I am eating bananas3, drinking hot tea with sugar, smoking 'em fags. The fags that one-day are going to kill me4. I just rose from the bed after a week of sickness, what they call the flu. I remember the voice of my mom last week: "Good, you don't have a job, so you aren't missing out on anything". But I felt I was. Things were going on as usual. On the pillow I could almost hear the hum in the cable lines and feel the satellite's rotation and while I blew my nose I knew that somewhere out there someone signed--with encrypted black ink in the modern5 office--a million-billion-European-dollar-contract, and it certainly wasn't me who held the pen of fun and fortune. Butt! In that office the old boss fondles her bum. He mumbles: "dot com". The secretary gives him the look. Next week she's getting it her way: A nice piece of fur. Shot on-line. She doesn't really care about all this new-so-supposed-funky Internet business.

Back to me: I blow my nose. It's green, horrible human, metaphorically like a fluid piece of my brain. I flush it out in the Internet toilet. The tissue swims the cable lines. It's a pipe network. I climb back to the keyboard...Picture this: A dominating whore wearing long leather pants, ruling from a dungeon of banners. Down there: Millions of men get a taste of her whip every day. They pay for it, sucking her tit gentle. They are plugged into the archive. Attached to this piece of hardware. So alive. So hooked up with the mother. She gives birth to years of entertainment, millions of jobs, billions of words and images. The Internet is a bitch. And I am dying to break up with her. No! It's not true; I want to marry her. Say YES in the holy church of advertising and pop-up windows6.

And so I did that. 14 months ago. My big brother gave me his old 28.8 modem. It was a great experience to feel the live element of this machine for the first time. I imagined that my computer suddenly surfed a giant sized cd-rom, perhaps in the shape of the sun7. Perhaps like a big record needle spinning on the surface of a pancake with sugar and jam. My weekly journey to the Internet café, checking my anport99@hotmail.com account, had immediately been terminated. I could now do that without stepping into the dangerous streets of a capitol city. I thought: "Yes, perhaps, the Internet provides a safer world, but maybe not one less disturbing".... Someone will walk up to my 16-year-old daughter one day saying: "Excuse me, can I sit on your face and take a picture...you ask me why? Well, it's for an Internet site some of mine friends are doing". And so it all tastes a little bit like a fruit called fame.

This media was one of compression. That was one of the first cyber enlightenment I had. But it was also a mirror and it was also a supermarket with blindfolded people inside. I couldn't see you. I probably never will.

Surely, after I entered the world of cyber-space I stopped dreaming of angels and ghosts and my dreams took shape of a pop-up-banner-add8. I quickly gained a series of new invisible cyber-pen-pal-freaks9. The exciting new routine in my life was now--first thing in the morning--to check my mailbox. I would turn up the music a bit or cover my modem with some clothes so my roommate next door couldn't hear the song of the modem10. I didn't want him to know that I was so obsessed with this new medium. In the very same moments: I was excited and I was ashamed. The ambivalence of modern man, it was and it is the same song I usually play when I DJ at parties.

It's an old vinyl classic. Released last century. So many have stepped out on the dance floor to this tune with the hope of meeting someone whom could take them away from the dead beat of the disco-tech.

Two days before I got sick I had snorted cocaine with an old friend of mine in a club. I hadn't seen him for years. Now he worked in the Internet business. He had an excellent income, and obviously spending the money on something that gave him a thrill bigger than the one of buying a big big television. I don't blame the coke, but the fact was, two days later I was in bed, sweating with a red nose. In bed I looked back at myself, stepping out of the toilet room, going up to the bar...hanging in there, laughing, drinking, tapping my foot, looking at the crowded dance-floor. "Too much", I would say. A couple hours later I was pissing on a shop window on a main street with a grill-snack in my other hand. 4:30 am. A blurred reflection. If only the cops had caught me....

A girl once told me--when the knife of the intellect is sharp enough it can cut through anything. And then I am thinking--like thought, reading requires time. In addition, writing requires inspiration and the feeling of a need to actually say something worthwhile. On the other hand, modern painting doesn't necessarily require thought, or time, or inspiration. All it takes is ink spouted on canvas11. It's a bit like music. The noise. Sometimes I can't distinguish between writing a mail, writing an article, composing a song or painting a picture...All media become one. The girl on a sofa. Eating grapes. Sucking her thumb12. Tonight at noon we all meet on the plains, we will gather our horses and retreat to the castle.... Surrounded by grey analogue hand-made bricks no one will fall in love with Internet again. She wants you. She is naked, covered in white bug powder dust. Lick her clean, man, like her clean. The little man is drawing the curtains. The show is about to end. I am not the revolutionary. I am not even a performer. I am nothing but a portrait in words.

I speak with my new boss: "Hey, Jacob, Can you come down here on Friday, we want you to look at something, you see, we're going to decide what Internet provider we're gonna use for our web site, and you could possibly do some research for us on that topic, ehh?" And there you go. I'm employed. I've got a job. Ironically enough for a driver's license school. They want to put the so-called theory book on the Internet. What kind of theory is that, I might ask, after been studying at the university in 8 years? And so it goes--the bitch keeps haunting me till' the day when I run away from it all. But remember, no gold medal reward, unless you're inside the club.

On the outside, a little boy with glasses13, sitting under the big big oak tree, eating a banana. With a butterfly on top. Birds singing. Sun shining. The telephone...

Copyright © 2000 Jacob Ørsted Nielsen. All Rights Reserved.

Jacob Ørsted Nielsen is a 28 year-old piece of Danish Bacon, lives in Copenhagen. He is 'a little bit of everything' which also could mean 'nothing'. Nathan Penlington is a bit younger14 and lives in London, arranges weekly performance poetry venues. They got to know each other when J was signed up for communication studies in London, autumn 199715. J mailed the original text to N, hoping he could invoke a higher consciousness 16. 24 hours later it came back. N had added the footnotes17.

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