IMG464195387

The Man Who Sold The World: A Prelude

“Astronaut starts when you press GO,” is what it says at the bottom of the landing page.

There's a site you can click onto and watch random Youtube videos that have no views, or almost no views. It’s a real thing. There's copycat sites but the original one, or the slickest looking one anyway, was Astronaut.io. And sometimes you would click on a link and you'd see someone's video of a streetcar lit up at night somewhere, or a kid blowing out candles on a cake, or someone admitting they murdered someone 20 years ago. I mean, 300 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute. In the time it's taken you to read this, how much does that equal?

The landing page for the website says "today, you are an astronaut. You are floating in inner space 100 miles above the surface of Earth. You peer through your window and this is what you see. You are people watching. These are fleeting moments." This is not bullshit, every video only plays five or six seconds unless you click to keep it from skipping to the next video. 

IMG464195387 started normal as a video of someone driving through the desert close to sundown like from a shaky dash cam mount listening to Johnny Cash soft and wounded by ethereal static would. Something no one would ever search for or bother to watch, it's just more 300 minute per minute shit, signal interference. But the voiceover to the scene starts talking, and he says some nutty shit like, so this is possibly my last living will and testament. My last gift to the world I helped to build from the ground up, even if nobody ever fucking sees it. His voice is frozen smoke grinding against a granite canyon wall. You stop the video from switching to a recorded physics lecture or outtakes from the local news in Belgium. The things kids do when they're burnt out studying, like you doing this; it's pure voyeurism for no reason, low risk, public and private at the same time, he says. I'm taking this video with fancy ass smart glasses, for the record, he says. Never gonna be able to sleep, ripped inside out on Adderall and last second academic anxiety, telling yourself just a minute ago all you needed was five minutes to chill out, turn the brain off, check a bullshit site instead of doomscrolling for once.

He looks out at the sunset’s gold rim clouds against a pastel sundowning darkness above a vast expanse of scrub and rock. You wanna say this is him driving in the hellscape middle of the Mojave on 40. The desert opens so wide, fading to blue shifted mountains and mesas in the extreme 4k video distance where it’s already dusked itself dark. So he’s gotta be driving north, right? Rock tumbler voice on the narrator says, it's pretty out there isn't it? Turns and he looks down at the seat next to him in this old beater car as big as god’s dick with some ancient rumbling V8 he's driving and the revolver comes into frame. A hand, his skin weathered, pale, dry, rock hard lookings, reaches down and pats a shining black void the pistol looks like on a ripped up red leather bench seat in streaming 1080HQ high def. I just have to do this one thing he says. They can't have my goddamn kid.