7th
Jakob Lodwick IM
Me: Hello Jakob.
Jakob Lodwick: Hello Mr. Nick Denton.
Me: What are you doing this weekend?
Jakob Lodwick: Hanging with my black roommate Reggie Watts. Have you heard of him?
Me: Why yes, I have in fact. You’ve a permanent link to his website on the upper right corner of your Tumblr page, which leads directly to a photo of him, AND you’ve also posted random photos of him on your Tumblr page. It’s hard to miss him.
Jakob Lodwick: Oh yeah, I totally forgot about that.
Jakob Lodwick: ;)
Jakob Lodwick: Isn’t it cool though, me living with a black guy, a real black guy? He’s so black! I mean, he’s got, like, a huge afro! Even his name sounds black! Say it Nick. “Reggie Watts.” Doesn’t that just sound so black?
Me: Like a character from Good Times, The Jeffersons, or Sanford and Son.
Jakob Lodwick: That’s one of the reasons I chose him to be my black roommate Nick. I could be at a party and casually mention in passing, “oh yeah, my roommate Reggie Watts and I stayed in on Saturday night to watch An Inconvenient Truth,” and whomever I was talking to would immediately know that my roommate was black without my having to say so, not to mention the cool inherent by staying in on a Saturday night to watch an environmental documentary.
Me: Does Reggie Watts happen to have a thing for effete, British, new media overlords?
Jakob Lodwick: I’m not entirely sure, but he’s open-minded. So am I, obviously. It’s this sort of stuff that makes me so different from all the other young white people Nick. I’m edgy. I’m complicated. I’m above the fray. I’m different. Just like the thousands of other white people with Tumblr pages.
Me: I see.
Jakob Lodwick: You see, we Tumblr people photograph mundane things, things that everyone else overlooks, things like crumbling structures made of brick, rusty metal signs, the elderly, our dogs, close-up shots of coins laying on the sidewalk next to dried pieces of chewing gum and fresh snot-rockets, and we post them on our Tumblr pages so that everyone can see how un-mainstream we are. And while we’re fully integrated into modern technological blogging advances, we simultaneously mourn the death of bygone technological advances, like the Atari ST and Polaroid cameras. We take time to notice the minutiae that regular people, people without Tumblr pages, are too doltish to notice.
Me: But if you’re so tuned in to “the minutiae,” why is it that you seem to overlook the larger, more glaring issues staring you right in the face?
Jakob Lodwick: You mean that time that I didn’t realize it was Super Bowl Sunday and I made a point to tell everyone about it to show them how un-mainstream and cool I am, because that was really un-mainstream and cool of me, even if I might have been totally full of shit by pretending not to realize what day it was, wasn’t it? Nick, I’m just not into the whole pop culture thing, the fame game that all of the vacuous people that read and comment on Gawker are so obsessed with.
Me: Well, no, the Super Bowl thing was not what I was referring to, but you raise an interesting point nonetheless. I was referring to your relationship with Julia Allison. Doesn’t having dated her, perhaps the most egregious offender of self-engrossed media harlotry in the modern era, contradict much of what you just professed to loathe?
Jakob Lodwick: Not at all Nick. It only serves to enhance my aura of aloof complexity. I’m a walking juxtaposition. A human contradiction. I’m complicated.
Jakob Lodwick: Dating Julia also serves to paint me as a sympathetic figure by drawing attention away from what a pompous bag of rotting assholes I really am and focusing it on Julia’s atrociousness.
Me: BRILLIANT!
Jakob Lodwick: I know. So what’s say that my black roommate Reggie Watts and I get together with your black friend, The Assimilated Negro, and enjoy microbrews at a poetry slam sometime?
Me: Sounds ripe homeslice! Catch you on the flippity flip!
