God Bless the Search Log
Something about the weeks before Christmas turns people weird online. The festive dread, the end-of-year reckoning, the family obligations—it compounds into something that cracks whatever composure people maintain the rest of the year, and what’s underneath goes straight into the search bar. I spent years watching the queries that led visitors to this journal, and December was reliably the richest month.
Most of it was carnal in the ordinary way. Multiple people needed confirmation that a lead actress’s breasts in Zweiohrkuken, a popular German romcom that year, were real—enough of them asked that it felt like a national crisis requiring public resolution. Emma Watson’s anatomy occupied several separate visitors across different evenings. Redheads appeared as both objects of desire and sources of existential unease: are redheaded women sexy or not
and afraid of redheads
showed up in the same log, which is a small portrait of ambivalence. Lindsay Lohan naked, Scarlett Johansson topless, tattooed tits, naked women at 35—the usual parade, seasonal edition.
Then the genuinely strange: someone wanted to know what you can do with chocolate sauce, the context left generously open. Someone asked whether SpongeBob has genitalia. Someone else wanted to know if Tokyo is welcoming to foreign visitors, which is a perfectly reasonable travel question that somehow ended up in the same log as porno with Christmas angel
and goats fucking.
There were searches for lesbian slurs on this journal, requests for facts about asexual reproduction, a query about my name in fucking-language,
and at least one person who wanted to know where to obtain laughing gas—the only entry that felt like actual forward planning.
But the one I’ve thought about more than any other: sad because ugly.
No celebrity, no anatomical inquiry, no pornographic subgenre. Just that, typed into a search box sometime in December 2009, released into the machine. The algorithm almost certainly returned nothing useful. Most of the others at least knew what they were looking for.