I’m going to talk about a meme. That makes me imagine my father glaring in disgust at the word and grinding his teeth, like Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love does at the word “weekend”. Or Zadie Smith, her fine intellect, sharp as a Japanese blade, undulled by scrolling (I think about her and her social media ban often). Zadie Smith does not need to know about memes.
I know about memes, because while Zadie Smith was creating enduring art, I was blunting the cheap plastic-handled knife of my brain in the dishwasher of Twitter. I imagine its crenellations and folds softened into a grey blur from prolonged bathing in social media’s grim minestrone of outrage, dancing cockatoos, raw sewage footage and the kind of tragedy that should require us to step away and take time to grieve. But no, here are some dogs going down a slide! One day I’ll break free, but, until then, little sparks of intellectual stimulation, connection or fun – the stuff that sucked me in – compensate for no longer being able to concentrate for more than 90 seconds. There was a video of a cow visiting a Spar in Austria today, I enjoyed that.
