I Signed Up To Be Part of Some Thing

A Nielsen Family Rating Story

I signed up to be part of some Nielsen Family Rating thing. It had me, the app, the app asked me give it permission to add my devices. Naturally I added my laptop, phone, and desktop computer. They all required different Nielsen programs. The one I tried for my laptop, it did not work. The app on my phone worked, and now, apparently, I can win $500 dollars a month. I also signed up for something that alerts me of potential class action lawsuits I could be involved in. I went through them, filled out the ones I was a part of, and silently hoped I would get money last night. I even paid $20 dollars for access to the service. They said if you get less money from the settlements than how much you pay for the service, they’ll give you it back. I’ve been receiving a lot more spam emails lately. I cull them all, quickly. Select, select all, delete. Then I empty the trash bin out and they go away forever. I made offers on four pairs of shoes, on Ebay. I offered lower than the asking price, and two of the sellers sold their shoes to me. So now I have two pairs of shoes getting shipped to my apartment. One pair was $38.99 and the other was $53.65. They’re coming later this July. One is a pair of Keen boots. I like the style of Keen, with their wide toe boxes and outdoorsy look. The other pair is a pair of vintage Marithe Francois Girbaud shoes that I swear I have seen online, on different websites, the same pair, for almost a year now. I bought them for $53.65 and they’re coming to my apartment next week. I also searched for my name on various government websites to determine if I have unclaimed funds. It’s my money.

Look, the thing I’m trying to get at is, I signed up for a bunch of things, paid money, got money, and stuff. Maybe it was because I drank four Coca Colas, but that doesn’t matter. I did all this stuff online, on my computer, on my laptop, and when I went outside the world was just as digital as the one in my phone. Green rivets plunked into gigantic peeling rectangles with rounded edges and one sharp part. A woman, on her phone, giving her phone to her baby back and forth to her, she wants it for a second, and then her baby wants it. And I noticed that he didn’t mind pigeons, they became a passive part of his environment that he didn’t find substantial, at least in that moment I think. He swiped past Sponsored Ads and focused on fifteen second long skits of a crazy Latino man with bright blue hair getting a bag put over his head and then the skit changes areas and he’s in a room on the floor with a bag over his head, struggling. The kid was about four years old. His foot touched my knee and I thought it was funny while we waited for the train. I wanted his foot to touch my knee because I want a kid around. My friend, my 27 year old friend has this big space underneath his apartment. He has access to it, it’s his, and he signed the lease. He’s working things out with other guys who are interested in making it into a real thing. A place for performing arts. I want to perform. I can make all these crazy faces and constrict my throat to replicate things, wild things that I really put my heart into. I find expression like this, this insane expression of the spirit of a crazy person, to be beautiful and necessary and it must exist and if we can get a bunch of people to come, to see this expression and many other expressions of course, in my friend’s cluttered, massive studio space, then maybe there will be more of this magic in the world. The magic in the world could increase, and we could empty our spam folders and then go into our trash, and empty that, too.