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あらすじ・解説
I have continued to use Little Red Book a.k.a. Xiaohongshu a.k.a. Rednote. It’s the Chinese version of TikTok that got popular in the USA when it seemed like TikTok was going to shut down. I never liked TikTok, but I enjoy Rednote, because I can’t understand what anyone is saying and I can’t determine how nauseatingly bad all of the jokes are. I am pleased to report that a comment I left on a video on Rednote has gotten more than 200 likes. The number is climbing all of the time. Soon they’re going to call me Mr. Worldwide because of my universally celebrated fame, all because of the comment I left on this one video.This is the story of how I left the comment on the video. I was watching footage of a man breaking up logs of wood, using a kind of whirling drill thing. It looks like the drill bit that’s on the front of the vehicle Shredder uses to travel from underground to the surface in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. Sometimes he would bring Krang with him.On the video, in English, I commented, “please put my head on this.” Now, every time I open the app, I find that a dozen people have liked that comment. Sometimes it’s more than that. It’s an extremely popular comment. But I don’t really want anyone to split my head open with an electric thing, I was pretending.I have also found a man who does livestreams at night, which is daytime here in the USA, of cats and dogs he has taken in. Someone posted in English during a livestream that he rescued them, that they’re all strays. They gather in this outdoor space, and there’s always a pot of something simmering in the foreground, while further back he slices raw meat and fish and feeds them to the cats and dogs. He wears nose plugs. It must smell like a nightmare, all the dirty animals and dead flesh pulsating in the hot Chinese night.I want to travel to China and meet this man. I want to help him feed the dogs and cats. But it’s possible I should stay at home instead and write something about the leafy greens that are in the simmering pot. I wonder what sort of inner life I can extrapolate for those vegetables. Who are their parents? What did they want for their own lives, before they ended up in that pot?Using Rednote reminds me of what it used to be like to use the Internet. I heard Chris Hayes, of all people, talking on a podcast about how in the early Internet days going online could sometimes feel like the moments after you check into a hotel in a new city, when you hit the street to go and get a cup of coffee and see what kind of people you see, whereas now using the Internet always seems to feel more like getting stuck in traffic. And I wouldn’t necessarily put it the same way—going online for me has never quite matched the excitement of being in a new place like that. But using an app that’s based in another country, which has very few American users, does remind me of what the Internet was supposed to be, before it turned into what it is. I wrote an essay that was published on Friday at The Culture We Deserve. You can read it now. It’s about the novel Wieland, by Charles Brockden Brown, which was the subject of my master’s thesis, which I wrote twenty years ago. You know what I can’t believe? I can’t believe the nurse at my doctor’s office laughed at me when I said I wanted to be the healthiest person she’s ever seen. I said I wanted to feel like a man who has something to live for. I told her someone in this world had to lay it all on the line, and that it might as well be me. She laughed for at least the third time that visit. I said nothing could happen anymore unless something took place that was real, that you could feel with your hands. She laughed even harder. The nurse did laugh in real life, though, when I said I aspire to be someone who smokes cannabis all day long and floats through his life without a care in the world. I confessed that I have too much work to do, to be like that. My kids would be against it, I’d probably feel nauseous a lot, and I just wouldn’t act like myself. Also I need to drive places, and I don’t want to do that under the influence. No one would be happy with me if I were like that, but still I kind of wish I could be that kind of person, who’s like the physical embodiment of calm and feeling good. The nurse walked out of the room laughing and said something to the doctor, I think that she thought I was funny. I couldn’t really hear her. She may have recommended that the doctor inject me with Lethal Injection Fluid and get this mess over with once and for all. Although I am rarely calm, and if I am the physical embodiment of anything it’s the sound of Jell-O being fired out of a machinegun, at least I am not a coffeehouse that’s owned by a church. The Kansas City subreddit had a thread going the other day about coffeehouses in the city’s northland, where I live, being owned by churches and Christian groups. One of them advertises that they ...