Astronaut by Remedios Varo
It’s dumb how dumb the world is. You can’t drift around tweeting about it anymore, though. Milling about on Mastodon isn’t the answer, either, because you’re just doing what you said you didn’t want to do anymore. Remember?
What, you don’t remember? A few weeks ago, you said it was good that Twitter was exploding into a million pieces because it meant you’d waste less time over there.
Yes, you did say that. I remember it perfectly.
And now the world is even stupider than it was a few weeks ago, which is frankly mind-boggling, but there’s nowhere to say a few frustrated words about it! Yes, of course you could go on Mastodon and type out some words. But if you did that, you’d just make Mastodon into a newer, slower, clunkier, more irritatingly purple Twitter.
You don’t want that. Because once you’re on the new, extremely slow, extremely purple Twitter, you’re just going to overdose on the same bad opinions you did before. You’re going to mix and mingle with the same motherfuckers and imbibe the same bad takes and then you’re going to start off-gassing the same pointless proclamations as everyone else.
Sure, you think your opinions are thoughtful and original. Of course you do. But then someone else tells you their opinion and you’re like, “That opinion isn’t smart at all, it’s fucking stupid. Why doesn’t this person know the difference?”
And then you’ll look at your original opinion and — if you’re not a complete fucking idiot! — you’ll start to notice that it’s not a good opinion after all. Not only is your opinion not so clever and not so indispensable as you originally thought, it’s actually just… pointless and bad.
Sure, your opinion seemed great. But then you tooted it – a terrible word, but I’m pretty sure that John Mastodon was referring to tooting your own horn and not farting when he dreamt up that term in his midcentury modern house by the seaside in Barcelona.
One of the best things about John Mastodon — before he slowly unraveled and started sexting random teenagers, anyway — was the fact that he recognized the inherently self-laudatory nature of social media at such an early date. Take this journal entry that he wrote on a beach near Vilanova I la Geltru back in 2014, when the seeds of Mastodon were just forming inside his extra-brilliant skull:
These birds, these clammering, cawing sea birds! They claim to offer new information, new insights into the world, but once one bird sounds off and the others join in chorus, they form a sonic muddle of cawing that has no meaning at all, it’s just a tidal wave of noise that says ME! ME! ME! ME!
What Mastodon clearly meant was that once enough opinions are in the mix, every opinion becomes a bad one. They’re all the same. It’s all just noise pollution.
***
But maybe you prefer olfactory metaphors. If so, consider the lotions and shower gels of Bath and Body Works. Here is a company that continues to survive well past its sell-by date of 1997. Difficult to grasp! At least it is until you realize that every thirteen-year-old on the planet purchases these products with clock-like regularity until they hit the exact age of fifteen.
This is why the halls of my younger daughter’s middle school smell like Winter Candy Apple and Champagne Toast and Strawberry Snowflakes. In fact, she says that when she walks from class to class, all she can smell is Japanese Cherry Blossom and Christmas Cookies and Summertime Sadness (okay, I made that one up). And eventually, each distinct scent blends with the… er, other scents of middle school, and forms a giant, fragrant wall of “Ewww.”
“A lot of them are the same scent,” she told me in the car the other day after school. “My friend got Frosted Coconut Snowball and I smelled it and it’s exactly the same as my Waikiki Beach Coconut.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah. They just change the name based on what season it is. It’s all a scam.”
My younger daughter sees everything as a scam these days, actually. It’s not just the shower gel. And even though you might think I’d delight in the fact that she woke up to the scam-centric nature of life on this planet roughly ten years ahead of schedule, developmentally speaking, that’s not how I feel about it. I agree that everything is a scam, of course, but the fact remains that a big chunk of our extra-super-dumb reality right now is fueled by the nihilism of seeing scams everywhere and feeling beyond certain that there’s not a goddamn thing anyone can do about any of it.
Just like that stinky wall of bad opinions that makes you hate opinions in general, recognizing one scam and another scam and another and another, with no one even remarking on the most egregious scams of all, eventually causes you to encounter every thought, insight, emotion, joke, expression of interest, and demonstration of concern as an outright scam, too.
And if all human expression is a scam, then soon enough people aren’t people anymore. It’s not that people are just brands, either. Sure, Jane Doe might also be Waikiki Coconut but she’s mostly just a grifter in our minds. We’re all nothing but grifters to each other.
Not only that, but we’re grifters whose most original sentiments can easily be reproduced by ChatGPT… which explains why every hot take on ChatGPT reads like it was written by ChatGPT.
Anyway. There is a cure.
Go to the beach. Meet one bird. Focus on that one bird for as long as you can. Follow it around. Observe its quirks. Reflect on the little eccentricities that make it special. The bird is pretty stupid, sure, and very anxious, but it’s also inventive, hyper-alert, more than a little paranoid. A real weirdo.
Now give your bird a name and vow to love it with all of your heart, in spite of its numerous personality flaws. Because this is where John Mastodon failed, and why he was eventually discovered huffing spray paint from a paper bag outside of the Circle K in Alhambra. He got too confused by the sound of his own voice. It wasn’t the cawing of the birds that did him in. It was his own tooting horn that eroded his sanity. You can see evidence of this in his journals from 2020, when he was holed up in an apartment overlooking the 405 near Westwood:
My desires spring up first thing in the morning and then spiral down the drain almost immediately. All I want is a true partner who will adore the cute little things I say the way I programmed my chatbot Lucinda to do! But real-life human women are just a scam, and they all smell like Raspberry Champagne Argonauts and Fuzzy Wuzzy Waikiki Fusarium, and sex is just a parched freeway running through the dusty hillsides — no sweetness, no meaning, just rattling axles and brake dust, black as the inky void of space…
Okay, so John Mastodon’s prose deteriorated a little in his final years. My point is, don’t be like him. Some things are still real and not that bad. Some things are not stupid and not a scam. Look for them. Love them.
It will take some time. Be patient. Be quiet.
Very, very quiet.
Even quieter.
Shhh!
Thanks for reading Ask Molly! My book Foreverland was named one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, so get a copy for your spouse or forever-friend today. I’m @hhavrilesky@zirk.us on Mastodon, btw. Yikes! You can enjoy the empty froth of my words much more often by subscribing now:
ONE OF YOUR VERY VERY VERY VERY BEST, Heather!!
Can someone invent a giant colander to filter out all the junk and keep the good stuff (fusili, rigatoni, whatever)?