my god, this man with a huge, beefy fuckin bike— a bike that met every qualification for obnoxious motorcycle except for the motor, it was just a classic pedal bike but steroided out (beast mode alert...). this man, dustin hoffman-eye-wrinkles and all, kept shooting me flirtatious sex looks from across the train car. at night. he was like 60.
this verified my whole new ordeal which is feeling invincible on a train. this is not delusional either people dont want to give me hell: i've "weakened my way through the other side" in that i'm too delicate to be accosted in good conscience. curb-stomping me is like curb-stomping an origami swan. what would otherwise be a cathartic destruction is just so so sad. i got that mush head. no one's gonna fuck with that.
remember the "john silly walk" meme? the caption, "i told john to do a silly walk and he actually did it the absolute madman hahahaha" carries that implacable compelling energy that the most stirring and memorable memes do: capturing some unusually specific and evocative character or way of saying something, but reaching at some somehow universal energy. it taps into some trope maybe we all saw on a kids show, which would explain the generational quality of most memes. there is a bank of zeitgeists that we were fed through Fairly OddParents, Spongebob, Jimmy Neutron... just emotional mechanisms and little operations that we internalized. so a meme that channels— even abstractly— some moment from that show is devastating. i remember in high school the funniest kid in our grade was the kid who was most frequently able to pull references from the collective unconscious, and it was super super funny and warm, because it created this instant kinship and love, triggering a memory that we had but forgotten. it's an amazing thing to do, to access that space. maybe it's nationalistic as well, because it really cements the idea of distinct cultural humors.
anyway, about silly john walk:
this is the kind of heavyduty research that i love to see painstakingly noted in an online forum.
that tirelessly thorough dig is what the internet was built for. thats why we catalog, boys. thats why we catalog boys.
i also recently saw my dad in a chicago production of macbeth. watching my elderly father rapier and prance and joust was just like classic the willy-wonka somersault was surprising , delightful, and somewhat of a betrayal.
