I used to fill this room with sound so loud it would steal my hearing from my future self.

I used to to eviscerate myself of stage until my white pick guard went red and my strings began to rust.

I used to collapse, wet with sweat, hoping this spectacle would fill the cracks in my mental health with gold strong enough to hold me together a little longer. That I would be able withstand the joy and pain of life and hold all of those I loved inside me without losing a drop of them.

In this room I used to heal wounds.

In this room I inhaled black mold.

In this room I picked at scabs until they scarred.

I spend way too much fucking time thinking about the internet. About technology. About what it all means. Like, what does re-blogging a sexy anime panel say about me personally. Is this misogyny? Is this sexual freedom? Why do I only want do that if the pic is in black and white? Is this a pathetic action for a man in his thirties?

Also, how in holy hell has the internet been used to turned some of my family from folks that loved oil money and jet-skis to anti-vaccine, anti-trans, anti-climate-action zealots doing research on YouTube?

Yes, I did just finish reading Naomi Klein-o-Wolf’s Dogglerganer. Thanks for asking.

I feel like there’s two main schools of thought here:

1. They were always secretly like this and now they can go mask-off about it.
2. They got radicalized during Deep Covid™️.

I think the truth is probably leans towards number two, here. I mean they were always kind of cruel and shitty about how I dressed (elder emo, big surprise), and that has a straight line to reinforcing the gender binary to the benefit of patriarchy, but they honestly didn’t think about it that much.

I am pretty sure the only thought they had about was “haha Goblin looks gay. I should tell him that.” before moving on to crushing their fourth Bud Heavy. They thought politics was dumb, boring, and there hottest take was “Taxes are bad and I don’t like them”.

They also had some worse takes, for sure. I doubt the hardest right of them ever supported gay marriage because they were grossed out by queer folks, but by no means were they picking up picket signs and protesting drag or running in local elections.

This was supposed to about why I care about the internet and look where we are now. I guess that’s where we are at. This blog was supposed to about bikes, but that’s not really happening, either. Here lies tallgoblin (the liar).

I think I care so much about the internet because I believe it’s real. It’s a layer of capabilities that rests on top of our tangible, organic world. It’s not separate. Augmented Reality (AR) is already here, we just have a shitty UI that’s giving back problems and carpal tunnel.

I think the majority of the people I’ve fallen in love with have been people I’ve met online. In high school, I fell in love with hotties on MySpace and Nexopia. I was Emo (well, Scene, but let’s not split hairs here, it was just another name for the same thing, be honest). I only wanted to date Emo/Scene girls and in a town of 10,000, the pool was real fucking small. So I went online.

Did I project my idea of who I wanted onto these people in gaps between their MSN messages and Top 8? Definitely. I am pretty sure they did the same to me. Their #BoyfriendinCanada™️. Not the healthiest choice, but let’s cut everyone some slack, we were teenagers on the internet.

Where the hell I am going with this?

The internet means so god damn much to me and I have this insatiable lust to over-analyze everything and I want to believe the internet could be a nice place to hang out.