Several People Are Typing

by Calvin Kasulke

what I mean is, there’s nothing visual you can cram in a glowing rectangle that fucks with your brain quite like a sunset so if we can’t seek the physical sublime what are we supposed to look at where’s that constant amazement that we can check in on every so often whenever we can stand it

comments, a dirge scrawled across the bathroom stall of human consciousness right there for me to gaze upon until I just can’t anymore, I just can’t it’s too much it hurts or worse it doesn’t hurt but it should, somehow, I mean that kind of pain should hurt a person, it should cause physical pain in their body so I flinch at where the pain isn’t and I click away from the fallen soldiers and check my email and turn up Spotify by one, two bars

it’s just like all the time, everywhere, on here you can just scroll and scroll and it won’t stop until you do we call it ephemera or at least I did, before, I called it ephemera and really that’s a mistake, it cheapens it we love to say the digital is fleeting like a sunset

have no skin to protect me from this bullshit* but it didn’t strike me because nothing can strike me because right now I have no body. no skin! your skin is your safety suit, you know? it’s the only thing that protects you from various external physical threats AND from the only thing you can actually call your own being entirely monopolized by some fucking memo about a micro-influencer strategy to “increase brand recognition across key audiences”!!

looking into thousands of different people’s lives at once we’re not made to absorb this much human information at once, man. all the pathos and bathos and other thos-es I’d say it’s exhausting except I can’t feel tired and anyway it’s beyond that

it’s overwhelming for a species that was basically content with an oral tradition of a handful of long-ass stories about the same six shitty gods for millennia now we can do all this knowing and empathizing and not-empathizing around innumerable tiny human stories and we can never fully succeed reprogramming our minds to get good at it

lol uh, death, I guess? but that’s more a permanent break sleep, if you count that kind of like diet death death

Twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle!

guess sex is also kind of a break from your body? or it’s like being in your body so much that you’re actually outside your body