LOL

During our penultimate years things were less and less funny, and it became more and more important to laugh out loud, or at least proclaim that one had just laughed out loud during an instant message. The problem was most of what was said wasn’t remotely funny.

In the seldom case when something was mildly humorous, it failed to cause any actual visceral reaction. No one literally "laughed out loud," or even guffawed coyly with a contraction of their diaphragm. Needless to say, nothing came up through the nose. There was a certain sadness about such conceit.

And as our demise grew more imminent, laughing out loud became more desperate—a cloying device to seem highly amicable to whomever one was having an instant message with. This grew out of existential isolation and confusion.

14-year-old girls, high on bubble gum saccharine and hairspray, substituted "lol" with a period, as if to end all sentences. The grammar was bad, the air was falsely sweet. True, these girls were indeed more giddy, but they did not laugh out loud.

The fathers of these girls, in an awkward attempt to reciprocate such colloquialisms, strategically inserted "lol" in their panic-ridden messages to their daughters regarding post-curfew geographic locations. The girls rolled their eyes in disgust, and continued blowing bubbles into the night sky.

The usage of "lol" grew in direct proportion to the subconscious sense of demise people felt near the beginning of the Chino-American War. A typical response to the Taiwan Missile Crisis was "lol," and sometimes, "lmao." Again, hyperbole—though it would have been timely for such people to laugh their ass off, for their asses grew in incommensurate proportion to the rest of their body. One was compelled to look away when these big-assed folks walked.

If anything was literal, it was the instant message. Instantly, they appeared, saying things like "12noon starbucks," or "janet is a ho lol."

One had little time to gather their feelings on such matters. One had to simply go to Starbucks at twelve o’clock sharp to wait for their lover. (Despite, or because of war, many people had affairs.) One simply had to deal with Janet differently now that she was a ho. Truth was no longer essential, but only the medium in which it was expressed. If enough people said Janet was a ho, then she became one. If enough people went to Starbucks at twelve o’clock sharp, it would become very crowded lol