Now that I think about it, Youtube is actually a pretty iffy premise. The site depends on the people of the world to provide video content at an essentially constant rate, which when it first launched was a rather shaky concept for a web-based business. Videos take time and at least a little effort. They take resources and an investment of confidence. I never would have believed Youtube would become the center for democratized media on planet Earth and yet it has. Even more than that, it is so replete with content that completely random phrases turn up results. Some are disconcertingly specific, others are only tangentially related. Still, I have seen more unusual things following the schizophrenic bread crumb trail of the Youtube search box than I have while actively scouring the Internet for overtly strange ephemera.

This particular jaunt into the infinite forest of Youtube began when a friend pointed me toward the video featured at the top of this page. As the creeps among you who regularly read my work surely know, the love of cats by humans is a rather foreign concept to me. I don't understand why those insane clumps of fur and sharpened calcium bring so much joy to people and I sure as hell don't get how in the hell the guy in the video discovered that his feline is enthusiastic about S&M. There is nothing ambiguous about that video. The cat is receiving more pleasure from those paddles than I would receive from lavender-scented supermodels with massage therapy certification. I have come to accept that cat people are beyond weird, but now there's a glut of videos depicting just how weird they are.

When I considered the mental gymnastics required to stumble upon a video called "Cat Spanking" I decided to test the limits of Youtube's power to dredge up the random. I dipped into the part of my brain that still likes Family Guy and Monty Python quotes from total strangers, grabbing wantonly weird combinations of words in search of a corresponding Youtube video.

The first among them was the result for "juggling monkey". I sadly only found a series of actual humans juggling mundane objects... in the first few posts. And then I found this wonderful abomination. That is not a monkey, but a chimp specifically, and it is not juggling but performing exact, fluid maneuevers in kung-fu, an art that takes many humans years of special practice to learn. I know that it doesn't take Youtube to make something like teaching a chimp to engage in the deadly arts, but the video here is proof that it happens frequently enough for a video of it to exist.

Then there's this game of Internet telephone. I searched for "the Jell-O Experience" and found a completely nonsensical collection of videos. None of them had anything to do with Jell-O and/or experiences. And yet I found this video, a five minute exercise in confusing drunk people. It begins as a moderately cute blonde girl staring at the camera doing nothing. She then hangs out by a pond while music plays, then she transforms into some sort of post-1980 Bob Ross with absolutely no warning. Damn it, folks, I've been drinking. I can't handle this kind of business.

I have to ponder whether or not I want Youtube to be this machine manufacturing nonsense. One part of me loves that this kind of content is readily available, but another part of me wants more order and meaning in the universe. For now, I suppose I'll just have to resign myself to the utter randomness of Youtube and hope that, in the deluge of the strange, I can maybe find something wonderful. Today just isn't that day.