Note from the bottom

What's so impressive about bottom exhaust?

What impresses me the most about Substack? Quite apart from the somewhat dubious etymology suggesting a bottom exhaust.

Is it the warm and fuzzy feeling of community? The played-out quotes adorned with darling animals so as to maximize the woos and whees? The intense positive stimulus of showing off large subscriber numbers to the nobodies? The glorification and monetization of disabilities; ah, the unbearable pining of the hypomaniac writing a novel a week? The weekly typographic seppukus, innards and all unfurled for all the cold fish to goon?—no seppuku worth its stomach lining answers a call less melodramatic. The meme lords and ladies of atrophied talents? Failed suicides monetizing their failure for the public good? Praise for convicted criminals making a killing out of their lack of moral fiber? Weirdos trapped in the anal stage referring to themselves in Greek letters and desperately needing sigmoid colonoscopies? Deluded masochists believing every evil, whether Manichean or Augustinian, only strengthens them? Sadists disguised as self-help gurus getting off on the agony of the hopeless? Nihilists writing as if already dead, stinking up the feed full of stodgy bourgeois spirit? The Borgian virtues of the Algorithm? Gullible bottom feeders within reach of the superficial trawl of their idols? Writers writing for themselves and bitching about the want of readers? Bare-assed endowments branded as headlines to divert attention from the hollowness of thought? The bleeders of petty wounds, the builders of empires on the bones of their parasites? The sickly, self-pitying repartee on the virtues of patent failure and subsequent inner growth?

Or is it us, the unlovable, insufferable flounders, gnashing our blunted teeth at your flavorless refuse?

No, none of this impresses me. Rather, it’s the sheer amount of effort involved. Truly, it is impressive how much information we expel with negative or no consequence. Every day, after a great deal of huffing and puffing, we eject our more or less digested intelligence with an enormous thrill, until at some as yet unimaginable limit, constipation grips us and all we can produce is a final, toothless burp.

That, my friends, will be impressive.