And then I scrolled down
Spiraled downward on April 20, 2025.
Do mermaids have foot fetishes?
This deep question plagued my mind this morning. I may have long been a fish expert, but I knew nothing more about mermaids than what I had learned from Disney movies when I was but a Pnårpling. Indeed I became obsessed with this question this morning… but only for a few seconds. I then scrolled down and forgot about it.
Next up (next down?) was a truly memorable post featuring Dors Feline pegging Jack Dorsey with a Dilbert-shaped dildo. This did not lead to any new questions, however—just a vague sense of unease at the direction all this newfangled A.I. artwork was going, and a growing desire to firebomb the entire planet and start over from scratch.
I scrolled down and forgot about it.
Then came news Jason the Horse had run off to Cloonfush to join the circus. Jason the Horse, as my readers may remember, is the author of What If You Are a Horse In Human Form?, a true masterpiece of nonfiction. Despite owning this book for thirteen years, I was now being bombarded with advertisement after advertisement for it, in every form: Paperback, hardback, softback, hardcover, softcover, and even lardcover. (Apparently the pigs I keep in the basement got hold of that one.) No amount of furious scrolling or even furiouser close box–clicking would make it stop. My mousewheel clicked and spun. Then, 17 seconds later, all on it’s own—it stopped.
I scrolled down and forgot about it.
The curious town of Cloonfush counterintuitively had little to do with “clown flush,” a malady affecting modern toilets which I learned about while merrily doomscrolling my way further down Facebook. This rather helpful advertisement, which refused to get out of my way no matter how hard I slammed my mouse button down on the close box, offered me a solution—for the low, low price of $88.18 (in eighty-eight monthly installments, plus 24.99% interest and $24.99 shipping and handling). My desire to firebomb the entire planet and start over rose.
I scrolled down and forgot about it.
Someone messaged me, “Hello, dear.” It was a woman living right in my hometown(!) and she said she was single. I told her I was in fact a deer, not a dear, and I had some headlights to go stare into for a while. I asked her why her profile said she was living in the Philippines (my islands, damn it!), which are a few million miles from my hometown. This seemed to do the trick. She went off to catfish someone else and I went back to staring into those headlights.
I scrolled down and forgot about it.
Next down (no, next up… I’m sure of it!) came a photograph of Jesus Horatio Christ morphing into Mike the Headless Chicken. Unlike the earlier one with Dors Feline, which fooled me for a total of 81 seconds, I wasn’t fooled for a single second by this one, however. They didn’t have cameras in Jesus’ time, let alone chickens! So I knew at once this was more A.I. slop. My pea-sized brain may be gullible, credulous, and as naïve as a twelve-year-old girl’s still nestled under its pigtails, but I’m not that gullible (or credulous or naïve)!
I scrolled down and forgot about it.
My mousewheel spun furiously. More slop flew by—then some spam, more crap, a screenful of garbage, followed by trash, rubbish, and junk… then more slop, more spam, more spam peddling slopmaking bots, and finally… I remembered today is 4/20. So, now I wondered if the three pounds of pot I smoked this morning might be causing me to hallucinate all of this. Then I remembered more: That wasn’t pot, it was cat hair. (This also explained why the smell of burning hair permeated thirteen floors of my palatial abode this morning.)
I scrolled down and forgot about it.
Becasue called me down to dinner (which I hoped was cornpones, not cornslop). At last, my catabatic journey to the very bottom of Facebook was nearing its end. “Just one more post!” I called down to my big little redheaded huzzey-muffet. “Someone on the Internet might be wrong somewhere in here!” My mousewheel spun again.
And then there, in another post, in the middle of all the other posts, away from everything else in the other posts, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated, another deep question to ponder presented itself:
Do mermaids have a cloaca instead of a vag———?
I closed the browser.