Letters of Wreck

So I backspace. So I delete and retype more efficiently, proficiently, a bio that will enamor and demonstrate my worth. But even the act of having an author write his/her bio is inherently fallacious, as how one perceives oneself and how one acts is often far different. I feel redundant now, cliché. Un-unique now. I’m sorry. I will now win your interest back by anecdotally exploring a hypothetical variant of the author bio, as my next business venture will be more purposeful, more accurate. I will lawfully stalk the famous in order to compose appropriate and accurate bios of them. Then, like all noteworthy spies, I’ll appear out of the shadows and deliver to them a succinct, heart-wrenching look into their soul for others to read, appreciate, and lust after. But again, I should note, I’ll be slightly different than the spies you know, read about, saw in their darkest suits and coiffed hair. There will be something intriguing about me that, even when other celebrity-bio-spies start to pop up, and their business cards’ emblazoned logos strike just as strikingly as mine, me, you will recall me. Phone me again. You got in on the ground-floor. Good for you.

Now that you’re on board, I can, of course, drop the façade and venture further into our mutually exclusive desires to be unique. Of course, I could point to our teenage selves who clung desperately to the notion that our orange iPods made us forever more unique. That blue and green were all the rage, unless you’re a girl, then maybe magenta. But we held strong for the one we wanted. And look at them now, with their curious eyes. Until that guy rocked a magenta one. Gasp!

Ridiculous as this may be, I’m not necessarily sure we’ve shaken this identity of self. Think Facebook. Think any social networking site that, let’s face it, doesn’t really cater to your desire to make new friends. This is not why you network socially. You want to be heard. You want to be unique. You want to be the star of the news feed. I get it. I’m writing on a blog. There are many, many of these.

So let’s, for a moment, look past the detrimental truth that we are not special, we have internalized Fight Club’s mantra, and we’re okay. Let’s even, briefly, look past the heart-aching knowledge that your most unique of problems have been lived before, cried over before, and have been gotten over before. History is not on your side, friend. But what if you shook the hipster tendency to scoff, and admitted that you are solely comprised of, perhaps, a combination of your biologic material, which has been passed down, and your purchased material? That The Cloud is the new heaven where data is both tangible and transient and you lust for such an ability. That, maybe, instead of my bio being a hometown, a quip about my family and interests, and where my work, my uniqueness, has appeared, that I’d instead list links to favorite songs, to critical analyses of albums, to IGN, to podcasts and NPR, to the bookmarks I’ve intended to go back to and have people see I’m going back to but never will, to my favorite memes, to my Alma Mater’s email server, to the unnamed porno-streaming sites, to the products I’ve purchased on Amazon, to my Amazon wishlist, as we are more driven by our lusts for the horizon, to my Facebook account and Twitter account, dead MySpace account, and deviant art account I created at 16, to my forgotten passwords and usernames, to remembered keystrokes, to WebMD and customer care avenues, to the E T Cs. This is me. I am the amalgamation of URLs. And if there was a more streamlined way to present them, me, I would. I actually pine for it. And yes, yes, Facebook has now implemented the auto-playing of videos into my News Feed. And Amazon has just patented its ‘anticipator package system,’ where I will receive products before I buy them, based on my search history. And I am excited. I am excited to tell you that I received an item, an item you’ve never heard of and want desperately, before you.