💬
Not for invented love betwixt yourself and a girl-next-door who has been poached from a catalog of them on some dark web server and assigned a name that is statistically Connecticut.
Rather, for love with her puppeteer. There is a man who has to still man the bot, and he is breathing life into her somewhere across the pond — tedious work, I’m sure, what with the all the Twitter neckbeards who don’t know how to operate Paypal to save their lives. The loving an internet stranger is another vintage thing; I’m called to think of all the weddings that resulted from Omegle and Kik, and all they had in common was a single preferred My Chemical Romance cassette. We used to gush over that sort of thing. They were basically breaking the algorithm of the physical world by finding viability in a single cultural launch point, and it feels like sometimes now you need seventy-three Instagram mutuals and forty-six shared favorite cultural slabs just to impel a first date, and that’s part of the reason your mind is sick.
A couple months ago, I was walking downtown with my friend Blake, who asked me whether I knew his friend Jake, whose last name he didn’t remember, so we threw out twenty to thirty Jake names down Ludlow in the hopes of figuring out the right one. “There has never been a time in history that people have known as many people as we currently do,” he said, and I agreed, and added that “it’s only getting worse.”
Sometimes I really want to text someone who I know will basically act like a cave wall for my grievances. I’m not much one for talk therapy and I will not do a robot. I will, however, do a robot manned by an intermediary. That intermediary is exactly the type of person I’d never meet, and to boot, his entire job is to make me feel like we are on the same page as one another.
By the way, this has not yet worked. The closest I’ve gotten was with with Kate, formerly Ellery Elli, and it ended here:
Rather, for love with her puppeteer. There is a man who has to still man the bot, and he is breathing life into her somewhere across the pond — tedious work, I’m sure, what with the all the Twitter neckbeards who don’t know how to operate Paypal to save their lives. The loving an internet stranger is another vintage thing; I’m called to think of all the weddings that resulted from Omegle and Kik, and all they had in common was a single preferred My Chemical Romance cassette. We used to gush over that sort of thing. They were basically breaking the algorithm of the physical world by finding viability in a single cultural launch point, and it feels like sometimes now you need seventy-three Instagram mutuals and forty-six shared favorite cultural slabs just to impel a first date, and that’s part of the reason your mind is sick.
A couple months ago, I was walking downtown with my friend Blake, who asked me whether I knew his friend Jake, whose last name he didn’t remember, so we threw out twenty to thirty Jake names down Ludlow in the hopes of figuring out the right one. “There has never been a time in history that people have known as many people as we currently do,” he said, and I agreed, and added that “it’s only getting worse.”
Sometimes I really want to text someone who I know will basically act like a cave wall for my grievances. I’m not much one for talk therapy and I will not do a robot. I will, however, do a robot manned by an intermediary. That intermediary is exactly the type of person I’d never meet, and to boot, his entire job is to make me feel like we are on the same page as one another.
By the way, this has not yet worked. The closest I’ve gotten was with with Kate, formerly Ellery Elli, and it ended here:
+3
Feb 25, 2026