All Of This Has Been For You

Contrary to popular belief, February does not end two days early but rather begins two days late--hence the uncanny panic and inconsolable sense of loss which, it is often reported, sets over the attuned on March 31--and is not actually shorter than the other months, but rather has had it's "missing" first two days set aside as part of your deferred compensation plan in Hell. Despite this formidible challenge, we have midwifed the most 'productive' month ever on the blog, with forty-three dispatches from the abyss, two new sister blogs launched by our collaborators, and a purely nominal promotion for our once whipping boy now Fifth Columnist, No Innocents. We'd like to thank them them all--our friends and especially our enemies; gin, coffee, and cigarettes; the people of Tunisia and Egypt; the Royal Family--but most of all, dear reader, we'd like to thank you. How much do we love you? A quick glance at our actuarial tables will let us calculate, with irrevocable certainty, the ways.

Taking into account 1) the wide range of time frames, from five minutes to an hour, needed to make a blog post; 2) the way that quotes gradually accumulate through conversations, conversations through which we used to trawl for incidental gems but which now would not taken place without this harlot blog to bring them into the world, so alienated have be grown and so desicated have our emotional and intellectual landscapes become thanks the very technology that was to bring us together and serve as a platform for our individual and collective creative self-realization; 3) a multiplier factor applied to every minute spent working on the blog to account for the energy expended during non-work hours to maintain the continuous state of stress and anxiety required to conjure bile strong enough for publishing; 4) an unknown and variable quantity to account for the effects of intoxication and space madness; and 5) the contention, raised by a council of scientists, that Quote Production reverses both the effects and importance of Time--taking all these things into account, we can see that each blog post represents on average three labor-hours at normal human intensity [see Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun], making for a total of 129 normal-labor-hours spent on the blog.

The amount of engergy spent on this blog in the month of February can further be shown to be electrochemically equivalent (based on statistical studies of the daily food consumption of average Americans) to the amount of killowatt hours needed to vacuum your childhood room or to project a 35mm print of Robert Bresson's Mouchette for approximately five horrible seconds; morally interchangeable with to $4,961.54 plus health coverage minus dental; and otherwise equal to the amount of work required to make 7 beneficial life changing decisions and 437 bad ones, to dial 36 phone calls to members of the opposite sex whose number was acquired the previous night, to attend 24 protests against American-sponsored dictators, to call your parents 12 times, and to endure 0.75 honest looks in the mirror.

And yet instead of pursuing any of these laudable goals, we threw ourselves upon the sword of our love for you, our readers, all twelve of you, you image-objects, you ego-ideals, you vampire projection screens, you anus-mouth black holes of desire. Cocks in hand we cross the finish line of one month, and, clammy with fear, haunted by regret--shouldn't we just have been watching sports and jerking off in interesting places the whole time?--we March on to the next, on to void, on to the end of the night. All of this has been for your. If you can read this, you're lying.