anyone other than the creator and possibly a small circle of friends, the intended audience, a concept that almost seems foreign in the age digital panopticon. The thrill of exploration? A general infantile desire to be annoying that didn’t leave me until age nineteen? Who knows.
More like this whenever I feel like it. Don’t expect anything too good.
BestGore, Ogrish, et al. Gone for years but still raw throbbing memory in the minds of, I assume, many people of my generation. “Oooh-oooh, won’t you take me to… funky town?” Spastic kicking. Something so awful that it can’t even overflow into humor. Who sent me these videos and, after that, why did I seek them out? It held no appeal then and holds less now. Morbid fascination? The inherent but never acknowledged desire to watch people die, that same voyeuristic love and hatred projected onto state executioners in the early Modern period. Dr. Franz Schmidt, you were the first niche microcelebrity. You were just too early for the internet.
Note to self: write later post going into my nonsexual relationship with extreme pornography. Something that’s probably way too common. The Billie Eilish-type introduction to filth, sans flesh. I’m convinced, probably for sentimental reasons, that there is nothing more grossly damaging to the mind than early exposure to hardcore pornography. It either crosses the wires in such a way to make hundred-man gangbang bukkake somehow appealing or short-circuits the system entirely into a loathing of the sexual. I occupy the latter. It made me lesser.