Dear Internet,

Dear internet,

This is just another beginning. A way of saying hello, again, to the screen. To the audience of anonymity, you amongst them. To the reader that might never be, though one hopes the words will find a reader.

What words, you ask? I obviously don't know yet. I've only just begun. But words they will be. Almost certainly. Almost because words do not become words simply by being written, but by being read and I think we can all agree that most things written are not read and therefore are not yet words.

At which point you ask, what are they then, if not words? And I respond, I... don't really know.

There are lots of things I don't know and you will discover that for yourself if you listen for long enough. Or, if you like, for very short lengths of time. But not a middle amount. No. It's very important you don't listen only for a middle amount of time. Otherwise, you will learn nothing, and this will all have been a massive waste to us both.

An aside— there are only two ways to discover whether something is real on the internet:

#1

You must look at it for much longer than you have been accustomed to look comfortably at anything on the internet. A good measure is until you are deeply disturbed by the passage of time followed by the growing sense of disgust in the awareness of your fragile body caught in the centre of it all…with no end in sight but death

or,

#2

You must scroll very quickly past it, almost missing the entire thing, and then – in the moment right after it is gone, from the memory of your peripheral vision – uncover that wriggling sense that there was in fact something there, had you paid attention to it earlier.

Oh, well.

If you're still here with me at this point, dear internet, I have to assume you have decided to go with path #1 in this instance. That is, to gaze deeply and for far too long at this text which is on the precipice of making you feel irrevocably exposed in your quaking mortality. And for this feat of endurance, I commend you.

Here we are. Together, in this soup of skin-crawling-surrender which is more real than most things pretend to be. And here we will remain, diligently avoiding the heart of the conversation, until the absolutely-last-moment-possible! Until you and I are about to break apart and leave the rest of this text unread. But if we do that – I remind you - we will learn absolutely nothing from this experience. So, stay, I say: help these words become real.

Help me help you help words.

Some of the less astute readers among you will be asking, is all this talk of helping words as selfless as it seems or is it all merely propaganda? Is this really an innocent attempt at saving words from the brink of extinction or is it the writer’s ego and reputation that need saving?

To be honest, dear internet, this is exactly the kind of critical thinking I was told to expect from you... which is to say, very little. But it is not the kind of thinking that is rewarded on this website... which is to say, any kind of thinking at all. I'm very disappointed.  

Of course it's all propaganda! But I wasn't going to say that explicitly and now you've made us all very uncomfortable by pointing at the pink elephant in the room when the rest of us were just going to ignore it.

Never in the history of time and literature has any writer been given any eyeballs for free.

The fact of the matter is that we, writers, myself included, require your eyeballs. But will you give them to us freely? Of course not– because you never do. Never in the history of time and literature has any writer been given any eyeballs for free.

Instead, we have to write words so absurd, so spontaneous and excessive, so borderline-institutionalizably-heinous, that they tempt your eyeballs to stay on the page and focus! Otherwise, the words would not become real and then we would all be outed as frauds in some elaborate pyramid scheme called The Publishing Industry.

So alright, I admit it. I'd be a fraud calling myself a writer without you and your eyeballs reading my words and so I am participating in this centuries-old-charade which is really just a grandiose plea disguised as a humble pardon for attention.

I may find it degrading and disrespectful, but what choice do I have? What kind of writer would I be if I just asked you to donate your eyeballs to me for free… If I just, oh so shamelessly, said that you can opt out of this degradation by following the link in the description to sign up for my email list, or by going to patreon.com/eyeballs, where there is no charade required.

I know, some of you will say, your eyeballs are too precious to donate. At which point I might remind you that you have two whole eyeballs to yourself. So, there’s no need to be so selfish with them. Just do it, which is short for just donate it. Be generous! Give me your eyeballs. You are the internet, after all.

You can post about your donation afterwards, and then someone else will donate their eyeballs to you, and we'll all live in a wonderful world of eyeball-communism. And hasn't that been what we’ve all wanted from the beginning, really?

Be the change you want to see in the world with just one eyeball.

I’m certain, dear internet, that you are all about generosity and good-will and absolutely not interested in any kind of performativity so I know that you will consider donating your eyeballs to me for the small fee of my honesty.

Some of you might want to get out scott-free by thinking I am a writer simply because I am here, at my keyboard, in this moment – writing. But the truth is, I am not a writer until you give me your eyeballs and make my words real.

So, please do consider just donating your eyeballs – no puppetry or pleasantries required – at the link in the description or by signing up to mailing list and/or visiting patreon.com/eyeballs to opt out of this capitalistic nightmare charade we are all very sick of playing.  

Finally, I hope you’ve found something for yourself in this excruciatingly long and discomforting series of moments of looking at words looking back at you looking back at them… Perhaps even the warmth of knowing that your eyeballs are everything to me…

Until next week,

Writer in waiting.