Council Member 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.