Living the Meme
Meme definition: an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.
I haven’t been terribly interested in music with lyrics for the past couple of years, preferring, mostly, audiobooks, podcasts, the sound of silence and nature, or the classical style melodies of Ludovico Einaudi. In my teens going to music events was just an excuse to get pissed and I could never really understand how anyone could enjoy themselves at such things without being inebriated when one can’t even see the performer on the stage without being half squashed to death up the front by all the other bodies, pushing and shoving and sweating, trying to get a glimpse of their favourite performer prancing around the stage doing his or her thing in a way that somehow resonates with the dreams, emotions, and aspirations of the hordes of people that all thought it was a bloody marvellous idea to pay an exorbitant amount of money to stand, squashed together like rubbish in a trash compacter, waving their arms in the air and hopefully managing to do so without elbowing another fan in the face and causing them a god awful injury of some type or another.
But some weird switch has flipped in my brain recently and I daresay I went a bit loopy and bought two tickets to Passenger in the Big Top in Galway. And I’m not even sure I like him all that much but since February and the happenings described here I’ve found myself listening to a lot of piney-whiney, whingy, lovey-dovey sort of music; I’m not entirely sure why as it all feels a bit daft, teenage, and melodramatic. But even though I keep self-analysing myself as to how I have acquired this strange malady and have gone to great lengths to cure myself of it, it appears to have somewhat chronic properties. If truth be told I actually kind of like it. And so, I’m going to Passenger in July even though it seems like an utterly daft thing to do. I’m not going to be drinking, crowd surfing, wiggling my ass, or singing along to his music because I can’t sing in a way that anyone would ever want to hear and I generally try not to subject people to my singing unless I want to annoy them. I may go wild and have a few chips though.
When out for my photo walk the other morning, listening to my piney whiney music playlist, I got to thinking that I have never heard a love song that mentions anything about smelling the pungent aroma of their loved one’s farts after a feed of pints and a curry cheese chips on a night out, which makes lovey-dovey music all seem a bit phoney when you think about it. To this day I find it hard to accept that anything but rose petals could ever come out of a beautiful woman and I wholeheartedly blame the meme culture which has been created for us. Someone invented love hearts that for some reason represent having a sense of affection for someone but love hearts look absolutely nothing at all like the human heart which is actually a veiny fist of obscure looking muscle that pulses away in our chests for an indeterminate number of years because of electrical impulses.
The picture in the header of this post shows a swan making the meme that humanity has come to recognise as a love heart. I say “swan” and not swans because it’s just one swan picture that I duplicated and flipped and stuck together in Photoshop. To those used to using this software, it’s obvious that I did so. A friend messaged me and gave me some advice to tinker with the picture to make it seem more realistically like two swans. I said it would still be obvious to anyone who looked carefully that it wasn’t two swans, I didn’t care anyway, and that the message in the picture was to love oneself. I’m not sure there’s any message in it at all really, but I like the picture, and it’s fun to pretend that things are endowed with intentional meaning. It’s sort of a meme really. Swans always remind me of a conversation with someone I considered my closest friend at a particular point in time and space. We were talking about whether it was a natural tendency for a male and a female to get together and stay together for life and I pointed out various animals that have various mates throughout their lives and she came back with the example of swans that mate exclusively for life. I think most people these days have multiple partners in their lives, but I still like the idea conveyed by the mating habits of swans; it seems quite romantic if not very prevalent in our current age.
Oftentimes when running, I like to strike up conversations with people as running in itself can be a bit boring to me. “How are you getting on?” is something I ask when running alongside people and a high percentage of the time the person is completely oblivious to my greeting as they have headphones in, and I always think of them as “plugged into the Matrix”. Don’t get me wrong, I like “plugging into the Matrix” myself, but it always somehow strikes me as a bit strange to greet someone that is completely oblivious to your greeting as one of their primary senses isn’t working the way it’s supposed to as it’s completely overrun with music that somehow resonates with the thoughts, feelings, dreams, and desires of the person listening to it. We all do it. Songs often open up filing cabinets of memory that transport us through time and space and conjure up memories and faces that were relevant in our lives when they were released. They stir sentiment, make one nostalgic, motivate, and maybe even inspire, but I find myself, generally, at a stage where all music seems a bit the same. It all seems like a kind of meme. But I like memes. And I’m going to Passenger in July. I may never “live the dream”, whatever that is, but I shall persevere in my efforts to live the meme until I get bored with it again. It might be a bit ridiculous, but I shall enjoy it while it lasts 😊.