First the room was black, and it had been black for a while. You and your date were busy with an app, or lowering approximate jumbled tiers of popcorn with five buttered tips and a kernel up in your molar’s business. Then there is light, a green neon swamp light, a swamp from which we crawled a long time ago. And it’s not me getting biblical on your ass, which might have been at the movies today. There were stories, bad stories to be told, told, told, told, told — keep looking at told until it looks told; it’s not a word really. Told. I told you you and your date are twenty dollars and two hours down. And this is all we were able to come up with for one another, t-telling b-bad s-stories like some s-studdering re: tard. Regarding tards, it’s spelt turds.

You and your date I know what you d-do. You watch a “Cannes” movie and grab a fallafel or burrito, some aluminum bomb ’bout to pregnate your belly with someone else’s economically collapsed culture. I know what y-you g-guys do. You g-go back to your mutual or respective apartment(s) — depending on who said or didn’t say I love you first or last — and you two act out this life in front of you. There’s the fridge, go grab a beer to wash down the sodium and sole eyelash. There’s the cat comin’ round getting all slutty with the edge of the chair leg, preferring it over yours. You love something that shits in a box with an asshole that is always saying hello. Now someone please slip on a three-week old issue of The Economist and break their ankle. No ER for you you freelancing fuck. Fall asleep tonight the dreams behind the black behind your eyes is a green screen holding its breath for the CGI of a better life, once the executive producer says okay.

I’m t-tired of black dudes gotta be all fucking shit up all the time. Don’t believe me? Try to find dinner-for-two with a lemon wedge in your H20 somewhere in Africa. My point is — and we are in the business of points — is that the Blue Man Group and Black Man Coup are all just mirages do you know what I’m saying? Q: Do you understand what happens when an african-american “chroma technician” decides he cannot bear to not wear his Birkenstocks? A: There’s gonna be floating Birkenstocks all out-of-context for no reason like some David Lynch product placement. Q: And do you know about the eponymous ex-couples’ lawsuit? A: Former Mr. Birkenstock sued ex-Mrs. Birkenstock over use of her married name which she strategically still wanted/needed to use for a sister footwear company she had started. And who do you think the Lawyer is? Look at the fucking picture. He likes to get baked.

And here on the internet it’s all really fun, but irl I’m @somehipstercafe and this feels like one excessive tweet. Since we’re being all color blind right now, I feel like I’m not finished talking about black dudes. Here in the “city” black dudes often wanna get up in my business, like on public transportation or on the sidewalk calling me nigger and/or bitch and basically making me — a pensive near-sighted weak-spirited chronically regressed asian — m-making me unc-comfortable. Yet they seem to be doing just fine in these videos with fake shit behind them, on them, all around them, and it’s like I have a problem? Like it’s my problem for not wanting to get pistol whipped? I’m the douche for not being impressed by their Moët et Chandon all hot-tub-lubed up? I’m the retarded racist who’s obsessed with nice thick black cock porn? Jesus F. Christ.

Usually in the middle of these rants I like to drop some nice esoteric art, anything to alienate the obtuse, the crass. In 1963, Josef Albers introduced his theories on color, basically saying that each hue’s vector in space was dependent on the colors around it. He conveyed this by painting a bunch of boxes inside one another; real snobby “dick in a box” type stuff for modernists. Art kept saying color made all the difference but the nimby-peeps kept saying ’twas no difference at all. Let’s say there’s a black dude in front of a green screen showing off his fancy moves and making this yellow chinaman uncomfortable, and it’s being read by b-bunch of white people. The cliche for people who wish to express that they aren’t racist is “I don’t care if you’re white, black, brown, yellow, or purple” — the absurd purple being used rhetorically to suggest a boundless tolerance for any color. Nobody ever mentions green. Nobody ever says they don’t care if you’re green, because everyone knows green means you’re an alien.

Ralph Ellison black dude motif, yah I thought that up myself ‘s Invisible Man is this black dude who is like invisible and stuff because he’s black. (A boom box, pair of adidas, and shades my brutha and you is black.) I never finished it because I couldn’t relate. The unnamed narrator lives in a room with 1,369 lights, I mean watt the fuck is up with that? Not much empathy here for the Invisible Man. I’m so visible when I close my eyes I see my eyelids.

A lesser known ee cummings book is The Enormous Room (1922). I also didn’t finish it, but that doesn’t mean I can’t name drop that bitch like some wiki-fiend. Went/am online and one line from it which caught my attention: I could eat an elephant. The Penguin classics edition uses Van Gogh’s lesser known painting of prisoners walking around in a circle for exercise. It’s hard talking about Van Gogh and “room” without invoking “Bedroom at Arles” (1888), a kind of intimate POV version of “Yellow House,” the view of his house from across the street, painted the same year. Scholars have attempted to match the window from both paintings to determine the room’s orientation within the house, which is yet another example of why PhDs have no fun. (Girls just wanna have PhuD.)

I don’t care if your house is white, black, brown, or yellow. I don’t care if your room is white, black, brown, or green. If two people watch a movie in a theatre alone maybe they are together. You and me, let’s meet in a weightless room. They’ll put scenes behind us, the real life saga of waiting in line at the groceries. The aisles behind us, each item — cereal, diapers, broths, baking soda — will recede towards a vanishing point. I tried for a Charlie Kaufman-esque “layer orgy” post but it’s falling flat. I need to CGI a third eye, some forehead navel pointing at my brain all hindu’d up in my business. I’ve never seen Avatar, just feels like the Blue Man Group meets George of the Jungle. Let’s find each other or one another, depending on your grammar and the catering budget. I wanna find you, not on facebook or AWP or “Brooklyn,” “Chicago,” “San Francisco,” or “Seattle.” Not at some cafe in which I’m writing this next to 10,000 gay? dudes on the same Mac as I. Don’t wanna find you under the drum loop b-bounce of god damn Gorillaz getting all future Vh1 on my business. Don’t want it to be just me blaring this into another IP address, some cable the girth of a 4-yr-old’s dick getting all Groundhog Day in the dirt — an info tendril, a root, a weed — to some server in Arizona or New Mexico or some shit like that. And I’m cussing as if I had street cred, but I don’t. Grew up in the ‘burbs watching “Oprah” with my mom, emotionally manipulating her into taking me to Carls Jr. She’s an old lady now, and I’m a little older too. The whole point is we slowly die a little more each day, so slow like watching a fingernail grow, which is why I wanna find you. If I had some libido, I might post this on Okcupid but here’s the catch I don’t wanna fuck you. Just wanna fly in slow motion with you, or maybe get bombed in some WWII movie, some scene where we’re at a concentration camp, you with L’Oréal sinking in your cheekbones, me with a machine gun and a script that calls for parenthetical empathy. 10,000 sundays from now I will kill you, but everything will be fine. Cities never really get destroyed in an enormous room.

Too bad I’m not your boyfriend. I do great break-up letters.

Told,

jc