Embracing Romanticism, It Is The Holiday Spirit!

April 13,

Islets of grey amidst a sea of coral and azure. I could breathe in the beauty of the evening and spend a lifetime in its transitions from russet and gold to the dimness of twilight. Poetry, happiness and peace are in the air for those who care. Beautiful. Beautiful. I can’t repeat it enough times. I am lost and found again. Redemption is sweet.

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.

choral music is so beautiful

Charles Wright, Nine-Panel Yaak River Screen

“Is it better to be the reed in the spokes of a battle wheel which splinters the chariot of hope, or to be the reed of hope tugging away at the clench of the unrelenting mast of the sunken ship, lost to the world and leave the world to lose? Perhaps it finer to be the reed from which floats the soft and treacherous  note of love, with the feathered footfall of the madman or the angel, and leave it to the mania of insanity to find out which.”

J. Estanislao Lopez, "What the Fingers Do" [transcript in ALT]

Butterflies, spinning in celestial delight, over arches

Crumbling and old, divinity longs for the brush of a

Whispering wing. A Darkening sky looms over the cathedral

Of locked bolts, standing tall and stalwart.

Footfalls echo down the hallways of buried thought,

Love lies dreamlessly in a flower wreathed coffin.

A hand gently runs down the jar of forgotten myth,

“Elpis”, the walls softly echo, “You should have

left when you could Have”. The dead roses you

fear are tucked away in the spandrels of memory,

The night is dark and beautiful,

The butterflies linger, will you too?

Nothing much, I know, just an old sunset.

I met an old centipede on the terrace today, slowly she crawled up to me. “Isn’t the sky beautiful today?” She remarks. I tilted my head forward and mumbled, “My aunt says she has seen finer ones, over Misty hilltops and pale dawns.”. She smiled, (I thought centipedes couldn’t smile?) “You’ll never find beauty or happiness in anything if you keep thinking there is something better.” Did she sound wistful? I don’t know. We sat there for a while, she crept near me and asked in a whisper, “Will you play something on that old guitar?” “Uh, sure.” I say and pick up my guitar and start strumming an old tune. I kept muting strings and tripping over notes. But as she showed no signs of noticing anything, I continued playing, until twilight gave way to the night sky and the music faded away in discord. “It was lovely”, she said. I raised an eyebrow. “It was lovely.” She repeated, as mosquitoes swarmed over my phone that had lit up at a notification from my math teacher.