🔭 The white bear essay

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Don’t read this essay. Or do. I don’t care. Except I do. In the Long, Long Ago, before this column, I plagued search engines with other content farm grasshoppers to make sure you’d consume my Bt-Ht-corn-fed name. (Don’t think of the video for The Locust’s “Live From the Russian Compound.”) Those bills weren’t gonna pay themselves. And I was honing skills. Building to something bigger.

I’ve privilege-checked a parallel between writers and camgirls here. (Don’t think of the “Camwhores” RPG by Elizabeth Sampat.) I promise I’ll read something from Working Girls Press—probably whatever results from their speculative fiction call that ends in January. On a not-inharmonious note, I picked up Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Windup Girl,” and set it right down again. (Don’t think of the on-the-body exploitation horror in Katherine Dunn’s “Geek Love.” Or the techno hyper ennui in Dan Simmons’s “The Fall of Hyperion.”) The third chapter was too much for lil’-ol’-vanilla-traumatized me.

D’ja hear that? Another record scratch. The vanilla plant doesn’t deserve that plain-old, off-handed basket. It’s the only orchid that grows edible fruit! (Don’t think of Susan Orlean’s florid prose in “The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession.” Or Nicolas Cage’s florid face in “Adaptation.”) Vanilla is the second-most expensive spice by weight. And you’ve gotta hand-pollinate the flowers in the absence of specialized bees. (Okay, given the double negative, do think of Ridiculous Cage’s “not the bees” soliloquy.) Think that’s weird? I know a gal who does basically the same thing with horses for a living. Do you want more Bamboo Harvesters and Potatoooooooos or not? (Don’t think of that handsy doc, “Zoo.”)

Yikes. Hold your Gork-scraped MLP:FIM FFs while this unbridled flurry of free associations rides off into the looks-like-acid-rain sunset like some shirtless dictator reinvigorated by clone organ harvests who invades a sovereign nation in the name of chaos-crossed евразийство and then everyone gets miffed for a few months, but then we all shrug because eggs cost more or the Internet crashes and we can’t peep Justin Bieber’s disgraced Bored Ape (Don’t think of that verse he chirped over The Kid LAROI’s “STAY.”) while we desperately apply skin-lightening cream to aid A.I. facial recognition and avoid unwanted attention from masked police who are “just doing their job,” even though their job is rounding up undesirables like actual Nazis, while we shuffle forward in the queue to board a football stadium-sized, post-Disclosure corporate healthcare spaceship transporter/thetan vaporizer to colonize a fallow corner of not-Amish Heaven. (Don’t think of that Alex Jones gay frog song.)

Okay, take a breath. Sip through your nose. Exhale more. Even more. Five and a half in. Five and a half out. Yup, I read James Nestor’s “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.” This was the message I’ve been waiting for! There is something wrong with me and it’s because of my behavior. That customer service chatbot that refused my rubber sheets return was right! Ahhhh… I haven’t felt so tranquil and nauseous since afternoon tea with Merricat. “Triple sugar, please. And, Ms. Blackwood, let me just say—before the rug screams through its blackberry-stained, worn-pile lips—Wednesday Addams has nothing on you.”

Uggh. Fetishizing teen goths is creepy AF if you’re not a teen, too. (Don’t think of “The Craft.” Don’t think of “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” Don’t remember Fairuza Balk not remembering threatening to commit seppuku in “Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau.”) Anyway, the decidedly adult charms of Morticia Addams are exponentially more captivating than off-the-rack goths. I’ll spare you the Gorey details. As you can see, I’m swatting away more brickbats than usual. You should see the stuff I cut about the world of top-dollar horse semen. (Don’t think of that Mary Roach book about the world of top-dollar horse semen. Wait, she didn’t write that? You sure?)

So, once again, don’t read this essay. That’s the only admonishment you’re getting. The science is in and, whoops, trigger warnings trigger reactions themselves and can stimulate a forbidden orchid fruit impulse. As such, I’m willing to expose your dopamine-addled, marble cake neurons to—shit-shit-shit.

Errgghhh! I just lost The Game AGAIN. Seventh time this year. And after a decade and a half of winning.

Everyone knows Randall Munroe ended “The Game” in an “xkcd” strip in 2008. But, until someone shallowfakes a Blair-or-later U.K. P.M. announcing the official conclusion, imma keep playing. (Don’t think of Wiz Khalifa’s “Imma Keep.”)

It’s clear the Brits have bizarre notions about what constitutes a game, anyway. (Don’t think of the “Go Johnny Go Go Go Go” skit from “The League of Gentlemen.”) Who else plays two different games where the the goal is to be polite enough not to win immediately by naming the titular train station?

Then again, my own perception of entertainment is wonky. I came a bounced grocery check away from getting a tattoo of Ron Spencer’s Magic: The Gathering card art for “Terror.” Quick check… wow, MTG tats are legion. Mana symbol ink is hilarious, but the “Black Lotus” beauties take the Mission Accomplished cake. One of the OG pieces of not-cardboard sold for $3 million USD in 2024. And that card—quite literally—gives something for nothing! (Don’t think about Eric Berne’s “Games People Play” or the acrostic nonsense you’ve internalized by reading this.)