Memes

Or, "On The Efficacy of Communicating Via Pictorial Representations of Our Emotions."

Hey all.

You probably have not read this blog. If you have, welcome back. If you have not, you probably are either a) a Facebook friend, b) a Twitter follower, or c) someone who stumbled over this randomly, and are now confused as to why you are reading some dude rambling on about things.

If it's any of those, the real quick rundown about me is: veteran, father, husband, teacher, guy who rants about things. See, wasn't that easy?

I find it easier to express myself like this:

(Even that's not really true, though, because I cropped the image. But hey, now you know what I look like! I'm the dude with the beard, if it isn't obvious, and that pretty lady next to me is my wife, who you will henceforth know as River. It's a long story.)

Anyway, what got me thinking about this was, when I posted about reinvigorating this blog (for a variety of reasons that even I am not really clear on/haven't figured out yet) on Facebook, thinking about deeply insightful, meaningful things, I got this:


via GIPHY

And this:


via GIPHY

Got this too:


via GIPHY

Even got this:


via GIPHY

At first, I won't lie, I was irritated. If you know me, you know why: I take myself way too seriously. Even though I'm pretty sure I've won some internet meme wars in the past. But this is the restart of my blog. Here's how I saw it going in my head:


via GIPHY

Then these images got me thinking about some really serious stuff (probably because I've been listening to this lately, which by the way I highly recommend: https://twitter.com/anthroreviewed?lang=en) like how, for most of human history, we have this weird dichotomy where people express themselves mainly through visual means, yet it was only "civilized" nations that wrote things down. It got me thinking about letters that colonists and frontiersman wrote home to their families, how they had to spend sentences describing the land and how they got sick from food poisoning and how hard it was to travel, and nowadays I can send a cat GIF to River, and she knows exactly how I'm feeling and in what context and what that means for how the night is going to go.

My point here, as I ramble on (and as I have struggled to figure out how to embed GIFs, which is a lot easier than I assumed it would be) is that we are so saturated with images, yet for some reason people like me (or maybe, really, just me) value the written word. When I posted about ideas for restarting this thing, I was expecting:

"Talk about the Trump presidency!"

"Describe 50 things you did today!"

"Discuss your philosophy about how the world should be xyz way!"

But that's pompous of me to assume, because in the end my friends posting memes is exactly what I needed, because as always they keep me grounded when my head is in the clouds.

So, I'm back. I'm going to write something every day. It might not be meaningful or insightful. It might just be posting a GIF. But my goal right now is to at least jot down some thoughts every day. I want to be an author (in case you didn't know) but I also have a lot of opinions and ideas and just plain rants. If you want to read it, fine. Great. It's not really for you, if you're actually someone reading this. It's really about using my voice, putting things down to be heard, but I will write as though I have an audience, because I think even a man shouting into the black emptiness of night should think about courtesy.

Speaking of courtesy, here are some images that show a being who has no sense of that word (oh yeah, I have two kids. They will most likely feature pretty prominently in this blog).








See you tomorrow.