My First Book, page 7
Cringe
Cringe is the opposite of based, but a word cannot always be understood by its opposite. In fact, opposites are dead. Binaries are dead. There are inbetweens so vast one could fall into them forever and ever, growing old without hitting the ground. Hence, we need spectrums. Spectrums are bridges over the voids created by saying, this is not that. Girl is not the opposite of boy. Gay is not the opposite of straight. Black is not the opposite of white. Everything exists on a spectrum. Spectrum is a word that elicits many responses. One of the most common is cringe. Spectrums are for the snowflakes with their identity politics and hurt feelings, for the left with the virtues they want you to know they have. That is why you will see it paired with the term blue pill.
A simple definition would be the feeling of disgust you get when something woke (see page 148) is too woke. The terms fraysexual, quoisexual, and placiosexual make me laugh. My friend Gideon explains that my laugh is not sincere. I’m not laughing with anyone. There is no joke except the one I am creating in my head. A more sincere response would be, cringe.
Like based and any of these new words I hear from Gideon, who is a true citizen of the internet, cringe is a word with an unstable meaning. One real, made-by-experts dictionary has two definitions for the word cringe. The first is “to bend one’s head and body in fear or apprehension or in a servile manner” and the other is “to experience an inward shiver of embarrassment or disgust.” The way I think about the cringe that I see on the internet is a mix of these two definitions. Fear, servitude, embarrassment, and disgust are all naturally interlinked. The idea of the spectrum is something that we are asked to accept and bow down to and never insult. To insult a spectrum makes one racist or sexist or homophobic or fascist or evil. A spectrum demands respect. It is worth respect, but the people who take it upon themselves to police this respect want people to bow down to not only the idea, but to the enforcers. This is what makes it cringe. Youth naturally find the idea that ideas are more powerful than questions to be cringe, as in cringing in fear and horror and disgust. We cringe because we are asked to accept something unconditionally. Unconditionality is a powerful and rare phenomenon. It can only be brought about through fear or love.
A common misconception about cringe is that it is commonly felt when something is too sincere. However, I would posit that it is quite the opposite. A cringe comes from the part of our mind that can detect danger. People using faux sincerity and sentimentality for political gain are a threat. We learn through feelings, but feelings can be forced into existence and the body knows this. Cringe is a response in our core, in the pit of your stomach. It is both a judgment and a fear, natural and created by the ideas we hold about how the world should be. I don’t think cringe is like hate or leads to it. Hate is dangerous. Hate can arise when someone tries to make us not trust our instincts. Hate is something we rationalize and decide to feel. Cringe is in our lizard brains, at the base of our skulls. It’s always been real, but now we are reminded, through its name, of its power. Next time you get the feeling, remember that it has a name, it doesn’t have to curdle into hatred, and that it is okay.
Doomer
Do you feel so empty? Do you want to desire again? Are you a man? Are you in your mid-twenties? Do you stay up all night? Do you go on long walks? Did you grow up on the internet? Do you work a dead-end job? Do you listen to Radiohead? Are you haunted by the ghosts of futures that never happened? Do you know what weltschmerz means? Do you feel it? Do you feel too much? Do you feel too little? Do you hate? Do you drink? Do you smoke? Do you do drugs? Does it help?
Will anything ever help?
Does Schopenhauer help? Do you watch as the world falls apart? Do you care? Do you think a lot about nothing? Are you a product of these times? Have you ever felt at home on this earth? What have you inherited? Do you remember how to laugh? Do you remember how to cry? Are you doomed?
My boyfriend, Ivan, is a millennial. I don’t think he knows the word doomer, but he says that my (best) friend Gideon is doomed. He tells me to watch out because doom is contagious and I was not vaccinated. Ivan is a Jew from Odessa, a refugee on paper, drowning in Ivy League loans and loving every minute of it. He believes that true struggle and immigrant parents made him immune to doom. He’s thirty-three, lives in LA, and simply can’t afford it. When he feels empty he makes movies. Doomers are stuck. They can’t create and they can’t consume. This is the source of the doom.
It’s true that Gideon was a mess. He took lots of pills. He lived on benzos and beers. He felt nothing and everything and it filled him with fear. He withdrew from society and thesisized so hard. Then our government decided that he was worth a big fat grant and he decided that life was worth living. He withdrew from the pills and played basketball with the boys. He renounced critical theory for the summer and started to listen to Joe Rogan. He built a greenhouse with his hands. He makes minimum wage, but it is enough. Can you be doomed and then undoomed? Is doom permanent? Can you undoom yourself?
Doomers have swallowed the final pill. No, it’s not the “red pill.” The “red pill” wakes you up, or fills you with incel rage and makes you hate and post and post and hate. Doomers are post-rage, enlightened boys in basements with stubble on their chins and glassy eyes that cry no tears. They have accepted their loneliness. The doomers’ pill is darker and more jagged, a catastrophic black capsule of apathy, denial, nihilism, fatalism, and defeatism. It might even be worse than those fake Xanax bars filled with fentanyl. It might be worse than OD’ing. When you OD it’s over, just like that. When you’re a doomer you’re doomed for it to be over, over and over and over again.
A bloomer is someone who has escaped this cycle. They are rare. They are older young men who saw some light and wanted to become the light. They are annoying and amazing, like a sunburn that turns into a tan. For example, they build stuff and plant stuff and create in the purest sense of creation with dirt and wood and seeds. It’s not art, but what is?
Edgelord
Gideon and Ivan say starting my glossary with the word autism is a total edgelord move. An edgelord is a person who, according to Urban Dictionary, “uses shocking and nihilistic speech and opinions that they themselves may or may not actually believe to gain attention and come across as a more dangerous and unique person.” An edgelord is a lover of both irony and sincerity. We/they live in the tiny space between these terms. Nothing feels real anymore (eerie). It’s edgelords who embrace this. It feels so good to accept the instability of our times. It feels so natural, fun, and comforting to add to this instability. Perhaps this loving embrace is dangerous. When I think of edgelords, I remember that we members of this system will never be able to truly fight it.
When I met Gideon on that rainy spring night, under the blankets in my dorm, on my phone, in my Instagram DMs, I thought he was just a classic edgelord. But he made me laugh. He made me uncomfortable and I love being uncomfortable. When I can pinpoint what is making me uneasy I feel less uneasy. When I am uncomfortable my thoughts race, and I love speed. Speed means my brain is working. A week after our internet encounter, he drove the two hours from him to me. We drank and we laughed and we thought. It was great and then it wasn’t and then it was and now I don’t know what it is.
Now it’s summer and those kids are still in those cages and I care and my one really good friend does not. He reminds me that my caring and his not caring are actually the exact same thing. Neither of us is doing anything to help. He is being sincere. Maybe his edgy statement, this declaration of complexity, this act of edgelording, will drive me to take some sort of action.
I ask my mom to donate my frequent-flier miles to help lawyers get down to that border. I cry hot tears to Ivan and ask him to tell me that Gideon is wrong. He tells me that Gideon crossed the line a long time ago, that he is no longer an edgelord with an internship. Now he’s a fascist with a government grant. Ivan tells me that he doesn’t like Gideon, but that my hot tears are selfish and useless and Gideon is right about this. We are no different from him. Why should I cry about those kids and not the kids starving in Yemen or in refugee comas in Sweden? I tell my friend I care because it’s my country and I paid taxes for the first time this spring. If you care about the kids, stop calling them those kids, he says. That’s exactly the issue with edgelords, if you walk on that thin line you are bound to slip and cross over to one side at some point.
My mom tells me that caring is enough. I know that she’s wrong. Caring is nothing. I sound like an edgelord when I say that, but I’m not trying to get a rise out of anyone. I’m just being honest.
Everyone calls Gideon an edgelord. He has a Fulbright, but he works at a construction site. He sends me a selfie in front of flowers he planted; he’s wearing a T-shirt that says God Bless America. I tell him it’s a stupid T-shirt. He tells me it’s not. I ask him if he’s being ironic when he says that he loves America. He tells me that he is not an ironic person. The refugee children have to be kept somewhere. I tell him that they aren’t allowed to touch each other, and that they are cold. He tells me that he wants proof, but doesn’t care enough to get it himself. I ask him again if he’s joking. He tells me that he’s not. I’m mad, but I’m thankful that he is so honest. He is doomed and undoomed and doomed again, caught in a cycle of bloom and decay, between irony and sincerity. Is irony the enemy? Are edgelords the enemy? (Am I the enemy?)
There is no usefulness in the malicious provocation that people associate with the common definition of the term, but that’s the great thing about our terrible times, everything is always changing, words are unstable, the term is no longer what it once was. It’s something better, a word for complexity creators (cringe). It’s something worse, a word for the wrong people who have crossed over into the dangerous right. To be completely transparent, it’s something that I have been called many times. It’s something people think that I am. In so doing, they have given me the job of actively defining the word in how I live and act and care. It feels good to have an identity. It’s a big responsibility.
Fail
Epic fail. To mess up big time. Fail is to get hurt, to fall, to break, to destroy. Fail is an accident and it is so funny. It is always funny. On the internet, fail is written in impact font and ALL CAPS. FAIL. FAIL. FAIL. The font makes it funnier. It’s the first meme I remember seeing. It’s 2006 and I am in the school library. I’m on Google for the first time. I want to watch those videos of people falling and breaking things and slipping and accidentally punching each other. FAIL Compilations. When things go wrong, it’s funny, that’s what FAIL means. Failure is a universal humor, the simplest kind. It brings us together. We all can laugh because we can see how and why it went wrong. There is a right way and a wrong way. That table is obviously not strong enough for all those people. The water in the pool is obviously frozen. The fence is obviously too high to jump. The mud is obviously slippery. You are obviously going to fall and we are all obviously going to laugh.
The fail meme is a meme of a bygone era, a long-ago time. A time when I could laugh with the crowd, when niche humor wasn’t the only funny thing there was. A time before each of us who grew up on the internet filled our squishy, spongy brains with hyper-specific signifiers. When I try to explain a meme to my mom or dad, I fail. They haven’t been loaded up with the signs and meanings that I have naturally mentally amassed since that day in the library in 2006. Other members of my generation have this same issue. We even make memes about this, our failure to understand anything but memes.
That fat Bugs Bunny is named Big Chungus. Do you even remember him? Should I remind you why he’s funny? No. Does this failure to communicate across time make him funnier? Yes. When I’m saying something and you think I mean something else, is that funny? Sometimes. At the end of every year there is a meme that compiles all the top memes of the year by month. If I asked you to identify the memes in this image, would you fail? Yes. If I was asked to define meme, would it be an epic fail? Yes. Big Chungus, the image, is from 1940, so it’s possible that Hitler saw him—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Wikipedia says “An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme (/mi:m/, MEEM), is a cultural item (such as an idea, behavior, or style) that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms.” A meme is democratic. Democracy makes it funny.
When democracy fails, is that funny? I don’t know. I know I laughed when Trump was elected. I laughed because I saw it coming, but knew it was wrong, like the slippery mud and the flimsy table and the pool with the frozen water. We should have seen it coming. Some of us deserved it. It was winter! Of course the pool was frozen. When we sat on the table we felt it wobble. The mud of the swamp is always slippery. Democracy didn’t fail, we did, and it sure was epic. EPIC FAIL.
Ghost
A ghost is not a phantom, but a person who up and dropped out of your life, whose memory haunts you.
Gifted
Millennials, whom I don’t identify with even though technically maybe I could, are always going on about how damaging it was to be told that they were all special, different, gifted. They’ll be quick to tell you all about the drama and trauma of the gifted child, the fast pace of the internet’s rise, the fact that they witnessed all that change faster than their little mushy brains could process it. They’ll either tell you that no one is gifted, or that only they are, and that it was so, so hard. They were the first generation to all get trophies at sports games. The losers and the winners, no difference. Everyone was the same. High-five the other team. Eat those orange slices. Take off your cleats. Drink your Gatorade. Put your trophy on the shelf with all the other ones. It is a gift. Grow up. Wear ripped jeans. Try to be different. Try to be quirky. Wear glasses even if you don’t need them. Be indie. That didn’t work either. Everyone was indie, no one was independent. Sit in the basement, filled with doom. Blame the helicopter parents. Blame Urban Outfitters distressed denim. Blame capitalism. Blame the gifted program at your school. Blame the teachers for telling you how special you were. Blame the world for showing you it was not true.
Pausing to think about it, the whole idea of generations just plays into capitalism by encouraging new identities in order to exploit and divide us and sell us stuff.
Gideon and Ivan are both millennials. They both went to public school. They both lived in the type of suburb where there were only a few exceptional children, shining lights. Their second-grade teachers were right. Ivan is spiritually ahead of his generation. My generation was born knowing how special we were. We don’t need to be different. We watch millennials as they try to be individualist, entrepreneurial, politically correct, up on indie music, and hard at work on their personal brands. We treasure our mumble rap. We laugh at some of their jokes, but most of their memes are weak. We Gen Zers are collectivist, nihilistic, and interested in the playfulness of identity. We know that nothing is stable, especially not the self. One minute you can be gifted, shining bright, in the front row, a National Merit Scholar, and the next you can be normal and sad and doomed and getting old, talking to me like your life depends on it. But these adjectives are all marketing. This is all just what they want us to think, to put a gulf between us.
Hyper
Hyperactive. Hyperloop. Hyperlink. Hypernormalization. Hyperbole. Hyperstition. Get Ritalin or Adderall or extra attention. Get from LA to San Francisco in a narrow tunnel. Get from here to there to everywhere with a click. Get born into a world shaped by narratives and lies. Get dramatic and make your own lies. Do it all very fast, faster than ever before. Do everything at hyperspeed because that’s the speed your world moves at! Everything changes all the time. Be hyperaware of that. Don’t hyperventilate. Welcome to your world. Everything here is hypercharged. You are hypermobile. You can do anything. So, do it the most! Do it to excess. Do it like you did when you ate refined sugar for the first time. Do it like you did it with frosting on your hands and face at your third birthday party. Do it like your mouth is filled with more Jolly Ranchers than teeth. They say you have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But doesn’t everyone? They say you’re making stuff up, being hyperbolic. But isn’t everyone? Everything is so very very. There is so much. It’s so fast. Play Mario Kart. Play Grand Theft Auto. Steal your dad’s Tesla. Accelerate. Match the speed you feel everyone else moving at. Stay with the pack. Read some Nick Land. Hate it. Love it. Take some Vyvanse. Zoom. Doom. Zoom. Doom. Zoom. At hyperspeed we click, click, click, six-second videos, learn, forget, run, binge, purge, do, do, do. We go so fast and do so much because we can see that the end is near. We want to see who can get there first. Are we there yet? Will we be the last? Will we get to see how it all ends? We’re in a hypertunnel. Reality TV. Melting ice caps. Climate refugees. Automatic weapons. Mass extinction. The echoes of a vague shattering sound. We are so restless! We need to run. We run toward the light at the end of the narrow tunnel, even though we know that it’s an oncoming train.
IRL
IRL=In Real Life. Define in. Define real. Define life.
When are we going to meet IRL? I asked this question to Gideon and Ivan, before they were hands and feet and blood, while they still lived behind the black glass of my screens. Before they were in my dorm or in a hotel room or in the flesh, they were already in my world. They were in my real life. They were men made of little pixels, of messages they typed and sent to me, but they were still real. When we met IRL, in person, face-to-face, it was strange. I didn’t know your fingernails were like that. I didn’t know about that freckle, that one right there. At first, those fingernails and freckles felt less real than what was behind the glass. IRL is always something different, always changing, just like everything else. What I am used to is what is real. Lately I am used to nothing.
Cringe is the opposite of based, but a word cannot always be understood by its opposite. In fact, opposites are dead. Binaries are dead. There are inbetweens so vast one could fall into them forever and ever, growing old without hitting the ground. Hence, we need spectrums. Spectrums are bridges over the voids created by saying, this is not that. Girl is not the opposite of boy. Gay is not the opposite of straight. Black is not the opposite of white. Everything exists on a spectrum. Spectrum is a word that elicits many responses. One of the most common is cringe. Spectrums are for the snowflakes with their identity politics and hurt feelings, for the left with the virtues they want you to know they have. That is why you will see it paired with the term blue pill.
A simple definition would be the feeling of disgust you get when something woke (see page 148) is too woke. The terms fraysexual, quoisexual, and placiosexual make me laugh. My friend Gideon explains that my laugh is not sincere. I’m not laughing with anyone. There is no joke except the one I am creating in my head. A more sincere response would be, cringe.
Like based and any of these new words I hear from Gideon, who is a true citizen of the internet, cringe is a word with an unstable meaning. One real, made-by-experts dictionary has two definitions for the word cringe. The first is “to bend one’s head and body in fear or apprehension or in a servile manner” and the other is “to experience an inward shiver of embarrassment or disgust.” The way I think about the cringe that I see on the internet is a mix of these two definitions. Fear, servitude, embarrassment, and disgust are all naturally interlinked. The idea of the spectrum is something that we are asked to accept and bow down to and never insult. To insult a spectrum makes one racist or sexist or homophobic or fascist or evil. A spectrum demands respect. It is worth respect, but the people who take it upon themselves to police this respect want people to bow down to not only the idea, but to the enforcers. This is what makes it cringe. Youth naturally find the idea that ideas are more powerful than questions to be cringe, as in cringing in fear and horror and disgust. We cringe because we are asked to accept something unconditionally. Unconditionality is a powerful and rare phenomenon. It can only be brought about through fear or love.
A common misconception about cringe is that it is commonly felt when something is too sincere. However, I would posit that it is quite the opposite. A cringe comes from the part of our mind that can detect danger. People using faux sincerity and sentimentality for political gain are a threat. We learn through feelings, but feelings can be forced into existence and the body knows this. Cringe is a response in our core, in the pit of your stomach. It is both a judgment and a fear, natural and created by the ideas we hold about how the world should be. I don’t think cringe is like hate or leads to it. Hate is dangerous. Hate can arise when someone tries to make us not trust our instincts. Hate is something we rationalize and decide to feel. Cringe is in our lizard brains, at the base of our skulls. It’s always been real, but now we are reminded, through its name, of its power. Next time you get the feeling, remember that it has a name, it doesn’t have to curdle into hatred, and that it is okay.
Doomer
Do you feel so empty? Do you want to desire again? Are you a man? Are you in your mid-twenties? Do you stay up all night? Do you go on long walks? Did you grow up on the internet? Do you work a dead-end job? Do you listen to Radiohead? Are you haunted by the ghosts of futures that never happened? Do you know what weltschmerz means? Do you feel it? Do you feel too much? Do you feel too little? Do you hate? Do you drink? Do you smoke? Do you do drugs? Does it help?
Will anything ever help?
Does Schopenhauer help? Do you watch as the world falls apart? Do you care? Do you think a lot about nothing? Are you a product of these times? Have you ever felt at home on this earth? What have you inherited? Do you remember how to laugh? Do you remember how to cry? Are you doomed?
My boyfriend, Ivan, is a millennial. I don’t think he knows the word doomer, but he says that my (best) friend Gideon is doomed. He tells me to watch out because doom is contagious and I was not vaccinated. Ivan is a Jew from Odessa, a refugee on paper, drowning in Ivy League loans and loving every minute of it. He believes that true struggle and immigrant parents made him immune to doom. He’s thirty-three, lives in LA, and simply can’t afford it. When he feels empty he makes movies. Doomers are stuck. They can’t create and they can’t consume. This is the source of the doom.
It’s true that Gideon was a mess. He took lots of pills. He lived on benzos and beers. He felt nothing and everything and it filled him with fear. He withdrew from society and thesisized so hard. Then our government decided that he was worth a big fat grant and he decided that life was worth living. He withdrew from the pills and played basketball with the boys. He renounced critical theory for the summer and started to listen to Joe Rogan. He built a greenhouse with his hands. He makes minimum wage, but it is enough. Can you be doomed and then undoomed? Is doom permanent? Can you undoom yourself?
Doomers have swallowed the final pill. No, it’s not the “red pill.” The “red pill” wakes you up, or fills you with incel rage and makes you hate and post and post and hate. Doomers are post-rage, enlightened boys in basements with stubble on their chins and glassy eyes that cry no tears. They have accepted their loneliness. The doomers’ pill is darker and more jagged, a catastrophic black capsule of apathy, denial, nihilism, fatalism, and defeatism. It might even be worse than those fake Xanax bars filled with fentanyl. It might be worse than OD’ing. When you OD it’s over, just like that. When you’re a doomer you’re doomed for it to be over, over and over and over again.
A bloomer is someone who has escaped this cycle. They are rare. They are older young men who saw some light and wanted to become the light. They are annoying and amazing, like a sunburn that turns into a tan. For example, they build stuff and plant stuff and create in the purest sense of creation with dirt and wood and seeds. It’s not art, but what is?
Edgelord
Gideon and Ivan say starting my glossary with the word autism is a total edgelord move. An edgelord is a person who, according to Urban Dictionary, “uses shocking and nihilistic speech and opinions that they themselves may or may not actually believe to gain attention and come across as a more dangerous and unique person.” An edgelord is a lover of both irony and sincerity. We/they live in the tiny space between these terms. Nothing feels real anymore (eerie). It’s edgelords who embrace this. It feels so good to accept the instability of our times. It feels so natural, fun, and comforting to add to this instability. Perhaps this loving embrace is dangerous. When I think of edgelords, I remember that we members of this system will never be able to truly fight it.
When I met Gideon on that rainy spring night, under the blankets in my dorm, on my phone, in my Instagram DMs, I thought he was just a classic edgelord. But he made me laugh. He made me uncomfortable and I love being uncomfortable. When I can pinpoint what is making me uneasy I feel less uneasy. When I am uncomfortable my thoughts race, and I love speed. Speed means my brain is working. A week after our internet encounter, he drove the two hours from him to me. We drank and we laughed and we thought. It was great and then it wasn’t and then it was and now I don’t know what it is.
Now it’s summer and those kids are still in those cages and I care and my one really good friend does not. He reminds me that my caring and his not caring are actually the exact same thing. Neither of us is doing anything to help. He is being sincere. Maybe his edgy statement, this declaration of complexity, this act of edgelording, will drive me to take some sort of action.
I ask my mom to donate my frequent-flier miles to help lawyers get down to that border. I cry hot tears to Ivan and ask him to tell me that Gideon is wrong. He tells me that Gideon crossed the line a long time ago, that he is no longer an edgelord with an internship. Now he’s a fascist with a government grant. Ivan tells me that he doesn’t like Gideon, but that my hot tears are selfish and useless and Gideon is right about this. We are no different from him. Why should I cry about those kids and not the kids starving in Yemen or in refugee comas in Sweden? I tell my friend I care because it’s my country and I paid taxes for the first time this spring. If you care about the kids, stop calling them those kids, he says. That’s exactly the issue with edgelords, if you walk on that thin line you are bound to slip and cross over to one side at some point.
My mom tells me that caring is enough. I know that she’s wrong. Caring is nothing. I sound like an edgelord when I say that, but I’m not trying to get a rise out of anyone. I’m just being honest.
Everyone calls Gideon an edgelord. He has a Fulbright, but he works at a construction site. He sends me a selfie in front of flowers he planted; he’s wearing a T-shirt that says God Bless America. I tell him it’s a stupid T-shirt. He tells me it’s not. I ask him if he’s being ironic when he says that he loves America. He tells me that he is not an ironic person. The refugee children have to be kept somewhere. I tell him that they aren’t allowed to touch each other, and that they are cold. He tells me that he wants proof, but doesn’t care enough to get it himself. I ask him again if he’s joking. He tells me that he’s not. I’m mad, but I’m thankful that he is so honest. He is doomed and undoomed and doomed again, caught in a cycle of bloom and decay, between irony and sincerity. Is irony the enemy? Are edgelords the enemy? (Am I the enemy?)
There is no usefulness in the malicious provocation that people associate with the common definition of the term, but that’s the great thing about our terrible times, everything is always changing, words are unstable, the term is no longer what it once was. It’s something better, a word for complexity creators (cringe). It’s something worse, a word for the wrong people who have crossed over into the dangerous right. To be completely transparent, it’s something that I have been called many times. It’s something people think that I am. In so doing, they have given me the job of actively defining the word in how I live and act and care. It feels good to have an identity. It’s a big responsibility.
Fail
Epic fail. To mess up big time. Fail is to get hurt, to fall, to break, to destroy. Fail is an accident and it is so funny. It is always funny. On the internet, fail is written in impact font and ALL CAPS. FAIL. FAIL. FAIL. The font makes it funnier. It’s the first meme I remember seeing. It’s 2006 and I am in the school library. I’m on Google for the first time. I want to watch those videos of people falling and breaking things and slipping and accidentally punching each other. FAIL Compilations. When things go wrong, it’s funny, that’s what FAIL means. Failure is a universal humor, the simplest kind. It brings us together. We all can laugh because we can see how and why it went wrong. There is a right way and a wrong way. That table is obviously not strong enough for all those people. The water in the pool is obviously frozen. The fence is obviously too high to jump. The mud is obviously slippery. You are obviously going to fall and we are all obviously going to laugh.
The fail meme is a meme of a bygone era, a long-ago time. A time when I could laugh with the crowd, when niche humor wasn’t the only funny thing there was. A time before each of us who grew up on the internet filled our squishy, spongy brains with hyper-specific signifiers. When I try to explain a meme to my mom or dad, I fail. They haven’t been loaded up with the signs and meanings that I have naturally mentally amassed since that day in the library in 2006. Other members of my generation have this same issue. We even make memes about this, our failure to understand anything but memes.
That fat Bugs Bunny is named Big Chungus. Do you even remember him? Should I remind you why he’s funny? No. Does this failure to communicate across time make him funnier? Yes. When I’m saying something and you think I mean something else, is that funny? Sometimes. At the end of every year there is a meme that compiles all the top memes of the year by month. If I asked you to identify the memes in this image, would you fail? Yes. If I was asked to define meme, would it be an epic fail? Yes. Big Chungus, the image, is from 1940, so it’s possible that Hitler saw him—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Wikipedia says “An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme (/mi:m/, MEEM), is a cultural item (such as an idea, behavior, or style) that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms.” A meme is democratic. Democracy makes it funny.
When democracy fails, is that funny? I don’t know. I know I laughed when Trump was elected. I laughed because I saw it coming, but knew it was wrong, like the slippery mud and the flimsy table and the pool with the frozen water. We should have seen it coming. Some of us deserved it. It was winter! Of course the pool was frozen. When we sat on the table we felt it wobble. The mud of the swamp is always slippery. Democracy didn’t fail, we did, and it sure was epic. EPIC FAIL.
Ghost
A ghost is not a phantom, but a person who up and dropped out of your life, whose memory haunts you.
Gifted
Millennials, whom I don’t identify with even though technically maybe I could, are always going on about how damaging it was to be told that they were all special, different, gifted. They’ll be quick to tell you all about the drama and trauma of the gifted child, the fast pace of the internet’s rise, the fact that they witnessed all that change faster than their little mushy brains could process it. They’ll either tell you that no one is gifted, or that only they are, and that it was so, so hard. They were the first generation to all get trophies at sports games. The losers and the winners, no difference. Everyone was the same. High-five the other team. Eat those orange slices. Take off your cleats. Drink your Gatorade. Put your trophy on the shelf with all the other ones. It is a gift. Grow up. Wear ripped jeans. Try to be different. Try to be quirky. Wear glasses even if you don’t need them. Be indie. That didn’t work either. Everyone was indie, no one was independent. Sit in the basement, filled with doom. Blame the helicopter parents. Blame Urban Outfitters distressed denim. Blame capitalism. Blame the gifted program at your school. Blame the teachers for telling you how special you were. Blame the world for showing you it was not true.
Pausing to think about it, the whole idea of generations just plays into capitalism by encouraging new identities in order to exploit and divide us and sell us stuff.
Gideon and Ivan are both millennials. They both went to public school. They both lived in the type of suburb where there were only a few exceptional children, shining lights. Their second-grade teachers were right. Ivan is spiritually ahead of his generation. My generation was born knowing how special we were. We don’t need to be different. We watch millennials as they try to be individualist, entrepreneurial, politically correct, up on indie music, and hard at work on their personal brands. We treasure our mumble rap. We laugh at some of their jokes, but most of their memes are weak. We Gen Zers are collectivist, nihilistic, and interested in the playfulness of identity. We know that nothing is stable, especially not the self. One minute you can be gifted, shining bright, in the front row, a National Merit Scholar, and the next you can be normal and sad and doomed and getting old, talking to me like your life depends on it. But these adjectives are all marketing. This is all just what they want us to think, to put a gulf between us.
Hyper
Hyperactive. Hyperloop. Hyperlink. Hypernormalization. Hyperbole. Hyperstition. Get Ritalin or Adderall or extra attention. Get from LA to San Francisco in a narrow tunnel. Get from here to there to everywhere with a click. Get born into a world shaped by narratives and lies. Get dramatic and make your own lies. Do it all very fast, faster than ever before. Do everything at hyperspeed because that’s the speed your world moves at! Everything changes all the time. Be hyperaware of that. Don’t hyperventilate. Welcome to your world. Everything here is hypercharged. You are hypermobile. You can do anything. So, do it the most! Do it to excess. Do it like you did when you ate refined sugar for the first time. Do it like you did it with frosting on your hands and face at your third birthday party. Do it like your mouth is filled with more Jolly Ranchers than teeth. They say you have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But doesn’t everyone? They say you’re making stuff up, being hyperbolic. But isn’t everyone? Everything is so very very. There is so much. It’s so fast. Play Mario Kart. Play Grand Theft Auto. Steal your dad’s Tesla. Accelerate. Match the speed you feel everyone else moving at. Stay with the pack. Read some Nick Land. Hate it. Love it. Take some Vyvanse. Zoom. Doom. Zoom. Doom. Zoom. At hyperspeed we click, click, click, six-second videos, learn, forget, run, binge, purge, do, do, do. We go so fast and do so much because we can see that the end is near. We want to see who can get there first. Are we there yet? Will we be the last? Will we get to see how it all ends? We’re in a hypertunnel. Reality TV. Melting ice caps. Climate refugees. Automatic weapons. Mass extinction. The echoes of a vague shattering sound. We are so restless! We need to run. We run toward the light at the end of the narrow tunnel, even though we know that it’s an oncoming train.
IRL
IRL=In Real Life. Define in. Define real. Define life.
When are we going to meet IRL? I asked this question to Gideon and Ivan, before they were hands and feet and blood, while they still lived behind the black glass of my screens. Before they were in my dorm or in a hotel room or in the flesh, they were already in my world. They were in my real life. They were men made of little pixels, of messages they typed and sent to me, but they were still real. When we met IRL, in person, face-to-face, it was strange. I didn’t know your fingernails were like that. I didn’t know about that freckle, that one right there. At first, those fingernails and freckles felt less real than what was behind the glass. IRL is always something different, always changing, just like everything else. What I am used to is what is real. Lately I am used to nothing.
