Dear Internet,

You suck. You are the reason my alternative culture blog -- the chronicle of my search for the wild, new, individualistic and unique -- is being written at 10 p.m. Saturday while my girlfriend is in the other room watching Dick Van Dyke and waiting for me to be done so we can pop in the Saturday Night Live Best of Will Ferrell DVD we picked up at Blockbuster.

All week I have been talking about the hip hop poetry slam i planned to attend tonight. People asked if I wanted to do things tonight and I said, "No. I'm going to a poetry slam," and felt pretty damn good about myself. Hip, unique and interesting. White-boy cool.

I found about the poetry slam on you, Internet. For shame.

I don't know if the poetry slam actually happened. I decided to check and called the number, the number you gave me. It had been changed. It changed from a 773 to a 312, incidentally. I called that number. It was a woman's personal cell phone number.

I was scared. I was lost. Terrified beyond recognition, I ("cough," excuse me) didn't leave a message.

Then I checked the address you gave me, Internet. I checked it on you, via your good friend Google. Were you wrong when you told me there was a poetry slam or were you wrong when you told me the address was for a hot dog stand?

On my girlfriend's advice and with a heavy heart I checked Metromix for something to do. Gone was my white-boy cool. Gone was my feeling of hip in-the-know-ness. Instead, I was picking my Saturday night activities from a Web site laden with images of drunk people, trendy bistros and Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man.

Found something cool, though. An edgy comedy show. Maybe not as alternative culturey as a poetry slam, but I liked the names the show members listed on the Web site when drawing comparisons to themselves. Sam Kinison, Richard Pryor, Mitch Hedberg, Todd Barry, Dave Chappelle. Those are good people to compare yourself to.

I've never seen Richard Pryor or Todd Barry live, but I'm guessing their shows didn't include the part where they never actually show up, leaving me and my girlfriend doing a crossword puzzle in a coffee shop while a fat man in the corner keeps laughing at something on his laptop.

I blame you, Internet. You put yourself up as a place to find things, a place to learn about things. But you're really just an aggregator of crap. I wouldn't have put as much stock in the no-show comedians had I found out about them from a ragged flyer hastily taped to a lamppost rather than a pretty swanky Web site. I wouldn't have talked all week about going to a poetry slam if I had heard about it from a dude who heard about it from a dude. I'm not saying I wouldn't have gone. I'm just saying I wouldn't have set my heart on it. Internet, you suck.

Sincerely,

Paul Dailing

P.S. I would like to continue to use your video games, e-mail, Facebook and, um, other sites. I hope this letter won't change that.

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