Me: Wants To Start A Conversation With Someone

ok from what i can tell there have only been like 4 moderately widespread memes on this site in the past month or so (1. pokemon go meme 2. taylor swift copyright meme 3. “you gotta” 4. halsey lyrics on spongebob caps) which others have noted is a remarkably reduced rate of meme production for this trash site. 

while i think the fact that the majority of tumblr’s user base has gone back to school definitely contributes to The Great Meme Depression of 2015 (TGMD 2k15), it cannot be the only explanation. if it was we would see the same Meme Stagnation every year around the same time, which has not been the case. september 2014 gave us unavoidable site-wide phenomena such as madden gifferator, “what’s better than this? guys being dudes,” the rebirth of loss.jpg, steal her look, what are we?, etc. 

i propose that the rapid rate of meme production we grew accustomed to in 2014 and early 2015 deflated the staying power of individual memes. our hyper-awareness of memes and the fact that our metatextual analysis of said memes became a meme within itself (”memeology”) conditioned us into constant vigilance in our search for “the next meme.” i mean, for fuck’s sake, the first meme of 2014 was “what’s going to be the first meme of 2014?” and the last meme of 2014 was “is this the last meme of 2014?” with garbage pseudo-intellectual meta we sowed the seeds of our own destruction.

deflation of individual meme value led to an even more dramatic increase in meme production (for evidence, just look at how many memes the blog memedocumentation has explained. and of course, those are only 2015 memes. the fact that memedocumentation does not document pre-2015 memes is another fucking 2015 meme) this lead to an even heavier reliance on what could be referred to as Meme Credit–we were borrowing and resurrecting old memes like pepe and the aforementioned loss.jpg to satisfy the Meme Demand in the absence of concrete, original memes. we were destined to crash when that credit ran out and the vaults of the Meme Banks were emptied. 

even now as i reflect on how meme hyper-vigilance and overproduction has destroyed the meme economy, i cannot help but wonder “but what will be the next meme?”

only some kind of……….new deal………a New Meme Deal, if u will, can save us from this Great Meme Depression. in its absence we shall continue to suffer.

October is my empire. Terror is part of me. 一 Tamura Ryūichi

1. Alfonsina Storni, 2. Cy Twombly, 3. William Stanley Merwin, 4. Cy Twombly, 5. Virginia Woolf, 6. Jorge Albericio, 7. Gala Mukomolova, 8. Andrei Tarkovsky, 9. Czesław Miłosz, 10. Andrei Tarkovsky, 11. Thomas Wolfe, 12. Andrei Tarkovsky, 13. Louise Glück

Sigh, anyways no one can deny Calvin and Hobbes is the best Sunday strip comic.

Some people never observe anything.  Life just happens to them.  They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.

Finalities

My hands have grown tired of writing about you Though the scars long since have faded into skin Smooth, edge-less, no longer promising red, A mother's daughter through out and through in.

Sleep is less tiresome, and all my work once done Leaves me fiddling with spare hours at the table, Twisting them in and out of a ring that shines on My fourth finger - chipped from the old fable Where the kindest doves would nip down at the Lover who wore your shoes, and drive her out Barefoot into the night - where you only yesterday Curled up under, melting tears into silent clout.

But there, it is a fable other hands have written, An embrace where other shoulders found shelter, And many others yet found tranquilled lethe. Mine is not a story foretold, perhaps for the better.

It has been very long.

Perhaps the lack of a proper Farewell kept me from exiting the scene definitely, so here I am, properly clad in mourning white, clutching at a handkerchief and a bouquet of marigolds. Marigolds in our country are worn in the hair and as necklaces by the bride. Who am I being given away to? From where I stand, it looks like a pyre, where one is burnt with her dead lover. I began to write for you, dearest, and so I shall stop for you, for you are gone. Other fingers now are exploring the crook in your smile, the scar on your hip. Other hands hold yours as you gaze into the deathly moon on quiet summer nights. Other songs nest in your head, ones you and her share.

And here, here I am. Pinning myself to every chord you ever sang to me, but never will once again.

I shall not love again.

i'm a simple girl: i see sunlight on the water, i find god

Frosted glass between rain and life

I run my hand through the same old withered branches,

Drenched in the same old tired rain,

Far away the sunset harbours the lost gold of

Odysseys gone by, and if the wind were to hide

Within it some unremembered glow from the land

Of unknown secrets, the evening will gently

Whisk away the covers of the coquette,

And reveal to us a maiden under the bent willow,

Sweet as the apples from the orchards where our dreams

Were buried. She will beckon for the children

To gather around the fire and tell them the story

Of Zerah and Zulamith, whilst we twist the

Slender branches of the cherry tree into a throne

Fit for the brides of heaven to recline on,

Place at the altar a wreath of dead roses,

And hope that the silent fragrance borne to the shore

Is enough for the sea to give up the child

She drew to her heart in death’s storm.

…

And dare I tag anyone? @pollosky-in-blue perhaps you’ll like the story?

“...what is the point of looking at things which must always be viewed in so crude a light? When there is no softened angle of memory, nor is there gladness of anticipation? I’ll carefully choose flowers from no mans garden through the frost, all for them to be displayed as accolades on the dusty precipice of another’s understanding...”

drops this post on ur dash like i am a cat bringing u a dead bird

in the sixth months after graduating from college, with my very expensive degree from a good college, i ate nothing but bread. i worked at a bakery / cafe / restaurant and got half off one meal per shift but it was still too expensive even then. but at the end of every night we would throw out all the bread loaves that hadn’t sold, which was most of them, every night. we would fill up ten boxes to give away to a shelter and then we could take anything we could carry, and i couldn’t afford a half off deconstructed sandwich, but i could fill the cabinets of my apartment with bread. everyone who worked there was just like me, subsisting on discarded, overpriced bread. 

(when the managers’ backs were turned i was taught to leave the trashbags of bread behind the dumpster rather than inside it, because it was locked after everyone left to prevent people from stealing from it. we would say we were going out to stack chairs and instead stack prepackaged salads prepared that morning in the narrow space between wall and dumpster, but that’s not what this is about.)

we were working valentine’s day, a little bit miserable about it, because customers are somehow worse on a holiday about love, and even if we were single we didn’t want to be here, and most of us had people we’d rather be spending the day with, and the snappish, hardass manager was working that day, and everyone could not wait for the day to be over. 

we had a boxes of those bakery tissue sheets around and i was twisting it in my hands and i thought about how the first night my uncle spent with my aunt he had to get up early for work but didn’t want to wake her and the whole thing hadn’t been planned, exactly, so he (a roofer by trade and a golden glove boxer by sport) went into the kitchen and took some paper towels and twisted them between his big, scarred hands until it formed a sweeter shape and when my aunt work up it was to a paper towel rose on her pillow. 

so i used a couple sheets of bakery tissue to make a rose and walked up to my coworker who stared at me with a rictus smile and i gave it to her, trying not overthink if it was a weird thing to do. her smile slipped and she asked “you made this?” holding it carefully, like it wasn’t something her two year old son could have made with his pudgy hands, and i shrugged and got more milk from the back. 

then another coworker held the steamer too long when frothing milk, not on accident but because he was irritated, so i rolled another rose and tucked it in his apron pocket as i walked by. then it was just one more of us up front and it was nothing, thirty seconds of twisting paper to take the stack of cookies out of her hands and hand her a tissue paper rose, her lined face lifting into a grin as she proudly tucked it into the chest pocket of her shirt and i may as well have been standing in front of the ovens for how hot my face felt. 

it was such a silly thing to do, i felt ridiculous, giving away hastily constructed tissue paper roses on valentine’s day, clumsy artful garbage. then one of the servers walked by and noticed and so i made her one too, and then other servers came by, leaning over the glass, and complimenting the flowers with big eyes, and i laughed and made more, still not sure if it was sincere, but even if it wasn’t, i figured making them one and handing it over was better than saying no. 

then i went to the back again and the dishwasher yelled out “where’s mine? what about us?” and he was too sweet to ever be anything less than sincere, so someone kept an eye on the door to the manager’s office as i stood in the sweltering kitchen and rolled clumsy tissue paper roses, enough for everyone 

and by the time the day ended, everyone had one, everyone wore one, tucked in their shirt or their apron or stuck in their hair or taped to the top of their pen. everyone was a little less miserable, smiling like we were all on in on the joke, although i don’t think any of us knew the punchline 

this story doesn’t have a punchline either. i just sometimes think of how much better some crumpled tissue paper made things and think that it can be that easy, sometimes, if we’re sincere and don’t overthink it too much