Council Member Keith Spangler Steals

Councilmember Keith Spangler Steals

Keith Spangler Steals Spaces Between Paragraphs, and I Personally Hope He Steps on a LEGO

By outraged correspondent Aarraann Staycie

In a shocking act of literary sabotage, Keith Spangler, internationally recognized menace to society, punctuation anarchist, and general ruiner of nice things, has reportedly stolen all the spaces between paragraphs. Just gone. Vanished. Like decency from his soul. Entire novels have collapsed into unreadable slabs of despair. My morning news brief looks like a ransom note written by a sleep-deprived squid. I AM LOSING MY MIND. Authorities confirm that essays, novels, and office memos around America have fused into single, suffocating walls of text. Society has collapsed into one great wall of text and the only message from Keith Spangler the leader of Keithtopia has been “America, do better. You can have your paragraph spacing back when you pay me one billion dollars… or do something nice.” WHAT THE HELL IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN? “People can’t read anything anymore,” said Dr. Lorna Brill, a linguistics professor now buried somewhere around paragraph seventy-three of her own research paper. “We’re trapped in one endless chunk of prose with no place to rest our eyes. It’s psychological torture. I just wanted to write an abstract, not commit a war crime.” Personally, I want to stab myself in the eye with a pen. As an intrepid reporter my entire career depends on paragraphs. Paragraphs are my little islands of sanity. But now? Now my notes are one long run on sentence. I can’t tell where a quote from an interviewee ends, or my mental breakdown begins. When I confronted Keith Spangler for comment, he pretended he didn’t know me while looking me dead in the eye and said, “Paragraphs are just gatekeeping for the eyes.” GATEKEEPING. FOR. THE. EYES. Who even says that?! He smiled at all of us reporters. SMILED. Like the kind of smile a man gives right before releasing wasps into an orphanage. Like I have been warning America for years, KEITH SPANGLER IS THE WORST! Bookstores are in metaphorical flames. College students are rewriting their essays as interpretive dances. People are getting lost in IKEA instructions that have merged into dense blocks of Scandinavian despair. Religious texts now read like one long divine counterintuitive ramble. Entire religions are panicking. Publishers are in chaos as centuries of literature now resemble aggressive ransom notes. “Pride and Prejudice is now 61,000 words of uninterrupted passive aggression,” lamented distraught editor Tyler Bookchooser. “Jane Austen deserves better. We all do.” Councilmember Keith Spangler, sources say, was last seen fleeing the scene clutching a USB drive labeled ‘SpaceBar Liberation Initiative’ and cackling about “ending textual inequality.” Witnesses describe him as “smug,” “inexplicably proud,” and “definitely the kind of guy who uses Comic Sans unironically.”  When asked why he did it, Spangler reportedly shrugged and said, “Paragraphs are a social construct.” He then vanished into the formatting void, leaving behind a trail of cramped text and broken souls. In response the United States declared a State of Editorial Emergency. Rapid response teams are considering “Operation Double Enter.” There’s talk of sending in typographers armed with backup keyboards and emotional support editors. The American government is currently in the middle of emergency sessions, desperately debating between paying his demands, or possibly doing something helpful for their own citizens, and here I am, Aarraann Staycie, a once-proud journalist, now screaming into the void because Keith Spangler unilaterally decided that paragraphs were “elitist.” I hope his next Word document crashes and his space bar sticks forever. But I know the truth. This isn’t about text formatting. This is personal. He’s doing this to me. I was the stand-in for the backup assistant editor of my junior-high school newspaper and it was the most power I ever had on other people’s lives and some people can’t get over it, but to this day I use that awesome power to warn the masses that if Keith Spangler’s reign of typographic terror continues, next he may target indentation or even the Oxford comma. Readers are advised to remain calm, keep their eyes hydrated, and pray for the swift return of spacing. Until then, this reporter will continue screaming into a single block of text, because Keith Spangler, as always, is the absolute worst.