Who The Fuck Clapped 7 Times?

…and why?

You’ve written a story, or an article, or an essay, or whatever the hell you’ve written, and you slowly watch as the claps accumulate.

50 claps.

100 claps.

It’s happening. People are reading and acknowledging your work. It’s a pretty cool feeling. Who knows how long it took you to develop the courage to make your writing available to the public? One year? Five years? Ten years even?

150 claps.

Before you began writing, your words were just thoughts, unformed bits of flotsam and jetsam that you collated and made coherent through this magical process we call “thinking”. Something stirred within you, desire perhaps, and provided the electrical impulses required to animate your synapses and dendrites…

200 claps.

…and you were moved by this divine spark, which some call creativity, to commit this combination of desire and thought into words by harnessing energy— the currency of life — energy you could have been using to do just about anything else…

250 claps.

Thru this mysterious process of divine alchemy you produce, you give birth to, dare I say it? Art? You’ve brought something from another dimension into this one…

300 claps.

It may not be world-beating, it may not represent the pinnacle of your abilities, but perhaps bits and pieces of it do, and in those moments you might have even entered the zone, that magical place where potential and action conspire to make the abstract manifest in ways the we can never predict — sometimes with wild success even …

350 claps.

And with your mental and emotional well-being hanging in the balance, you present this creation to the world for judgement.

400 claps.

The people are liking it, it seems, judging by the clap count… those wonderful, serotonin-inducing, massive leaps of 50.

50 — it’s a nice, even number. Clean. Strong. Orderly even. Watching the claps accumulate you can predict which number will arrive next, and there’s something oddly reassuring about that.

450 claps.

You’re so close to an even 500. I like that number. It looks good on a page. Halfway to 1000, which is a pretty respectable number of claps. It suggests balance and authority, promise and potential. It has a calming effect even. It’s the Valerian root of numbers.

550 claps.

Now you’re running downhill, with the wind at your back, providing an effortless momentum. With your worry now behind you, you feel nothing but excitement and anticipation as the possibilities open up to you. You even allow yourself to dream a little! Maybe this’ll be the one, maybe it’ll go viral…

600 claps.

Your creation is speaking to the public, and they’re speaking back in the form of claps, and nothing can stop you now. It’s like a ritualistic reciprocity or something, and you’re on your way, advancing towards your dream 50 claps at a time, and there’s no stopping you —

607 claps.

…

…

…

…

…

…

The needle is jerked violently off the record and the party stops.

607 claps?

Just what in the fuck is that all about???

Is this some kind of cruel joke or something, you wonder?

Your neatly ordered praise has now been distorted, the universe is no longer offering it’s clean and structured reassurance, and your effortless momentum has been halted abruptly and rudely.

The sudden confusion paralyzes your brain. Chaotic thoughts run amok and cannot be reeled in, and you experience them in your 3rd eye as petulant toddlers let loose in your brain to spill finger paints and vomit and throw tennis balls of your frontal cortex.

You look closely and notice that these toddlers have identical, adult’ish facial features. You vaguely recognize the big mischievous grin, the eyes that suggest at least a mild amount of weed consumption, and the big furry black hat common to Russians in movies like Rocky 4 and The Hunt For Red October.

The chaos is deafening, and only allows you one clear thought, and that thought is this:

What the hell has just happened?

And in that moment all the little toddlers morph into inky black blots, proceed to dance around each other with a sense of manic excitement, and then finally reform into an amorphous blob before eventually taking coherent shape again and approaching your 3rd eye in a slow and deliberate manner…

Although you can’t make it out exactly, the shape you are seeing is clearly a face. It’s surrounded by a circle of garish Christmas lights — blinking on and off feverishly — and a bunch of miniature, elaborately dressed and fiercely smiling jesters that emit an unsettling and roguish energy.

And then you finally see it clearly, the face that is. It was the same one you saw just minutes earlier, just larger and closer and obscenely detailed; you can see each and every pore, each fleck of dandruff in the eyebrows. The lips begin to move while the rest of the face remains eerily frozen, which gives the impression of an animated corpse being manipulated by a puppeteer.

The face offers a message, and that message is this:

You’ve been Smillew’d.

I often write ironically and satirically, but I’m actually very slow at recognizing it in other people’s writing. I had to read Frank T. Bird for months before I finally realized his stories were a combination of fact and fiction. I remember the day I had my epiphany actually. I was reading one of his stories and I thought: wait a second, did Frank really drunkenly piss on a gangster’s shoes while reciting Eminem? That seems a little far-fetched…”

Most satirists offer a baseline level of truth, or something like an orienting mechanism for readers to latch onto so they don’t drown in the irony and satire. After all, we live in a relative world, where things only exist in the presence of their opposite.

Not so with Smillew Rahcuef. Or Ann James for that matter. They are wholly unique in that way.

Or, if they are offering basic truths, they’re so drenched in mustard and mayo that I’m often left off-balance, wondering if they really are basic truths after all.

Does Smillew really have 7 kids? Is he really married to an American woman? Did he really grow up in America? Is Ann really his aunt? Does Ann really have dogs? Did she really work as a janitor at a bunny ranch?

Do not look to their writing for clarification. It will only confuse you further.

Getting Smillew’d is really a badge of honor. You will realize this eventually, once you grasp that the act is symbolic of his surreal brand of approval.

And though I feel like I know little about Smillew, and even less about Ann, I trust the sense of warmth and kindness I get from both of them. They’ve quickly become two of my favorite people here.

I was chatting with Kristen Stark in the comments section somewhere, expressing my desire to meet Smillew and Ann someday. And that says alot, because I don’t like meeting people. Just ask my friends. Both of them.

But I can’t imagine this meeting in any kind of linear, traditionally coherent way; I can only imagine it in the surreal context of an Ann James story, who I keep thinking of as a female Don Juan Matus figure for some reason (you know, the Yaqui witch doctor from the Castaneda books).

I imagine her grabbing my wrist with great force and reading my palm by tracing a long nail along the lines in my hand, alternately cackling and frowning, alternately speaking English and whatever that other language is Ann often speaks in her stories, then cutting me up into pieces and feeding me to her dog and magically reassembling me from his feces before kindly serving me a bubbling, hearty soup from something resembling a cauldron…

I imagine seeing Smillew appearing in the corner of my eye but vanishing every time I attempt to look at him directly…

I imagine a walk, a cool breeze, and crowds of jesters and tricksters flying dick-shaped kites at high altitude, and refusing to engage me when I try to make contact…

I imagine waking up from what feels like a dream to a face slowly receding from my 3rd eye and into the darkness of the collective unconsciousness, and a voice emanating from the mouth on this otherwise frozen face — sounding like a young boy who’d just inhaled some helium — saying something about $5 dollar referrals on medium, and cackling crazily before taking another hit of the helium and repeating the thing about the referrals…and repeating this process over and over again, like a great cracked record in the sky.