In contrast with her generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis. Was this always how it happened?
. . .
A conversation with a future grandchild. She lifts her eyes, as blue as willow ware. The tips of her braids twitch with innocence. “So you were all calling each other bitch, and that was funny, and then you were all calling each other binch, and that was even funnier?” How could you explain it? Which words, and in which order, could you possibly utter that would make her understand? “. . . yes binch”
. . .
We reveled in these stories, which were not untrue. But there was some untruth in the degree to which they comforted us.
. . .
The future of intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information.
. . .
The more closely we could associate a diet with cavemen, the more we loved it. Cavemen were not famous for living a long time, but they were famous for being exactly what the fuck they were supposed to be, something we could no longer say about ourselves. A caveman knew what he was; the adjective was a sheltering stone curve over his head. A man alone under the sky had no idea.
. . .
The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.
. . .
“MY SAFE!” she found herself screaming two days later, kneeling below her husband’s work window with a needle standing in every pore, a pair of balled-up panties stuck to one leg and clutching to her chest what appeared to be a dictionary. “GET DOWN HERE AND OPEN MY SAFE!” She had tried every number that she could think of—the sex number, the antichrist number, the twin towers number—but he grimly took the safe from her and freed it with 1-2-3-4. “Oh,” she said, slumping with relief, her body unlocking as soon as the phone was in her hand, “that’s good, that’s funny. Like learning to count. Like Sesame Street.” That night the safe went in the back of the closet, where the words NEW ENGLISH could not wink at her any longer, and they never spoke of it again, and that was love, that was what love was now.
. . .
“A minute means something to her, more than it means to us. We don’t know how long she has—I can give them to her, I can give her my minutes.” Then, almost angrily, “What was I doing with them before?”
. . .
“I was just thinking that you and I . . . have seen very different memes in our lives.”
. . .
[B]ecause she liked it, of course she liked it, she could not tell the difference between beauty and a joke.
. . .
She wondered was it worth it to show up, hear a little music, and then leave?
