The Internet is a chimera that magically manifests in whatever guise its viewer expects it to. If you are looking at the Internet and expecting it to be a source of fleeting funniness, unchallenging writing, attention-span-killing video snippets, and porn, then that is exactly all it will ever be for you.
Writing for free feels, to me, sometimes like a vice and sometimes like a privilege. Sometimes I wonder whether, if I organized my thoughts in a more palatable way, I mightn’t be able to knead and pat many of my blog posts into little women’s-magazine-personal-essay-shaped molds. And per the logic that giving away the blog-milk for free devalues not just one’s own personal cow but also the cow of anyone who might ever have a cow to sell, I suppose that is what I ought to have done.
These manifestations of culture are sometimes genuinely shallow, but sometimes they’re only deceptively shallow-seeming, like those places at the ocean’s edge where you’ll wade in a few feet and then lose your footing in suddenly cool, deep water.
Having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, he asked, what did the turtle rest on?
Another turtle.
And that turtle?
"Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."
