Egghead: Or, You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone

by Bo Burnham

Convenience I would do anything for you, if convenient. I would move a mountain for you if that mountain could be moved with a button or with a lever that wasn’t too cold to the touch. I would give you the moon if I could. You would love the moon. You would show it off to everyone and not give a fuck that you’ve now severely damaged our ecosystem by disrupting the tides. Maybe a nice look in the mirror is in order, Missy.

When I was little, I killed ants with a magnifying glass. And now I’m big. And I worry I’m doing the same thing with you.

It feels good to love an angel. It feels better to fuck an angel with her wings pinned back like a recently archived butterfly.

Pigs are smarter than dogs. I love my dog. I also love eating bacon. So I can stop eating bacon or I can continue playing a quiet and aggressive role in the genocide of a species whose intelligence sits safely in the middle of my “worthy of real love” spectrum.

Or I can continue eating bacon and admit that my love for my dog is a sham, a hollow and meaningless relationship born of my own insecurities and years of confirmation bias. He likes me because I feed him. That’s it. Fuck him. Bacon is delicious.

It’s unfortunate that the word for “catching fish by piercing their lips with hooks and dragging them onto a boat” is called fishing. To the fish, fishing means something different. To fish is to live, to love, to be. When the more aggressive fish find a lonely swimming human and rip the flesh from its stupid bones—that’s called peopling.