Weird Facts, Wilder Grievance: On BuzzFeed, Bulbs, and a Dog Named Sparky Who I Did Not Trust

BuzzFeed. Let's start there, because we have to start there, because I opened that page and before a single "fact" loaded, three different boxes tried to sell me a mattress, a boot, and something called a "quiz." A quiz! In 1982 a quiz was a piece of paper Sister Ambrose handed you face-down and you turned it over with your own two hands and if you failed it, you failed it, there was no algorithm whispering "you got 8 out of 10 — are you smarter than a golden retriever?" No. You got a D and you carried it home in a manila folder and your father looked at it the way a man looks at a car that won't start. That's accountability. That's a system. This "People Are Sharing Beautiful, Day-Brightening Facts That Sound Totally Made Up, But Are Actually 100% True" business — first of all, that headline is eleven words too long, and second of all, it's using the word "beautiful" to describe a FACT, which is a category error, facts aren't beautiful, facts are facts, a hammer isn't handsome, it's a hammer, and this is what happens when a website lets the interns write the marquee.

But fine. Fine! I clicked through. I always click through. My doctor — not a real doctor, a fella at the counter of the pharmacy who I've decided has doctor-level authority because he once correctly guessed I had a sinus thing — my doctor says I have "compulsive click-through syndrome" and I said doc, in 1982 we didn't click through anything, we walked through, we walked to the library and we asked Mrs. Denby at the desk and she looked something up in a drawer the size of a Buick and that was the whole transaction, no ads for boots.

And here's the thing about "facts that sound made up but are true" — that's not a category, that's just called "facts," you dunderheads, all facts sound made up until you know them, that's the whole business of a fact, it arrives and it doesn't ask permission, like the man who used to come collect on the Amana account —

— and speaking of collections, I want to tell you about Gerald. Not important Gerald, my Gerald, the man who lived two doors down in a house with a carport that never once held a car, always just a canoe, upside down, tarped, for eleven years, and Gerald collected bottle caps, not in a jar, in a filing system, alphabetized by soda name, and one August — this would be, I want to say, the August before they repaved Linden Street, so call it '81 going into '82, the summer the heat was so bad the tar on the road went soft and you could press your thumbprint into it like a crime scene — Gerald came over and said he had a Tab bottle cap from a batch that was recalled, a genuine recalled Tab, and he wanted my father to appraise it because my father had once, ONCE, sold a stamp for eleven dollars and this apparently made him the neighborhood Sotheby's. My father looked at the cap for a long time. A long time. And then he said, "Gerald, that's a Fresca cap." And Gerald — I have never before or since seen a grown man's face do what Gerald's face did — Gerald did not speak to my father again until the Bicentennial, no wait, the Bicentennial was earlier, I'm — it doesn't matter when, the point is the silence, the silence lasted years, and I never did find out if it was actually a Fresca cap or if my father was just tired and wanted to go inside, and Gerald eventually moved to, I believe, Ohio, or he died, one of the two, and nobody ever mentioned the bottle caps again and I think about this constantly and it has NOTHING to do with anything.

Where was I. The facts. The beautiful facts. See, and another thing — the article doesn't even tell you WHICH facts, or it does, I assume it does, somewhere below the fold, buried under a carousel of "18 Photos That Prove Nature Is Him," but by the time a person like me gets to the actual content we're two hundred words deep in scroll-fatigue, and scroll-fatigue, let the record show, did not exist in 1982 because there was nothing to scroll, there was a newspaper, and a newspaper has an END, a physical end, you reach the classifieds and you know you are DONE, there is closure built into the object, whereas a phone, my nephew's phone, that thing does not end, I have watched him thumb it for forty minutes with the specific dead-eyed look of a man rowing a boat with no shore in sight, and I said to him, son, at some point doesn't it just repeat, and he said "sort of" and would not elaborate and this, THIS, is the generational rift nobody's writing about — not Ukraine, not Syria, this, a boy who cannot locate the bottom of a website —

Actually let me back up because there was a woman, Deloris, who ran the register at the Rexall — and this has nothing to do with Gerald, separate story, do not conflate them — Deloris had a system where she would only give you your change in the order the coins came out of the drawer, no sorting, so sometimes you'd get a nickel-penny-nickel-quarter situation just cascading into your palm, and she'd narrate it, she'd say "there's your nickel" like you couldn't see the nickel, and one time — and I want to be careful here because I might be merging two Deloris stories into one, there may have been a second Deloris, at the OTHER Rexall, the one by the bowling alley that also sold bait, which in retrospect is an insane thing for a pharmacy to also sell, worms next to the aspirin — one time the register jammed on a Tuesday, I'm fairly sure it was a Tuesday because Tuesday was the day the bread truck came, and Deloris had to make change by HAND, out of her own APRON, and a line formed, a real line, out the door, past the bait, and nobody complained, NOBODY, because complaining about a slow line was not a thing a person did, you stood there, you looked at gum, and I don't know what happened to that register, I assume it's landfill now, I assume everything from that year is landfill now, including, apparently, my patience, which is also apparently landfill, because look what we've done to "sharing information" — we've made it a BEAUTIFUL, DAY-BRIGHTENING event, like a fact is a birthday, like knowing something true is supposed to give you a little serotonin treat, and back in my day a fact just sat there being true and you dealt with it, nobody brightened your day with the fact that the mail came at eleven, it just came at eleven, grimly, on schedule, the way a fact should.

Now — and I want to be fair here, because I am not an ideologue, I don't do the thing where I blame "the government" for a website's headline capitalization choices, that's a coward's move, that's a bumper-sticker mind at work, no, the responsibility here is diffuse, it's cultural, it's — it's the arcade, honestly, it traces back to the arcade, because the first time I ever saw a machine tell me "beautiful, get ready, high score incoming" in a friendly voice was Ziggurat's on Route 9, which also, and I cannot stress this enough, ALSO sold a slice of pizza for forty cents that gave at minimum three boys I personally knew a fever, and that machine, the one that talked to you, that was the beginning of computers flattering us, computers COMPLIMENTING us, and now forty years later a website is telling me a fact is "beautiful" the same way that Ziggurat machine told twelve-year-old Denny Fitch he was "the best," which he was not, Denny Fitch could not get past level two, Denny Fitch went on to — I don't actually know what Denny Fitch went on to do, we lost touch, I heard insurance, I heard also possibly Delaware —

And another thing — nobody in this article is named! That's the part that gets me! "People Are Sharing." WHICH people! In 1982 if you shared a fact, your NAME was on it, you stood behind your fact, you said "Carl told me this" and if Carl was wrong, Carl heard about it at the Rotary breakfast, publicly, over bad coffee, that's accountability, that's community, and now it's just "people," a fog of people, an anonymous cloud of fact-havers, and you cannot even find out if they were RIGHT, not really, not in your bones, because there's no Carl to corner —

I don't trust it. I don't trust the softness of it. I don't trust a fact wrapped in a bow. Somewhere there is a dog — Sparky, two houses down from Gerald, a mean, wall-eyed dog who bit exactly one mailman and became a local legend for it, statistically the least remarkable dog bite in American history and yet we discussed it for a YEAR — and Sparky never once needed his facts to be beautiful. Sparky just bit the man and that was that, plain, ugly, true. That's the standard. Nobody's meeting it.

Anyway I never did find out if Gerald's cap was really a Fresca. And another thing —

— Edgar