
“New comment on your video”
My heart skips a beat as the words touch my retinas, the notification chime ringing in my ears like a flashbang. I start to sweat. My stomach ties itself in knots. All I want to do is put down my phone, back away slowly, and get under my covers holding onto a little plush Siberian husky. But I’m not at home right now. I’m out with friends. Good friends, but not the kind who can wrap their arms around me and tell me it’ll all be okay if shit goes bad.
Clear the notification. Leave it for later.
“New reply to your comment”
Which comment? Where? What did I say? Was it a silly joke, or was it a thoughtful opinion? My heart races again. No. I don’t want to look at it now.
Next day, I’m home. I open up my inbox. There they are. I’d forgotten about them last night. I turn white. I’m all alone now; just me and the comments. The words of random, anonymous people somewhere on the other side of the planet, judging me. Taking the communications I’d poured my heart and soul into and scrutinizing them. Scrutinizing me.
I’ll look at the reply first.
“Wow, you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.” Etcetera etcetera. Bashing me over the head with why I’m wrong. I’m not wrong, of course, and I clearly know what I’m talking about better than this guy. For some reason, the ignorance makes it sting more. And it really stings.
The knots in my stomach tie themselves into bows. My throat clenches. It was everything I’d feared: rejection, disdain, scorn, hatred. I know it’s meaningless and insignificant, but I’m helpless to stop the debilitating haze of gloom that overruns my senses. Everything looks flatter. Grayer. My head throbs with a dull pain.
I know people on the Internet are dicks, and I’ve seen it a million times before. But when it happens to me, it’s still a slap in the face. It still hurts.
This is why I wanted to let this wait until I was someplace safe. Because when you look at a comment on something you made — no matter if it’s the most insignificant thing — if it means something to you, then anything can happen. They can utterly destroy you in five words.
But on the other hand…
I open the reply to my video. “That was one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time.” He goes on for a whole paragraph telling me what he loved about it. I’m smiling. Beaming. Walking on air. I feel like I’m flying. Like I could take on the world.
This is how it goes. Every single time, when I open one of those emails, it’s a game of roulette. Am I going to feel stabbed in the heart for the next ten minutes, or king of the world for the next twenty?









Whatever Happened to Surrealism?
I’m a Magritte fan. In fact, the name and mascot of Plankhead was inspired by his 1926 painting The Conqueror. This, in turn, inspired my fascination with people with inanimate objects instead of heads, which I first explored in this clip about Nintendo and continued at length with Your Face is a Saxophone. (Incidentally, Magritte worked in advertising)
The surrealist movement focused predominantly on letting out all of the absurd, crazy thoughts in your mind. The result was a slew of bizarre, dream-like art, fascinating and highly entertaining. But after than the 1960s, other than a few David Lynch films here and there, surrealism seemed to disappear from the public consciousness.
But now it’s back.
When I was in high school obsessing over surrealism, I wondered why it wasn’t a speculative fiction genre right alongside sci-fi and fantasy. Unbeknownst to me, a lot of people were wondering the same thing at the same time, and started writing bizarro fiction. Weird books that are weird for the sake of being weird. It’s wonderful stuff.
While I’m not sure if it was influenced by bizarro fiction, Ugly Americans is probably one of the first truly bizarro shows on television.It depicts a world where humans, zombies, demons, wizards, koala-people, robots, floating-brain-things, and pretty much anything else the writers decide to come up with coexist (semi-)peacefully in modern-day New York City.
Also, it seems to be on some of the same wavelengths as Your Face is a Saxophone. (From Season 2 Episode 13)
I’d say seeing the weird juxtaposed with the familiar — with all of the characters regarding as completely normal — is as close to a trope that the bizarro genre can ever get.
Meanwhile, Dadaism — the inbred father/sister of the Surrealist movement — is seeing a resurgence as well. See, Dadaism was about doing stuff like turning a urinal upside down, signing it, and declaring it to be a sculpture. Now have a look at this:
That’s kind of Dada, isn’t it?