how am i supposed to learn to drive

if i'm just a little rascal?

kombucha, youtube

ok so as the golden dusks rise up like steam from the thawing streets of providence and becomes iridescent in the ripe rich air, who is going to do the math to figure out how many kevita ginger kombuchas i can buy with the remaining points i have on my student id? certainly not me, and my breath is catching every time the card is swiped, i run the risk of absolutely public humiliation in front of everyone, and not because it is shameful to not have money (it's not), but because it is shameful (deeply) to choose the drink that most signifies oblivious wealth and then be publicly hit with the sobering realization that you may not drinketh from the goblet of disposable income as you so thought. it's like an attempted flex that results in you spraining every muscle in your body.

i've also been wasting large chunks of my life watching the worst content in the world at the worst hours of the morning (the early ones!)— late night talk show clips, which now seems to be the bulk of youtube's stock. when did youtube become a post-apocalyptic corporate hellscape? i remember when it once represented some gleefully anarcho garden of eden in which puppy eating flower would fall in line with family guy poop. as a middle schooler i would scour the depths, riding the high of the millennial complex of "accessing content you shouldn't be"— feeling perpetually too-young in a deviously satisfying way. naughty naughty. i always assumed i was the youngest in the comments section. in retrospect it is clear that everyone felt that way, and people like Shane Dawson and RWJ were appealing exclusively to this demographic: younger kids who assumed it was for older kids.

now, what few human beings do seem to be straggling on the barren cliffs of the site are disturbingly conservative. did 4chan imperialize when i wasn't looking? and when did the figure of the rogue youtuber get replaced with TV networks? the absence of real content in lieu of Entertainment Content reminds me of mark fisher quoting marc augé:

In the final assignment [of series finale, titular characters] Sapphire and Steel arrive at a small service station. Corporate logos – Access, 7 Up, Castrol GTX, LV – are pasted on the windows and the walls of the garage and the adjoining café. This ‘halfway place’ is a prototype version of what the anthropologist Marc Augé will call in a 1995 book of the same title, ‘non-places’ – the generic zones of transit (retail parks, airports) which will come to increasingly dominate the spaces of late capitalism.

(Fisher, Mark. “Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures.” Zero Books, 2013)

obviously an essential difference here is that youtube was never a physical space. but that's also super interesting, because the interface of networks like facebook and youtube are built to feel architectural— it's why if you spend a long time browsing, you'll start to conceptualize it as a space to "return to" or "re-enter." i'll hand this one over to the black mirror writers now though.

in response, i've started a youtube playlist of bona fide DIY indie videos with low view counts that i've been really passionate about. i've put some of these clips on this blog before. please enjoy.

p.s. about a month ago i got upsettingly high and, subsequently, pretty nauseous, so in a panic i bought some kevita ginger kombucha. upon taking a first sip a small, phlegmlike object started darting around my mouth. my first thought was: there's a fucking tadpole in here. i spit it out, wretching, only to find it was literally the scoby. i drank the ONE bottle that the scoby got into. if you dont know what a scoby is, it's the "sourdough starter" of kombucha, but also, more accurately, the placenta.