being able to just post 'lol'

**encey** · February 18, 2011

So, I post on other internet forums, where grown-ups go and write in full sentences and talk about nougat and, like, blood marrow and shit. And if I were to respond to someone's post on those forums with just, 'lol,' I would be fucking kicked out in a heartbeat like a red-nosed vagrant pleading for malt liquor alms two bits at a time outside the dingiest 7-Eleven.

Not so, here. Just saying 'lol' is common currency. It's a way of belonging, of expressing your inner, essential wattiamity, as someone who appreciates the subtle nuances of textual expression and the unplumbed depths of humor, of insight into the deepest human need for acknowledgement in a cold and overwhelmingly uncaring, meaningless existence. Someone who can show in three letters (really just two, if you count them in my way) that they have won a tight grip upon that innermost human force of eros upon which all civilization and culture, all those social bonds that give meaning and shape to our shared lives, every treasure of the creative imagination, are built.

That is, in fact, why the rolling lol constitutes the supremely vulnerable expression of our kingdom of ends that it does -- for, it reveals to us that nothing holds together the intelligibility of the world we find ourselves thrown into except our own self-legislated act of giving ourselves the rule of 'lol,' and that it takes but one act of self-exception, one willed refusal to say 'yes' to the pact we have created together, to bring the harmony of our fundamental practical imperative -- to act only on that maxim that could be willed as a universal 'lol' -- crashing to the ground in a paroxysm of communal disorder one mere degree above total chaos. Confronted with this fact, of our responsibility to the 'lol' being the very, and sole, vital force keeping that 'lol' alive, we tend to shrink back in terror before the abyss of nothingness looming beyond our wholehearted assent, and retreat into a callous or self-deceptive stance upon our standing in this community as one in which we are free to give full rein to the heteronomous policy of action driven by our basest instincts and the vanity of our sensual inclinations, whereby we mistake the pleasure of breaking the 'lol' for what is really the only true and non-illusory pleasure available to us insofar as we are capable of acting at all, namely, the pleasure of willing the 'lol' for its own sake.

The point being: This is the only place in the universe where we are free from the overt tyrranical oppression of message board dictators and the stealthy etiolation of the status quo upon our moral powers. This is, in short, the one place we are free to affirm the 'lol' as the basis of our humanity and the dignity by which it is characterized as such, and so I salute WATMM for the haven and fortress of 'lol' that it is, always has been, and always will be. Viva el 'lòl'!

Edited February 18, 2011 by encey