WARNING; EXPICIT LACK OF EDITING, GRAPHIC LACK OF PROOFREADING

Based on the idea that I’m not too far from the mean hump of the bell curve, I figure it takes someone about ten minutes, soup to nuts, to pick out a greeting card for, say, your niece’s birthday. Sure, there are other things to consider like it goes a lot faster if you’re already ten minutes late and you’ve stopped by the pharmacy to pick up your Xanax and maybe a Barret, a gift bag, some smokes and are rushing through the gift card aisle, wondering if you can open up the Xanax before getting into the checkout queue. Or, say, you’ve got insomnia and are at an all-night pharmacy hoping to kill a few hours until the sun rises, also.

But you (or I or possibly me depending whether I’m in parenthesis or not or if I give a ripe old shit) usually stand there looking at the picture, then reading the inside, thinking about whether we can make it work or not. Oh, oh, oh, quick tangent. About twenty some odd years ago, most of this whole flock of Cranes are in West Plainfield, Connecticut that is (No movie stars, swimming pools or black gold) for my sister in laws sister’s wedding, in part on account of my little sister doing her first wedding ceremony, I think, as a newly minted minister. The story apropos to this is that the groom gave my sister a greeting card to incorporate into the ceremony. The pre-made greeting is really trite and the hand-made writing is sexually explicit. My little sister had no idea which part he wanted incorporated. Maybe you had to be there, there were circus acts going on in the other two rings as well. Sort of guerilla participatory circus acts.

Given all that, on social media, people (or I’s, me’s or some singular variation thereof) will spend less than a minute picking out a meme to post. This close to midterms it’s usually a political meme. I think, in a large part, for most you’s and I’s, it’s because if y’all or m’all don’t get the number of thumbs or emoji’s we were hoping for due to our impeccable good taste and skill in choosing what part of someone else’s picture and caption panders to the widest audience, we can just keep posting more until we hit our quota.

Unlike the niece’s birthday card, the political meme never goes away. Also, the intent of the birthday card isn’t to persuade some that it’s your nieces’ birthday, even the biggest niece birthday denier will concede that the date is, in fact, the kids’ birthday, assuming you’re not late or early. Maybe I’m mistaken here, but you’d think one would want to persuade them what’s sitting on the fence to come over to the side of your political view. Otherwise there’s a good reason why the phrase preaching to the choir exists. It is entirely, or at least partially, because it is a pervasive facet of human behavior. In the Saul Bellows novel Henderson, the Rain King there is a short scene that goes something a bit like this;

Henderson; You’re the chief, can’t you make them do (whatever the hell it was he wanted them to do).

Chief; I am the chief because I only make them do the things they want to.

Meaning something, I’m sure. Something like a closed circuit of sycophants. Or, and I can keep going back to this as often as necessary; meaning something, I’m sure. My considered opinion (meaning I spent more than sixty seconds on it) you’re going to have to either write your opinion out in your own words or choose a better class of someone else’s opinion, if you want to convert the fence sitters.

Shit, a verbose albeit singular point and one tangent. I’m just shocked at the number of offensive shits out there in meme land. It’s like the people writing your opinions for you are assholes. The lack of including me in your rabble? On the rare occasion I post a meme it’s funny or intended to be, in either case it cracked me up, or, it’s music which means I both ripped of the meme maker and the artist. I have a very limited number of qualms about theft but huge number of whatever the opposite of qualms is about intentional mediocrity. Wow that went sideways. I wonder why I don’t give a shit is a common phrase and I don’t give a qualm is not. Often giving a shit is not literal but is the worse metaphor, simile or analogy ever depending on context (I will point out that you can’t spell analogy without anal.) (you can try this at home kids, making the context show analogy ((he, heh, he said anal. Again)) simile or metaphor.). Using qualm out of context is silly, unless it’s a typo, a failure of the auto-correct system or it’s a male quail, the context of latter is uncommon at best.  Where the shitting qualm was I?

My impression of the conservative meme’s is almost demonstrative of the opposite message than the one they were shooting for and the liberal ones are often dumb shit Trump or his minions said which is a lot like quoting a previous greeting card in the current one or handwriting a prior greeting card inside one with its own pablum. Kind of makes me wish I had chosen my friends list to be all one batch of idiots or the other. I am offended by one group of memes, not the content itself but that I have to waste a whole three second of my life deleting them or the better part of ten seconds doing that thing where you don’t unfriend them but make their posts invisible to my feed or the entire minute to week it takes to unfriend them with an explanation.  Worse yet is the energy it takes to pretend that Facebook means jack shit and the hypocrisy of spending a few hours looking at shit that means jack shit. I think there should be a rule, no law, no amendment to the constitution, no an amendment to the Geneva convention that for every meme you post you have to write one and the only background picture you can use is a picture of your neighbors’ cat (which, too, you can’t covet). That’ll learn y’all or me.

I have three dyed in the wool conservative, two of which are republicans (heh, spellcheck did a funny thing to my misspelling of republicans at first; replicas. My immediate synonym for replica is skin job, from the movie Blade runner, or, if you’re literate, the novel Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep.). If we still like the premise that I’m riding the mean hump of the bell curve that ought to scare the shit out of both sides of the polarizing fence. The one what don’t claim the republican party is a staunch Trump supporter. That scares the shit and qualm out of me. T’any rate, those three find primarily violent memes. You know, like, all lives splatter which, I believe has to do with running over anti-fa protesters with their cars, but, has the added bonus of bigotry by a perversion of the current civil rights slogan. And other various ways of fucking up liberals, again, someone else’s meme, because it’s hard to be original when you’re aping the worst in human behaviors. The second worst is forgoing even the most remote possibility that a basic tenant of Jeffersonian democracy is given the remotest nod. That we is us. That we’ve agreed to abiding by the majority decision and go about the task of being we. Ok, maybe the whole majority rule thing got usurped some 250 years ago, but we like to operate under the presumption that it still exists in form or the other.

The current state of things is like flipping the coin, for, say, who receives, and then, when the game is over, calling foul for having gotten the goats end of the coin flip. Huh, that’s a qualmy metaphor. I mean being all for an agreed upon set of boundaries then bitching about it when things don’t go your way or praising the rule when they do go your way. It makes it so even the mildest of wounds can never heal. Hmmm. It makes so even the mildest of butt-hurt … no. Just no. It guarantees that no rule or law is worth the spit it takes to say and that even if majority rule was a reality that it can at bare minimum can be contested for even a perceived misstep. Sweet Swaddling Jesus, the more I type the more I equivocate. Especially since y’all knew what I was talking about from the get go. Yes, customized greeting cards and/or not having any nieces.