Bono, the frontman of the rock band U2, once wrote to the late great Don Van Vliet, also known as Captain Beefheart, asking for a collaboration. Beefheart, who had been in a rather isolated retirement for most of the time after the 70s, did write back to Bono. The letter, which was handwritten, read “Dear Bongo, no.”
Now, I would love to believe this is true. It's absolutely hilarious, and judging by the way Mr. Beefheart presented himself, it could be. But there is few lessons to learn here. The first is to listen to the album Trout Mask Replica at least once before you die. And the other, more important lesson, is to not believe everything you read. This is a lesson you must learn if you are ever going to go online.
I started my Internet career in the late 2009’s, where I would spend my time making weiner people in a game called spore and watching nerf gun reviews. My first ever traces were emails I sent to my dad through spore’s monster sharing system, where it would send him a picture of my disgusting creatures. It all went downhill from here. I would spend all my time watching youtube poops and playing Jimmy Neutron: the game for the pc. It was a dark time.
It was later on that I first started going on imageboards, and I was soon hooked. The ability to anonymously chat about your favorite music, games, and cartoons that are not made in the United States was truly magical. Don’t ask me to clarify, I’m sure you can put it together. On these imageboards I would meet interesting people that I still talk to to this day.
One of the things I have been working on is a archive of all of my favourite things I have ever found while browsing. Sep 27, 2015 was the day that the best thing I have ever seen graced my vision. It is a six second long .webm file that changed my life forever. It starts out pitch black. There is nothing, except for the deafening sound of silence. Then, I caught my first glimpse of it- a picture of the musical artist, Drake, badly photoshopped to look less than a foot tall, slowly fading in with the sound of Mongolian throat singing playing in the background. It then abruptly ends. I don’t know why, but when I saw this for the first time, I was red in the face. I couldn’t breath, I was laughing so hard. It just didn’t make any sense, but that just made it funnier. Those of you who know me now my sense of humor, and you can trace it all back to this one six second long video.
You have to understand that the internet can be truly awful. It gives a platform to some of the worst people in the world, and laughs in the face of anyone who doesn’t already know the tricks of the trade when they are first figuring it out. But it is the small things that make it worthwhile. And I wouldn’t trade my time spent online laughing with my friends for anything.