Collecting, by Jennifer Weigel

Coming at’cha every Sunday at noon Eastern Standard Time EST – here’s more creative content craziness from Jennifer Weigel…

Every dog may have his day, but it seems that cats are another matter entirely.  They can and do haz cheezborger.  And then they meme about it.  But then what? So much cheese…  Sometimes I wonder where all the contents go after the buffet is cleared into the massive dumpster and scraped clean for the new.  It took me ten minutes to find Hovercat again, still requesting permissions to land.  Apparently, all your base are no longer belong to us.  This is why I have a folder titled Research.

It supposedly contains things that inspire me to create or to think about things differently or even to simply smile pensively to myself.  It offers a safe space for those passing memories and moments to rest before they are simply forgotten, fading away into the dark recesses of the algorithms.  Essentially it acts as a sort of archive of online ephemera containing mostly memes, and occasional social media detritus.  Not the overt political plays, but rather the subtle nods to being in a specific time and place in one weird global group hug, suffocating together.

Yeah, yeah, I don’t own permissions.  Honestly in most cases, neither did whoever posted the stuff to start with.  But I don’t do anything with any of it other than to hoard it, like my own weird dragon treasure.  I open it up like an attic shoebox full of love letters and that dried corsage from my first prom (the second, eh I threw that away at the end of the night, but that’s another story).  I glance at the hyperbole from time to time when I’m feeling nostalgic for simpler, seemingly more innocent, innocuous virtual presences.  Anemoia be damned.  Or damning as it were…

Because it’s all just a Lovecraftian wave of undead probability, and you try searching for that post you liked 5 years ago.  Tell me when you find it, I won’t be waiting up.

(Image features Reversals altered mirror image of cat Sam staring at you from Displacer Beasts.)