Walking a Lonely Rope 

This seems to be an odd thing, and in fact completely impossible, thing be doing in a building, and in a very small room, in fact, but I'm walking on a tightrope. I've been doing that since nearly a year ago, before which I was rather contented to stand on the side of the tightrope and watch people nearly teeter over and point at them and go "Whoa, that guy nearly teetered over!" 

Well, I suppose there must have been something appealing about it, since a while later I jumped on (or rather, was dragged on by a group of very persistant people and after a while, I found that I rather liked it). So for a solid nine months, I've been walking on this not-so-much-solid-as-wobbly tightrope (that you've provided figured out is metaphorical by now and if you haven't, then never attempt a conversation with say, Mr Valles) and I've found several things to be true. 

It's very hard to overtake people when you're on the tightrope, and when you try doing that you end up falling over because people that are in front eventually get annoyed after a while and inevitably start displaying their amazing ability to kick behind them while still staying on the tightrope. So after a while you decide you might as well just admire their posteriors and tiptoe behind them at a pace that could almost be described as "merry", except that there's nothing very "merry" about the whole business of getting kicked if you don't. 

It's also fiendishly difficult just staying on the infernal cord. It gets very tempting at times to simply lean over to one side, since you've got the justification that you could quite easily compensate by leaning over to the other side ready, which comes in quite handy when you're looking for an explanation as to how you ended up lying down and staring up at people walking on a tightrope, the point at which the you now might turn to the you then and very sardonically raise one eyebrow and declare this whole idea to be "Perfectly executed". The response is usually silence, although if the fall was traumatic enough a "shut up" might be heard. 

So what I'm doing right now is creeping along on this piece of rope, hoping that I don't fall and if I do, then someone might think me lying in the mud an eyesore and yank me out (Quiet, children) of it and slap me down (I said settle down) onto the line that seems to be standing in for a compass that said it'd be back in a while and it just had to settle this one thing. 

I hope it gets back soon, because everytime I look at my feet I know precisely how I stand on the line. 

Squatting Ideas

Every so often, and I really mean this, I'll find myself sitting in a school canteen where dustbins have been liberated of the social obligation to wear their lids, and I'll hear a distant voice of a rather nasal and high pitched quality proclaim something nearly as annoying as itself. 

These incidents happen to coincide very closely with the times in which I start weighing all the pros and cons of the Internet. Usually, the nasally voice is allowed to continue with its gummy bear muffled ramblings since the alternative would mean me getting closer to its source, but I still can't help but wonder during those moments whether the Internet's advantages outweigh the terrible scourge of most Internet memes. 

Yes, that's going to be the topic of this article, and while you're probably digging trenches for the rhetoricky, rant-ish invasion about why can't all these people just grow up and start making up phrases of their own, that's only going to be part of this article. The other part is hopefully going to be a soulful attempt to remember what memes used to be. The end of this paragraph's probably a good place to start, so let's get to it then. 

Memes, when you boil away the thick black coating of Rickrolls and bodily fluid exchange, are really just recurring or continuous ideas within a society that are transmitted from one mind to another by way of a completely mentionable act: communication. And that's never been easier (seeing as how technology tends to get better in every aspect other than eco-friendliness when going forward in time) given advent of the Internet, phones and large buildings with nice hollow spaces right in their middles which make it very hard for you to have affairs (or one, if you'd like) with your attractive secretary(s). 

So with the mention of the Internet and its ability to proliferate memes like a cold does in a Chinese train, the thought of testing the durability of your router may have occured to you. But hold that thought for a second. Memes are something more. (No, just put the router down. Really. It's not going to be worse.) 

Every form of "received wisdom" is a meme. The concept of wearing clothing (some, at least) in public or not going spelunking in your nostrils (those who do have developed apathy shields that would greatly ensure their survival in the event that Halley's Comet came over to grab its belongings. So on further reflection we're mostly safe.)  are all memes. They're generally well accepted ideas that have been deeply rooted into many different cultures, and the cultures that don't have these memes are either exiled or considered "damned outrageous". And the thing is, many memes have served us well, because without memes, it would be practically impossible to get anything done with large groups of people (With the exception of rioting. On second thought, scratch that. Rioting's no exception.) because of the absence of a common idea or set of ideas that unifies them in some way. If it weren't for the meme that stealing and murdering were bad, we wouldn't have a legal system. If it weren't for the meme that goats are by no means a form of standardized (or vending machine compatible) currency, we wouldn't have, well, currency. 

Memes, we can clearly see at this point, are ludicrously two sided (the number of two sides there are is impossible to conceive). It can either be the trusty concrete that we have our riots on or the sewer of humanity where our last hope, in the form of very talented humanoid turtles, lies. So the problem isn't the existence of memes, but rather recognizing which ones should be existings and which ones shouldn't. 

Because while memes can be useful foundational ideas, they can also become the equivalent of soft plywood supports for one of those kampong houses. It seemed like a great idea at the time when the rest of the house was made of soft plywood and its inhabitants consisted of the ocassional hummingbird that would fly off once the boards started creaking, but when its inhabitants atart consisting of walking things the whole thing starts to fall apart. 

My point here is that memes can squat on mental chairs that should really be given to new ideas after a good dusting. While some foundational memes may have been excellent several decades ago, they start to lose their appeal and usefulness today. (The example of wearing clothing comes in here again, and it's nice to know that we're going full circle and that all we need to do is start talking to serpents again.) The problem with getting rid of such memes, though, is that they really don't want to get off their arses, because some have been so deepy imbedded in our culture that getting rid of them seems unthinkable. (Like say, in the case of hoping for a Hollywood film that doesn't have a romance thrown in like soya sauce on ice cream.) 

So they sit there and shove away any new ideas that want to so much as offer them some Pocky. They end up being there for the sake of being there, and then the process of creating new ideas starts making funny gurgling noises that aren't very funny at all in retrospect. 

Internet memes being used so often in some conversations is a clear example of this. Once people start using those memes as placeholders for phrases that haven't been echoed by at least one world, then no other ideas can. 

Memes need to be constantly rexamined to make sure that they aren't irrelevant, and deciding whether they're irrelevant or not is going to take a lot of notepaper and a good supply of Pocky. 

Persuasive Accomodation

A few hours ago I did so relieve myself of the loads that made me suspect for a brief moment that I might have been detained for illegal immigration, and in a startling moment I flopped down (More of a roll on my back. The legs did flop down though, if that's any comfort) on my hostel bed and uttered one of the more startling things of the week.

"Yay, I'm back." 

I'm trying desperately to rationalize this action as simply having been a slip of the tongue into oblivion, and then I realize, with several generous servings of dismay sprinkled lightly with stir fried hopelessness, that the expression (the smug bastard) is probably right. I've seen the hostel so often that it's probably becoming my default accomodation, whereas my actual home is becoming something akin to one of those summer houses in Zanzibar that you can only take the word of your estate agent that it still exists. 

So for the time being, I've been constantly reminding myself of the perils of hostel life to hopefully bump this hostel room down a bit on my list of preferred accomodation, and since the list consists of two kinds of accomodation at this point, my actual home and this room, then it shouldn't be too hard to bump it down to the required level of tastelessness. 

So if anyone does see me in the hostel, please try your best to make my stay here as unbearable as possible.