#theterribleinternet

Guy falls asleep at a ballgame, gets caught on tape and it goes viral, everyone on the internet makes fun of him and hates him. 

I love how fun it must have been for Rivka Galchen to write passages in dumb internet haterese, quoting the all the mean things all the world’s dummies say about this poor guy. 

The other fun writer-y thing I enjoy are the malapropisms she uses appropriately in characters’ voices. Cases in point:

“...its [sic] Hollywoodized to the point of recognizable gibberish.”

“Why is there ever an unrequired kind act?”

Should be unrecognizable and unrequited, right? That’s such a fun subtle writerly thing to do.

Otherwise this is one of those New Yorker-y fiction pieces where this sweet innocent character wanders through these vignetty moments with people, he works with gold so he gets these gold-industry factoid text messages that are about gold and how strong it is but they’re really about him and his own strength, and then we finally get to this crystallization philosophy moment where a previously crappy character becomes the mouthpiece for a lightbulb moment about the nature of this crazy world. (It’s not ‘Why is there evil in the world?’ but ‘Isn’t it amazing that there is good?’) Then he zooms into himself into a beautiful memory and that’s the end!