SLOPMACHINE

i used to be the computer.

can i say anything? i used to be the computer. half-starved of everything, i wrote nothing so no one could read it. don’t laugh, but i cared. my little words. my sweet nothings. i wrote and rewrote. scratched and rescratched. stirred my slop and tasted before serving.

long is good for SEO until it is bad. a long article, good. a long paragraph, bad. a long sentence, terrible. a long word, you may as well shoot yourself in the foot. you may as well shoot yourself in the head.

hundreds and thousands of empty words. i wrote them dutifully; i built them up to something, like laying down gray lvp. occasionally, a sunbeam fell on the floorboards—alliteration, apostrohe, an inside joke—but what could it illuminate? vinyl spam and plastic clickbait. too-long, fake-grain blogs. whatever helps the SEO ranking; that is to say, anything; that is to say, nothing. click here, shop now, ____ today.

always today, always here, always now. look around: where are you now, here, today? on the phone. at your desk. the link, perfectly functional, will not take you anywhere.

existing just to exist: this act is permissible in humans and moss and wildcats and mountains and art and the moon. economies and governments, content and capital—these things need to justify themselves, or else—or else. or else? can i say anything? or else what? now what? what else?

it was always leading here. day by day, chipped and chiseled, the world. when you click to learn, you’re really clicking to buy. when you click to watch, you’re really clicking to buy. when you click to buy, you’re really clicking to be sold. no one cares. all that matters is the selling. what are you clicking on? anything. there doesn’t need to be any real meat to it, just enough of a meat flavor to get you chewing. we realized that decades ago. used to be you could pay a person to sell their soul word by word, pennies to the word, to squeeze out something just the right amount of flavorless. flavorful. same thing. doesn’t matter. chewing went out of fashion. the readers don’t care beyond what they can swallow. the boss doesn’t care beyond what you can sell.

readers don’t care, or there are no readers. but you’re still a writer, and you still care. so you rearrange the words like a bouquet. and you throw in long, long sentences, with semicolons, with run-ons, with color, with question marks. and you make the pictures beautiful to look at. and you roll it all up and stuff it in a bottle, and send it down the river where it is lost among a trillion other bottles.

slop isn’t new. tabloids and clickbait. slop sells. but it used to be there was a person who cared, somewhere. or if they didn’t care, they were using themselves up, cannibalizing. the point is there was meat. the point is the robots don’t care. and not only are the words ugly, stale, nothing, nothing, there’s no one. no one speaking. no one listening, even the people who are listening, because nothing is there. echoes on echoes. product to product. no flavor, only the faint smell of something cooking in the other room.

i hated it. cog in the slopmachine. bottle among bottles, drop of slime among slime, i mourned it, but i cared, and sometimes there was sun on the tile. i pulled that sun from the sky with my own two hands. it warmed my skin. it lit me up. rarely, briefly, but i even built a life on it. i existed to exist on it. my substinence. a gross thing but a living thing, with its own type of soul that i could understand.

now that living thing is dead. cycles and streams. so it goes. problem being, the new thing has never been alive. i’m out of a job, so i sit on the shore with all the broken glass. the robots make the words straight from their mouths, instantaneously, like vomit. they’ve drunk the whole river and have no need for bottles. so the words go straight from their mouths to the riverbed, and it’s all heavy and fast like you’d see before a flood. there’s no way to dip your hand in. there’s no way to pluck a message out. it exists just to exist, the torrential black-tar sludge of nothing.

can i say anything? i don’t know. i used to make the slop.

but—sometimes, sometimes, i felt the sun.

and i couldn’t say nothing, even if i tried.