Here is a video of someone passed out, on a subway platform, in Crown Heights, into whose lap a rat appears to have crawled, only to take a “selfie.” I hate this video and it makes me want to die.

Why was this guy filming some stranger? Why didn’t he instead go chase the rat off his fellow human, like a normal person would? How did the rat take a selfie? The guy who took the video said that the guy who the rat was crawling on said that the flash from his phone-camera woke him up. But that doesn’t make any sense, because (a) there’s no visible flash in the video and (b) most front-facing cameras on phones aren’t accompanied by flash. Also, in the unlikely even that a rat were to have crawled up onto a sleeping person, it would surely bolt when the guy jolted awake. That is to say: I don’t buy it.

Is it possible that this video is authentic? Yes. It’s possible. All sorts of absurd and bizarre and sometimes nightmarish and sometimes wonderful things happen all over the world, all the time—especially in New York—and when everyone’s carrying a camera more and more people get to experience, second-hand, at least, more and more of those absurd and bizarre, nightmarish and wonderful things. This would be a good thing, but for the fact that once people experience the ecstatic shared discovery of something like Pizza Rat, no lesser content will ever be as satisfying again, and so we go looking for Pizza Rat. But Pizza Rat cannot be sought out and found. Pizza Rat just happens. Pizza Rat is there for those with eyes to see. On some level, probably, we all know this, which is why when we do not find him, we start making other kinds of Rats—except none of us are capable of channeling the kind of fortuitous absurdity that the universe renders on a daily basis. We think we can, but we can’t. Whatsoever is Cool and Good on the ‘net is only waiting to be ruined. We are like a child who loves his kitten—or rat, I guess—so much that he squeezes it to death.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.