Or, How Pierce Brosnan Gave Me Type 1 Diabetes.
Senator Ted Stevens once said the internet is a “series of tubes”, and as anyone who owns a building will tell you, all tubes lead to bad places.
Which would make, in this perfectly accurate metaphor, the comment sections the septic tanks of the internet.
Every type of small minded Filth Bucket seems to find their way to these internet poop troughs to drop their own unique brand of opinion turd on the world.
These opinion turds are always so special and unique that the Filth Bucket is sure no other Filth Bucket could have created it. Said turds of opinion burn so deep and so profoundly in the digestive tracts of the Filth Buckets, that they simply must find a way to shit them out onto the world.
Of course, this leaves little regard for the rest of us, strolling along on the information highway, who happen to eye-stumble upon these ungodly shits, forevermore injured by the ignorance expressed within them.
And though the Filth Bucket believes in their opinion turd so strongly they simply must release them into the wild, the Filth Bucket by no means want the turd linked back to their personal, actual, identity.
I mean, don’t get Filth Bucket wrong, their opinion turd absolutely needs and deserves to be seen and heard loudly by the entire world, but god forbid anyone finds out it belongs to them.
Actual Shit Holes
And then there are actual shit holes in the real world where people drop real turds into.
In these actual poop troughs there are walls, and on these walls we find the pinnacle of anonymous pop culture commentary.
We find in the real life poop trough what all internet comment sections wish they were: commentary that actually adds to the experience of the user.
Although the public bathroom stall is the original internet comment section – anonymous weirdos writing whatever crazy shit they can come up with, all to be viewed by the public – it is a place infinitely more palatable then the metaphorical poop troughs of the internet.
So the next time you find yourself with your pants at your ankles, ankles which are in plain view of any stranger who walks in (because we built doors with no bottoms to be used solely in the places where we are most vulnerable in public), put down your phone with it’s wi-fi link to the metaphorical poop troughs of the internet and start embracing the poop trough right there in front of you.
And here’s why.
#1. No Expectations
In a public bathroom there are no expectations.
There is only the opposite of hope.
You go into real bathrooms expecting the absolute worse of humanity: poop on the walls, poop on the seat, no toilet paper left. You’re relieved when its clean, and once again disturbed when you feel that the seat is warm.
If there’s something written in a language you understand in a place like that, it’s transcendent; immediately and infinitely better than all the stranger’s poop smells put together, which is admittedly a low bar.
The comments in a bathroom stall are a relief from reality, they are not gross comments creeping into your escapist search for puppy videos.
#2. Your Favorite Song is Now Ruined
Let’s say you’re me and you’re lazy.
You just found your new favorite song and you want to see the music video for it on youtube.
When you get to youtube, not only do you find Filth Buckets who took the time to click the “down thumb” icon for whatever filth bucket reason they came up with; you find even dumber, more puss filled scum buckets writing whatever angry, sexually rejected opinions they have way too much time on their hands to think about and then type.
All of a sudden you took a beautiful act – searching out art to make yourself warmer in a cold world – and turned it into rape jokes and racism.
In a real life poop trough you’re going in knowing you’re probably about to do the worst thing you’ve done all day.
If Cindy is suggested to be “a good time” and her number is on the wall, that’s just a nice reminder that your life is much better than Cindy’s. Maybe your life is so nice that someday you won’t ever have to shit here again.
#3. dead ass jim halpert is lowkey #bareminimum
When it comes to pooping at a highway gas station vs pooping your shitty ideas onto Reddit, it’s not just the fact that one act brings with it the expectation of terribleness and the other has the potential to be something actually enjoyable.
It’s the culture.
As in, the internet has developed a culture and public bathroom stalls couldn’t be further away from developing anything besides fungal infections.
The writing on bathroom stalls in America has to be some of the oddest, most idiosyncratic text ever read or written in one place.
One person has written, “ADAB!” in large letters.
The next person has tagged their personal tag: “Spicer” or “Equalitee” or something else of a similarly profound nature.
Another guy in the corner totally missed out on this enlightening political debate and just draws a penis riding a manatee.
On the internet, we’ve all being speaking to each other so much, so often, and for so long, that we’ve created a dialect. A way of speaking I try to replicate like a fellowkid in the title of this section.
This internet dialect evolved directly from its mode of communication: typing. It is a written dialect.
The internet “talks” the way it does because never before have humans had to write (read: type) to each other as quickly or more often, as we do today.
As recently as 20 years ago if anything was done in writing, it was expected that a response, in writing, would take a while. Hours, if not days, if not weeks. It was expected that things put in writing were thoughtful, purposeful statements.
Nowadays, twitter is such a Filth Bucket-inhabited place it’s inspired fucking Amnesty International to research it’s effects on women. Effects, of course, meaning harrassment and threats.
Signs you might be talking “Internet”
- You’re trying to be “edgy”
- you dont use any capital letters correct grammar or punctuation for that matter because you just need to get it out and it looks funnier this way
- Certain turns of phrase and initializations are understood (deadass, lowkey, fr, rn, af, mfw, mf)
I’m not as anti-internet dialect as my list makes it seem. I love how people adapt and change language to fit their environment.
I just think this current internet dialect is getting tired. Too many on the bandwagon. Too many copying the culture without understanding the context.
It also feels like a lot of internet dialect (see Black Twitter, maybe not so much the deeper chasms of places like 4chan) was invented by black people on twitter and everyone kind of lowkey co-opted it. More forensic dialectic research is probably needed in this area, but that is certainly how it feels at this point in time.
Although this internet dialect is creeping out of the internet and into the hand-written and spoken world, there is no common culture or agreed upon set of references in a public bathroom stall. There is no hivespeak, there is only beautiful, glorious randomness, the thing the internet once promised so much of.
Pierce Brosnan Gave Me Type 1 Diabetes
In public bathroom stalls all across America, weirdos with pens show up from all walks of life with a shared, burning desire…to write something on the wall of a poop trough.
These people aren’t all cliquey, entitled white teenagers who learned how to talk snark before they learned how to drive a car.
They’re truck drivers and teachers, insurance brokers and mailmen, public defenders and defendants…real salt of the earth weirdos.
They probably don’t have a youtube channel or curate spotify playlists for a living.
These are the people whose innermost random bullshit needs to be heard, not a league of meme wielding wannabe in-crowd fuckboys. Or at least, not just a league of meme wielding wannabe in-crowd fuckboys.
There is no bubble, no echo chamber, no safe space, in the American Public Bathroom Stall.
You’re Already Pooping
To sum it all up: bathroom stalls are better than internet comments sections.
They attract an even more diverse, weirder crowd than the internet and you’re already pooping so what do you have to lose?
Put down the phone, pick up a sharpie, and write something so mind-bogglingly out of context, so stunning in its complete what-the-fuckness that anyone who reads it will remember it forever. Like the time Pierce Brosnan Gave Me Type 1 Diabetes.