“One flip,” Donnovan said. He laid his palm on the table, pulled it away — revealing an old, shiny quarter.
Rammy agreed behind him, the humming wordless way he used to agree with Donnovan — “hmahm”.
“If it’s a head you go back to your cell no fuss, that’s it, and we say goodbye and we part ways, adios.” “hmahah,” said Rammy. “If it’s not we look away for a couple of minutes with the door open and your handcuffs — oops! Gone”.
“One flip,” said the prisoner, whose name they now knew was Johnson. His hands were handcuffed to the chair behind him, and he looked chained and broken, like on some scene from a hardcore porno movie. His hair was disheveled, like his shirt, and he was talking to them through it. “Let’s make it interesting, ha? Boss? Kinda boring like you said it”.
(more…)

* It was a cold bright day in April and all the clocks were striking eleven-thirty.

* Call me Mike.

* It was an okay time.

* In the beginning, God created Yahtzee.

* Happy families are all alike; unhappy families are also alike.

* Howard Roark picked his nose.

* Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—- Fuck this fucking shit.

As of now, September first, 2008, I’m the first me in Google. This is a great honor.

I’m also the second, third, fourth and fifth. All the first five Jonathan Silbers, Google says they’re me. It feels great. If you ask Google, there is no denying who, in this entire world, is Jonathan Silber. (It’s me.)

The Google results are as follows: the first is my Linkedin page, in which you can read my entire resume, and also find out where I work, so you could come over late in the afternoon with a shotgun under your coat. The second result is my other blog, a digitalist, where you can find reasons you’d want use this shotgun on me. On the third link you get my Facebook page, where you can make sure you know what I look like, and so avoid the embarrassment of shooting strangers.

My resume, my blog, my Facebook page: indeed, these all prove that I am here, that je suis, that j’existe, that I posses life and history and friends — I can’t fade away, I will never disappear from memory, not entirely. As long as there is Google there is proof, firm, solid, that I was here. On those interminable nights where I feel myself fading away into nothing, all I have to do to remain alive is Google myself.