Antisocial Commentary Preview!

Since the positive response I got regarding my idea of publishing an compilation of my writings called Antisocial Commentary: From the Secret Files of the Mattress Police, I've been working on selecting and editing some of my better posts for the book. I've also been organizing the posts into chapters by different themes (Family, pop culture, religion, etc.) and writing introductions to each of the chapters. I wanted the introductions to be sort of a "bonus" feature, so that even if you've been a loyal reader of this blog since the beginning, there will still be some material you haven't seen. But as I was working on one of the introductions last night, I thought, "But how will anyone know about these bonus features?" And then I thought, "I know, I'll post them to my blog!" And then I thought, "Wow, I can't believe I'm allowed to feed myself."

Anyway, I'm not going to post all of the introductions, but here's one of them, just to show you what you'll be missing if you don't buy the book. Or, more accurately, what you'd be missing if you didn't buy the book and I wasn't an idiot.

Chapter 3: The Internet

There’s an old story about 3 blind men who are attempting to describe an elephant. One man feels the elephant’s trunk and theorizes that an elephant is like a snake. Another feels the elephant’s tail and asserts that an elephant is like a rope. The third man feels the elephant’s rough hide and concludes an elephant is like a boulder.

In many ways, the internet is like that elephant. The fact is, if you’re blind and retarded, you’re not going to get much out of it. On the other hand, why would you be trying to get something out of an elephant? Let me tell you, you’re not going to get anything out of an elephant that didn’t first go into the elephant, and few things are improved by a journey through an elephant. If you lost something near an elephant, you should probably just get another of whatever it is. But you would know that if you would have just looked it up on the internet rather than reading this drivel. And really, that’s my point.

The internet is a phenomenal resource. So phenomenal, in fact, that for the first several years that the World Wide Web was around, nobody knew quite what it was for. Maybe it’s for selling pet food and furniture, we thought. When that turned out to be incorrect, we theorized that it was for getting your groceries delivered to your doorstep. Unfortunately, we were wrong about that too. We were pretty sure that it had something to do with productivity and efficiency, and it turned out we were right. What we didn’t realize was that the purpose of the internet was to decrease productivity while increasing the efficiency with which we could disseminate pornography and videos of monkeys sticking their fingers in their bums.

And yet, something was still missing. “How will we know how to find the pornography and monkey bum videos?” we asked. And that’s when someone came up with the idea of blogging. “It will be just like a diary,” someone said. “Except it will be arranged in reverse chronological order in order to reflect the diminishing importance of context in the modern age.” And just like that, a new form of literature was invented. Not that you give a shit, because it happened like three weeks ago and have you seen the new monkey bum video?

Anyway, as a former computer programmer, current blogger, and monkey-bum aficionado, I spend a lot of time on the internet. This results in me writing a lot about the internet, and then posting those writings to the internet. Then I write about writing about the internet, and post that to the internet. Eventually I get bored and go looking for some of those Russian dolls on eBay.



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