Overqualified by Joey Comeau Read Free Book Online Page A

explicity.
    Joey Comeau

    Dear IBM,
    Perverts are everywhere, and I’m no exception. I used to joke that I should never get a webcam. I reasoned that if I did, I would be on the Internet disgracing myself within hours. That timeline, it appears, was optimistic. A webcam came with my new keyboard, and within ten minutes of installing it, my pants were pulled down and my shirt was pulled up and I honestly couldn’t choose between being mortified at myself and thinking, “If dignity means I can’t do this, then fuck dignity!”
    There’s a weird magic to your image, though. I don’t care if that sounds crazy. I’ve started believing in magic. Magic and ghosts and family.
    I brought a Polaroid JoyCam to bed with a friend and we took photographs in the dark. It’s weird to pose for yourself, your future self. How do you cater to your own tastes if your taste is the unexpected? Flash. Flash. Flash. And afterward, we sat on my bed and we looked through the pictures with the lights on, all wrapped in blankets and sweatshirts. The pictures were harshly lit and terrifying and sort of perfect in their ugliness. Our skin looked too white from the flash. We were always squinting. Our bodies didn’t look natural. They looked the way nighttime photos of moles and bats always look.
    We decided that we had to get rid of them. But of course we couldn’t just put them in the garbage, because what ifsomeone found them? No, we had to destroy them. I was afraid to burn them because of chemicals, so we cut them open, pushing my pocket knife between the layers and scraping away the image. I don’t think that was the best idea. The chemical powder stuck to the blade. It scratched down onto my sheets.
    And there’s a sick feeling you get when you’re scratching away your own face. We agreed we would scratch ourselves. I don’t think I could have handled scratching away someone else’s face. I could hardly handle mine. I woke up the next morning feeling quiet. Feeling cursed. I still have one of the photos that we missed, and I’m afraid to throw it away. I get a sick feeling in my stomach when I think about those scratched out pictures and I wish I had all of the pictures still. I would put them up on my wall, all ugly and broken and perverted and squinty-eyed and alive.
    I feel weird writing this, I guess, but what if we die and nobody remembers those parts of us? What if all that’s left is the censored version?
    Joey Comeau

    Dear General Electric,
    When I was a kid, my brother and I used to sneak past the locked front doors of apartment buildings. There were four apartment buildings in my neighbourhood. One of them was harder than the others to get into, until we figured out that there was an exit in the back of the building and we could just wait out there until someone left and then catch the door. Once we were inside we just wandered the halls the same way we wandered our neighbourhood. We climbed the stairs to the very top, and there was a public balcony on this floor, just like on the others. You could stand and look out over everything.
    We bought parachute men to throw from the balcony. They rocked and drifted and we took the elevator down to try and beat them to the ground, only to find them caught in bushes and trees. We bought those styrofoam planes that you have to punch out of the sheet and build, that are printed with designs on one side and are blank white on the other. They flew in spirals down to the ground, or around the side of the building. Once, my plane flew to the building across the street and down the road. It flew straight and slowly. We loved to take the elevator down and walk out the front, coming from behind the locked door, like we lived there, like we had every right.
    And then, climbing the back stairs one day, we stopped to unscrew one of the light bulbs. Adrian took the next one, and then I took the next. There was a light bulb on each ofthe