No news today - Guest Post - Matt Bell

No news today, not for you or from you. No news today, despite the availability of newsmaking tools, despite your organs for hearing and seeing what has been made. No news today, but only if you refuse the offers of others, and also your own participation. Paste paper over your television, bend wrong your antennae. Watch now the ticker, silent in its unseen scrolling. Watch the flickering, still with faces. Stuff your ears with the unprinted parts of the paper, of magazines, then listen to the radio. There are disasters still, but you are unaware and smiling. Now stop smiling. Now start doing your own part. Now do it bravely, without flinches: Take down your content. Delete all your blog posts. Share their former addresses on Facebook and Twitter, then delete your sharing. Celebrate blanknesses, absences of opinion. Celebrate by saying nothing. Unlike everything you have ever liked. Unfriend everyone you have ever loved. Change your status to a question mark and then erase it as soon as someone comments. Swallow their news into your blankness, then blindfold yourself from that nothing, then be a nothing yourself, moving across the computer screen, and then off it, then out into the world. Now stand in the middle of the street with your ears plugged, your eyes bound, your hands tucked into your pockets to refuse contact. Now stand in the street and say nothing. Now stand in the street and get yourself empty right. Now all the cars swerving around you, and in your oblivious rightness all they are is wind, wind and danger, and what new news is that.

Matt Bell is the author of the fiction collection How They Were Found. He is online at http://www.mdbell.com/