Early one morning in 2020, deep in the pandemic, I rode out from town and headed towards the mountain. I was engrossed in an excel sheet, double checking attendance. They can only bring two of us. One hasn’t confirmed. Fingers crossed.
I set my attention back to the valley in front of me. To my surprise, I saw a face I recognized. I approached him and started a conversation. “I don’t think the other guy is coming.”
He was friendly. “I’m not sure. Doesn’t look like it.”
“Do these usually start on time?”
“It’s actually my first one,” he replied.
We set off to the mountain together. I joined in on the call and saw him join in as well. We rode in silence.
A warm voice crackled over the line. Invites were starting. Chatter slowly filled the call.
“Is that everyone?” Silence. “Okay let’s start doing fills.”
I turned to my neighbor, “I think I’m in.” He nodded. I asked him a few questions. I was starting to get nervous. He reassured me and reminded me it was his first time as well. I asked if he had any tips and we chatted some more. Then it came to our class.
I unmuted myself and answered the call. “You’re in,” he said.
I entered the mountain alongside my friend. The rest was a wild ride.
It turns out Mizzourah had a couple of characters. I ended up having a couple of characters as well. We played many mornings together after that day. He taught me the ropes of Druid and I began leading morning raids. He was my first GDKP friend, a loot system used for pick up groups. It was lucky I met him that morning and lucky I got into a raid due to an absence. There was a good chance I would have had a completely different experience had I not met him that day. Who knows?
Seeing this comment randomly spring up in my youtube shorts, I found it sometimes humorous, sometimes missing the mark. Seeing this comment a few times made me realize it wasn’t just a poor, unsuitable joke someone misused, but rather a developing meme in response to content. Typically the content contained some kind of “Don’t give a fuck attitude” that would do well in customer service, other times it was just a random reply.
Googling the phrase yields two important results. This article, written just three days ago, concludes that the phrase means nothing at all. This video on the other hand, stands to legitimize the phrase by creating a user-generated advertisement.
It’s nice to see two polar opposite reactions to internet nonsense. And that’s what this post is really about: invoking meaning from the meaningless. Or rather, contextualizing that which has no context.
I have been doing this type of exercise in all sorts of forms, from content that had much more concentrated meaning like books assigned to me for literature classes, to content made from internet celebrities that is low-brow and well accessible. It is in our nature to find patterns and to dissect them, finding meaning in things that may not have meaning.
Ideas live in generations, from its genesis to each retweet or repost, to how those ideas are consumed by the end user.
Meaning is not only defined by ourselves and by our culture, but also by generational digestion and regurgitation, meaning ideas can evolve over time, especially when ideas grow larger than the speaker and become entrenched with society before any firm ground has been laid on what has been said. This comes largely in the form of catchphrases, used to propagandize the public’s opinion on things, like “Black Lives Matter” or “Believe all Women” which started as humble phrases with good intention and ended up as weaponized rhetoric. This is not to say all catchphrases will fall to the dark side, with some phrases having harder to misinterpret messages, like “Stop Asian Hate.”
Without making this whole post about the power and use of propaganda, I’ll just say that the specifics around bite-sized sound clips has become a business, a science, and a force of politics. And while that is an extreme and harrowing view, this post also started as a dissection of memes spreading around, even without roots.
I’ll touch on the topic of meaning and phrases more in a future post. For now, I’d like to end on an actual Waffle House story, which is not all that related to semantics.
There were not many Waffle Houses in Illinois, where I spent most of my young adulthood. When I traveled for competitive gaming, I would stop by restaurants local to the area, and this area had a Waffle House. I had been told the food was legendary, the service not so much. I’m a fan of these types of places because I can handle being ignored, especially if the food is worth the social experience.
I enjoyed my meal alone before my tournament. As I was paying the tab, I looked over at a mother and her son finishing up their meal, They were asking for a to-go container. The servings were decently large and a to-go container’s nothing new for a big breakfast.
This was not their leftovers. This was a to-go order after their meal had finished. Okay. I’ve seen this before. Maybe someone at home is hungry or maybe they just love Waffle House and they wanted some more for later. What I saw disgusted me. After this mother and son had finished their meal, they had asked for two large waffles to take home. And when they received their Styrofoam package, the son revealed his waffles, took a syrup dispenser from the table, and unleashed an oil spill level of syrup onto his to-go waffles. His mother carefully supervised the whole encounter, only saying “good” when her son twirled the dispenser upright. He closed his food with delight and they hopped off to their car.
Believe me, there’s a lot of things I could comment on. But those waffles are going to be soggy as hell, bro. C’mon you can’t be doing this to yourself. Amongst the several other reasons.
Leadership, Design, Writing 