Young Writers Society

I am entirely uncomfortable with the fourth wall of written work. Not that there is a fourth wall – there are no walls. That is unless one is elaborating on the nature of walls, or writing an exposé on Berlin, or describing a scene from Secret Garden. Even then, if I, the reader, choose to see beautiful women lining up in front of a Super Nintendo for a turn at Duck Hunt – Well, it does not matter whether the writing is about walls or equine medicine. The point is, Lemony Snicket-esque letters to the reader make me uncomfortable. As does the thought of a brown bear trying to rob vodka from a Russian convenience store. But everyone knows Russians ride bears just to screw with us, so the situation would probably dissipate into lots of spilled vodka and a late-night party contest of brown-bear-mechanical-bull-riding into the sunset, then the bear would hibernate for the next 9 months because FUCK it’s cold out there and it ingested enough vodka to increase the alcohol content of the Bering Sea by 5%. (Not to mention it was just ridden by innumerable drunken Russians.) Even then, the bear could probably get his stomach pumped and have enough vodka to light the city of Berlin by lamp for a week.

And there’s a wall in Berlin. It’s not so much there now – its palimpsestic remains loom more psychologically than physically over the town. The fictional town of Springfield built a wall much like it, and there was a rock concert involved. Probably vodka there too, but much lesser likelihood of bear-riding. I suppose the writers could have added bear-riding, but that would certainly have detracted from the significance of the wall. And that is, after all, what we are talking about – walls. They separate things, like the chemical opposition between oil and water. Except less natural – walls are a construct, an artificial separator. Although oil is actually melted petrified dinosaur bones extracted by boring massive holes into the earth and sucking unrefined dead matter through huge metal straws suspended over the ocean. Even then it has to be refined.

Everything seems anthropogenic, in that case – everything related to walls, at least. Punctuation is like a wall; punctuation marks separate thoughts, clauses, words, phrases, images, just about everything. A boycott wouldn’t do much good though because nobody can hardly stand when someone raves on forever without taking a break or thinking about what they say especially since punctuation is pretty much the reason the brain can separate thoughts enough to make comprehensible matter from what it reads who cares anyway since punctuation rather obviously does not have that much to do with walls and nobody would be able to figure out I was trying to make a point even if they did read my lolling idiot vomit status update brain mush and I could just say whatever I wanted like banana bread lollipop lipstick Hitchcock monkey sock battering ram juicy fruit baked potato macaroni necklace capricious clock cogs candy corn.

This is why twitter and facebook cannot be the same thing – walls. Hashtags are like the wall between two very distinct forms of social media. If one adopts the rules of the other, each is less unique and suddenly there is multiculturalism forming between bodies of multicultural populations each centered around very original devices intended to prevent the spillage of multiple multiculturalisms and sustain an addiction to one specific brand of multicultural interaction. Twitter has hashtags, and facebook has… well, it has… timeline? That’s useless. Good thing facebook added hashtags, I guess. I just remembered that. They didn’t have anything else exciting. Unless you count Farmville, I suppose, but everyone secretly both hates facebook apps and the people that play them. I won’t even bother to tell you people playing facebook apps hate themselves – everyone hates oneself. Even if one doesn’t play Farmville. Anyway, facebook does not limit status updates to 160 characters. So that’s the new wall. They still are different things, of course. And I don’t mean wall, as in the wall one has on one’s timeline. Metaphorical wall – one separating those complicated boiling pots which draw so many individuals into their vortices of acronymic socio-babble case study phenomena. For instance, “lol, jus peeps dont get me brah too real 4 dis.” What a brilliant example of schizophrenic aphasia – pretty much a textbook case. There’s inflated ego; abbreviated and inconsistent, sometimes incomprehensible speech; disdain for others resulting from delusory mental disintegration… Psychiatry has never had such a rich source material. Of course, psychiatry does not really exist. It kind of straddles the wall between science and monkey shit – where either side of the wall could really belong to the other category. Scatological primate observation and classification is a special branch of Park Ranger training required for Brown University’s Anthropology major course load. So yeah, there’s no wall between science and monkey shit, and for that very reason psychiatry does not exist.

And that makes four. Or none. And the one that was already broken.

( Still very much uncomfortable. It's like half my brain took a vacation and failed to leave an address. Then this happened. I have no idea. )