We Need the Fortnite Skinification of All Biological Life on Earth – Jonathan Allan
February 21, 2023
I had either too much foreskin or too little. Finding out wasn’t my intention. I didn’t like looking at the thing and doctors made me nervous. Not necessarily because of the invasiveness, but because after the invasion, the nation building would begin: some saline suppository for urethral sounding maybe, or a cut-up job and post-surgery doohickey; or worse, there would be nothing wrong and this would just be my lot in cock. See for now I just knew the problem was that it hurt. I figured chronic pain would be like a thong, the way it removes wedgies through immersion. With nothing to refer itself to, the pain would be obliterated away. I would become invulnerable, a respawning player-character action game hero. But it wasn’t like that. The biology of pain doesn’t work linguistically, I suppose. Plus, I had a memory. I remembered not-pain. I remembered when I had a penis that felt normal, or at least looked normal.
I guess I have to admit I don’t really know normal. You come to normal through data and mine wouldn’t pass muster in a scientific journal. It was pornos that perverted my data mainly. And my dad’s dick. Having experienced it as a young boy, my understanding wasn’t clear. Some thought the retrieval of this kind of data could be traumatizing, trauma often playing games with your knowledge of a situation—maybe this is why nation building never worked. Maybe this is why I didn’t trust doctors….How could looking at my botched cock not traumatize you? And how, then, could they come to an intelligent solution? Paranoia set in: if they could, they were psychos, and the solution, like some citrus topical or rat-trap cast, could be a Psycho’s Trick.
As with the drunken-like memory of my father’s dick, that time from the sliver of the sliding bathroom door, hanging as he sat and shit, which turned me into Ham, or Moses who saw the divine father’s back parts, his face obscured, psychos and data sets have an inherent incompleteness, and paranoia too. Incompleteness is an essential part of any system, whether it be your brain’s connectome, creating some wobbly and twisty curve of a specified type between points at a moment’s notice, or Big data analytics. And it was systems that made things happen: the traffic system, the nation-building system, the biological system. The absence of space between cars, that was the traffic; the lack of stability was the lack of a new, democratic and free nation; the lack of, the lack of…maybe it was Lack itself that required personhood to have a biology in the first place. Roundabouts and traffic lights, veins and sinews, the transportation of gas and guns, these circuits, they lack something. Not-information was essential to information, nescience equalling knowledge, and hence dad dick data did have something to offer.
I thought about my dad’s dick more and more, especially as the painful days progressed. I thought about the doctors that served him in his final years, with the staples around his neck and the chemotherapy. I wondered how his dick was through all this. I would lose my mind and along would my penis go: both heads going sicko mode like the cancer in the throat.
The problem with my dick wasn’t cancerous, luckily. But after many days, as I faced endless throbbing and prickly sensations, I realized the cause of my troubles after carefully feeling around: there was an ingrown hair that had molded itself around the structure of my shaft. Like cancer, my penis was at war with itself. The negation was built in. Vaguely, I believed the problem of the ingrown hair was being exacerbated by my botched circumcision months earlier. It was like it was wrapped around some piece of loose skin, squeezed and blue, the whole thing twisted and intertwined with my cock like rootstalk. This loose skin wasn’t foreskin, for that was mostly gone, but some lingering piece left behind that was neither foreskin nor skin, born through the chaos of Foreskin versus Skin. The doctor who performed the failed procedure, I suppose, was the revolutionary subject that propelled it into its new form. I was all very philosophical about it because I needed some space from it, to consider it in its cellular form, an abstract, mathematical form, to get distance from it as the thing that hurt me.
If I could profit off it, I guess, this would also be a good way to get my self outside of any human arrangement around it, to feel better about it. Circus sideshows were a thing of the past, now relegated to social media, but there was less of a lucrative market for this kind of freakiness, as most major platforms banned nudity. It was more about bad cooking now or having autism. I considered a life where I became the Mr. Hands of fucked-up penises, and I considered it dutifully. I looked at my options: 8chan, KiwiFarms—I could even sell myself to Barstool Sports. But I did not want to simply become something to just shock your friends with. I wanted something more. Maybe profit was not what I was after but clout.
Flesh and spirit are out. Inwardness and outwardness have been replaced by the overwhelming flows of the totally Tubular border crossings you find in endless video streams, always the most tactile, foley-filled clips, and big Latina rump after rump, often serving as advertising for Ring home security cameras. Even as flesh, it is incomprehensible; and as spirit, devoid. But yet also plural and overdetermined, being both fleshes and spirits, abstract and general but individually curated. I love the Algorithm, and wanted to be a part of Her unknowing and all-knowing bosom, to generate, with Her milk, more content and more clout and more Algorithm.
It was the clout-demon Paul who first addressed the pagans, and he did so with a polemic of circumcision. The circumcised becomes uncircumcised if he fails to follow God: “circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter.” By becoming inwardly circumcised, a path to salvation. No need to actually do it, like my ass. I had always been too focused on the outward.
This is not to say I should have privileged the inward. I should just become one of these guys who calls himself schizophrenic online until it’s true. I’m way too online, I would say. I am the Great Man of the Great Weirding. I’m the most online. I’m going goblin mode. I have poster brain. I’m schizopoetic. I’m being random. I invented the McGangBang. My uncle works for Blizzard. Charles Manson was at Esalen. I’d get super into Kabbalah but not in a paranoid, anti-semitic way, in a I need a new way to recognize these patterns around me way. But that was for the real heads who followed me. My raison d’ȇtre…my cock is all fucked up: here’s a picture, ironic caption, “thirst trap,” freckle filter, at Belle Delphine, “Let’s collab,” tongue out emoji.
Then I would let the circuit board do its work, and the Algorithm carry it into salvation. Then my pain would be more obliterated than a hoe, and my lack would transcend want, buried in it, immersed like a thong: now no more patterns of negation and affirmation which construct and define every moment of my perception, but instead an infinite tiling of light and lines that you could never understand in any meaningful way, and that is bliss—that is my feed, my timeline—whose material basis, the phone itself and its network of devices, was circuits and chips here and there and up in the air creating a wiring diagram classified to me, communicating meaningfully in a way with no meaning, me at the center, but nowhere and all over. Let’s fucking go! I’m going viral.
I tend to get reflective when good things happen. My inclination is to compare it to all the bad things that have ever happened, and think about how my mood has never really changed according to the content of the events around me—not because I’m some psycho, but because of biological cope, like adrenaline and resignation. But this time I had a good reason: I had gone viral for my mangled, abominable penis, so I began to think about the boy who asked me to have the operation done in the first place, that boy of Cyrene who accompanied me to my circumcision—or crucifixion, or sissification, or circumfixation of knife and skin and not of words—he who flung me into this world on account of the deathly perimeter around his thought, so rigid and incurious it made me his unwashed. It was love, though, that had him ask this of me: the body could always be replaced by another, but he wanted me, so my body would have to change, and really it was all unimportant; the body was over, he would say, and soon there would be none of these categories or distinctions. It would be Algorithm all the way down, a portable fatherland, and your body would be some material base that you wouldn’t have to understand or think about.
“Okay <3 Yay,” I replied.
The doctor he took me to, he must have understood the body. His mistake was unavoidable, perhaps, because it was of his body, which he could never understand: a slip of the hand, some spasm, for some reason, unanticipated and idiopathic, a spontaneous revolution. That was all material, and that’s why we had to do away with it. Maybe Cy would have loved me forever then, or at least until the servers burned out and the circuit boards melted to jelly, wobbly to hold and impossible to grasp, for real this time, materially, like all the jelly in all the stores that was made by our guts and brains in collaboration with the guts and brains of animals, smooshed out of them, now in stasis on a shelf as some trademark among other trademarks, completely paralyzed.
I decided to collab with the Onlyfans accounts and the Reddit girls because it would help my own trademark. This was the only kind of thing you were allowed to do to yourself anymore. I would never own a home or start a family, not with this awful offal on me, and in this economy, but I could maybe be a brand. There would always be a market, some freak who can fixate on even the worst thing about you and jack off to it. It was nice to know, and it was always a refuge I resorted to in my own life. Every awful thing that ever happened to me, I jerked off about. It probably started with Jesus on the cross. They would always carve him so sexy.
For me, everything was beginning to come back to Jesus. I never read the Bible, but my not-reading has remained one of the most profound readings of my life. I have pieced together the thing with half-remembered glimpses of my father’s faith and paintings on every wall in every place, familiar or unfamiliar, often foreign in build, with some weirdo Gesellschaft, but somehow knowable, even in its parallelomania. There is a forever propagating co-authorship of the bible: the Lay, the Priestly, and me. If language is still important, I must insist on not capitalizing the bible for this reason—it’s not one thing, but many, and that’s what’s so holy: its unavoidable data which, for so long, had its strangeness veiled, its allegorical curves contained by capitals and capitols, was unleashed by unreading.
This has me coming to another trademark I could add to my brand: the botched circumcision guy, who, for $5.99, you can see do eFukt content with your favorite egirl…he’s Catholic now.
And so my podcast appearances began: first it was Brain Aerobics for the Downtown Set, who hooked me up with Larouchite Vape Club and All Bucket Bunnies Must Die. There was nothing that could be better for my brand than getting canceled, so I said some really provocative things, like about rape and body dysmorphia, but my takes had no clearly-bounded shape, which my friends at Mass said wasn’t Christian: we had an understanding of things and we must employ that understanding, but this was Marxism to me. It was something about Adam letting his cock hang out and not knowing it, and when that all changed, and we started hiding our cocks and pussies, that was what made us human or something. See, my understanding of this wasn’t clear. But I insisted to myself my understanding was in my misunderstanding: throwing yourself, with speed, at a white wall, believing the passage to be pale.
But no one ever came for me. My clout was slowly clouded. The Algorithm had made me Preterite, passed over for bigger and weirder cocks and hotter takes. Should I have become a Coin? Is this the way of the superhighway or was it some sin in some post? What if I killed Palmer Luckey? What if I went to Ninja’s house and tied him up and prayed the Rosary for his chat? What if I lit David Geffen’s yacht on fire? What if I chained myself to the Twitter headquarters? What if I went GG Allin mode at a Princeton eating club, or the Lampoon Castle, those fucking cronies? What if I joined DoorDash and ate everyone’s food until I was banned and I blew my brains out on the top step of Memorial Church on the Jewish Day of Atonement?
My ability to cause pain must be directed inward; that is our only option left in this place where nothing tangible or productive can ever happen. This is where my circumcision becomes accelerationist and I make some big splash that will make something happen for fuck’s sake.
I’m going to cut my dick off.
“Cy, you bastard, you fuck, if you wanted my body, why did you leave me with it? All your posthuman libertarian friends followed my Onlyfans. Peter Thiel was a $10,000/mo subscriber to my Substack. They did a theater workshop where Peter Vack hung dong playing me. I was called fascist by all the right people,” I screamed as I sawed, with drama created for cameras—but alas, alone; when I cut my dick off, I did it for no Reel or Story.
My circumcision was now wholly done for, but soon after, the pain was replaced with dizziness, and the firmness of my body was obliterated until I was lying in blood; that putrid liquid mass that had sat in my cock, that disgorged pool of past and future erections, had it been there the whole time, shadowbanned? We only knew it through skin as it became hard, a piercing projectile hurtling toward an indefinite destination. Now what I saw was red and real. Lying next to me, my pathetic penis, covered in hesitation wounds, draped in gore, it was a holy lance directed toward a threshold, and on the other side there was a kingdom, where my dead dad’s dick appeared in immaculate light.
Blinded by dick, I looked down and saw myself transformed. I was Morty from Rick and Morty, and then I became Harley Quinn, then a man in a banana suit, and I found myself dancing. That’s hella random, haha. Suddenly everything in the bathroom, from the blood, to my severed penis, towel rack, the sink, was glowing, interactable. I began to jump around; there were kids to shoot. I took out a big pixelated pickaxe from the hole in my crotch and destroyed every glowing object in sight, including my now dormant and lifeless penis, perfectly popped, turned into the splatter of a squib, an unholy chunk of myself now reified back into all the rest of the undefined mass in the world, yet somehow appearing in my inventory as something I could build upon.
My hallucination was named by the doctors, but it was something in Latin, and I didn’t really understand what they were talking about anyway. I’m not really sure what naming it even tells us about it, truthfully. Language was lame. I shouldn’t use the word lame: language is important, and I don’t mean to offend. The doctors used a lot of language to tell me I could have died, but I knew that from the hospital bed beneath me. Lying there, I remembered my schizo phase on Twitter, and thought this would be the perfect time to reactivate and become an I’m actually Jesus returned guy. Reborn now, I could start a Discord religion. We could have Fortnite events worshiping me. We could have a giantess Doja Cat there to sing hymns, my followers floating through the clouds, collecting experience points. It would behoove me to be “normal for a while,” the doctors insisted.
Cy came to visit me in the hospital. It was all so embarrassing. This whole self-harm thing was probably gaslighting or something, but I didn’t care. It had been months since I had seen him, and he looked so different. He was Korean now. He had all these surgeries, I guess. And you know what, he was wrong. His flesh had changed and along with it his spirit. I know because, seldom a pud-puller, he told me he jerked off to my video with Buck Angel, and he did it, not because of any single visual frame, but because he loved and missed me and felt me through the screen. He insisted there was an aura to my porno, and it was an aura that he understood and felt fully in his body. He had been reading about projection and photography and told me the way those mechanisms captured the data from my light and how it “consummated a perfect symphony.” It was perfect not through the act of perfection, he insisted, but by imperfectly destroying and deconstructing me as a circle into irregular tiles of light, rearranging them in some elaborate way that I was transformed into a comprehensible 4:3 square. I didn’t understand it, but I believe that he believed it, and that was perfectly profane, and holy too.
When I returned home, I had all these new ideas about the objects around me. The glow from my hallucination had lingered. I saw, for the first time, my thermostat and how it worked. Everything was inspectable, and I was a moment away from all the information in the world we had about it. It didn’t overwhelm anymore, though. All the systems that made things function, they contained data and hence they could be rebuilt, like a circle into a square. My cock, or lack of cock, was included in all this. While it was gone now, in some biohazard waste bin, its glow remained. Perhaps, radiating from the threshold of the knowable, it was really the clear, pale light of my father’s dick.