TL:DR

You know, at times I really wish I were the kind of person who could sit down and write 1,800 or 18,000 words about whether the internet has made me stupider. Me--or rather, everyone else and maybe me too, just a little.

Oh, you know, to be so and so easily convinced that I was doing something important, socially worthwhile, while I was working up pithy précis of the extant literature and taking such care over the data so as to achieve that perfectly circular inconclusive arrangment with every bunch of it. Happy as a cross between a rich gay florist and a clam in the deep cold salt mud, spitting after footsteps...me, the independent scholar-journalist, I wish I could be.

What a trip it's got to feel like! I mean to feel right and whole or wholer, righter, while opining at length; the doing and the consciousness of doing both rewarding. (Not to mention maybe even a check on delivery, or a PayPal credit, or a couple of events passes or something--I know how it works and I wouldn't be choosy like the others are.) I suppose I would be thinking, "Frankly this should come from me. I've got the answers and if I haven't got the answers I can get them and what's more I can pack them up so nice it makes you dizzy and your eyes spin. Mine might be the last words you'll ever read on the subject--" I mean, need to.

It's me I see me weighing in. Paragraphs unspool from my soft fingertips like spider webbing; here and there a trapped fact gasps. I'm leaving it all up to you, the experts, to slap the engines with your special monkey grease and keep my traffic high. My job, once you deliver the readers, is I keep that page view session long and longer ever longer. The hardest stuck will stay to fill my comments boxes...stay forever. I like I'm imbibing something enzymatic--fruity, meaty, mineral--feel rich. Hot. Creepy.

Look over here instead! It's me starting an important new paragraph. Which in addition to its personal importance is important because here is where I admit that if someone gives me a nickel for every time I make a mental note to make a Google search but in ten minutes or less I forget to so then I don't, then that will make too many nickels please. I would rather get paid every fifth lapse in quarters for laundry.