abi writes here

This is the Footer

You are about to begin reading the footer on Abi's blog. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the other windows; music is probably playing on your iTunes. ⌘+tab to it and pause the song right away. Maybe, your iTunes just froze up and won't listen to you. Hit ctrl+alt+delete and bang it repeatedly until the music dies out. Or if you prefer, just stay in this window and hope the music and the Gmail Notifier and the yellow popups emanating from the lower right corner will just leave you alone.

Now, try to foresee everything else that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

It's not that you expect anything in particular from this particular footer. You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from Presidents, from websites, from journeys, from marriages, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about footers? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of footers, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of this footer. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don't recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an asshole who doesn't know how to write, and who instead, chooses to flagrantly plagiarize Italo Calvino's first chapter from If on a winter's night a traveller. Now that you know that this piece of writing is a fake, a copy, a work of a criminal even, you are bitterly disappointed. For a second there, you thought this author was actually creative! And just for a millisecond, you thought about following him on Twitter. But that's impossible now because you only follow the most brilliant people and the author here seems to be quite the opposite.

You even wonder why you are still reading the footer of such a talentless hack? And the answer to that is obvious — you are not a quitter. Once you start on something, you don't stop until you achieve complete success. When Ronald Reagan could not run in 1988 due to term limits, you petitioned to get rid of term limits altogether. And when the courts threw out that petition, you called your congressman. You called him everyday for the first twelve years and you've been calling her for the last nine. And on November 4 2008, you wrote in Ronald Reagan's name just like you've done every election since '88. When your math teacher give you a D in 7th grade, you didn't sleep until the next year after getting an A. You are one of the 40% of Twitter users who returned after the first month. You are Donald Trump. You are Greg Kinnear's character in Little Miss Sunshine (which you hate to find out, is one of the author's favorite movies). In short, you never quit, and for this deeply-seated reason, you will continue reading this footer regardless of how long, boring or fake it is or becomes.

Your mind wanders once again to this plagiarizing rat of an author. What can this guy do? He can't design (obviously, someone else designed this blog), he can't write, he most probably can't read. Can he code? Ah! Maybe, he can. Maybe, that's the only thing he can do! You almost click this link to his projects page. But you stop yourself midway, what if that page has another long boring essay and you, being the non-quitter that you are, would have to read every word of that too. So, you don't bother with even going near the link to his about page. Yes, it's best not to start.

Now, you are seething with anger. You have read 752 words of the author's writing (or rather, of Calvino's writing) and he's done all the talking. You'd like to talk back, scream at the author, because you are the kind of guy who calls up Jim Skinner when your local McDonald's refuses to serve you breakfast at 10:59am. So, you start composing an email but immediately after you write the words “To the bastard who ripped off everyone..”, all the energy seems to get sucked out of your body. You put down your pen, so to speak. You give up! Perhaps for the first time in your life. Fuck. You are really really really really really really pissed off. You wish you could reach into the computer and grab the neck of the author. But, with a heavy sigh, you give up, yet again. All is lost. You are doomed to read this footer for as long as it runs.

And as you wallow in your own misery, unbeknownst to you, your computer's security has been compromised. Your hard disk's contents have been copied and the disk subsequently erased. Your porn has been sent to your grandmother, the one that's still living. And at this very moment, your credit card is being used to purchase Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller, which Amazon will deliver to the author within 24 hours, who will read it for the very first time. “Wait, how's that even....

Your world spins madly, everything is grey and blurred. Your jaw drops. You are shocked. Stunned, in fact. But, before you can regain your poise and try to comprehend what just happened, and before the author can tell you more about how he hacked your computer, you are already at the end of t             h                      i                      s