The Death of Jimmy Buffet
We lost a great man on the Friday Night. He left us to have one last margarita in his honor on the last weekend of summer before the long cold winter ahead of us. Margaritaville (the restaurant) enjoyed the meme treatment and the music of Jimmy Buffet was seen as somewhat of a joke. Anyone who’s ever listened to Margaritaville (the song) more than twice knows that he is a gifted and talented songwriter who speaks to the soul of partying and vacation. He embodied not only the thrill of one drink by the ocean but the melancholy that sets in after the third. Twitter turned into an Irish wake to celebrate the work of a man whose name we often mentioned in jest. He came out on top because we all had to admit that he was the best at what he did and there are worse ways to make a living. There are worse songs to write and worse sentiments to express. It’s hard to hate a man who only asked us to consider a vacation lifestyle and all that entailed. To embrace vacation, every day. Paradise is just around the corner and it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere.
He Was A Fucking Kid
Now when an older celebrity dies, someone always feels the need to post this as if it’s a meme and not just repeating someone else’s joke. Those may seem like the same thing but there’s an important distinction to be made. A meme requires at least a little creativity for each contribution. This has the same tenor as a kid repeating a joke at the wrong moment because they heard someone else say it. They don’t have the right timing or deployment. It’s not as good as the first time but it’s not wrong per se. It’s not correct either. The first time someone said it, it was about the death of Queen Elizabeth, whom many had suspected of being dead for at least six months prior. It's funnier when it’s more plausible the person is more likely to be dead than alive. It does not hit the same when applied to anyone with an AARP membership. For some, there is no distinction between The kind of old Queen Elizabeth was versus the kind of old Jimmy Buffet was. That does not make these people correct or funny. I know the internet is for young people and some of you are stupid, but a joke is best deployed when it’s funny, and the funniest it can be. Not everything needs to be a meme. Sometimes a tweet is just a tweet, and we diminish how good it was the first time by repeating it. What was once a hilarious prescient joke is now just a callous attempt to go viral.
Tabis
There are times when spending hours and hours wasting away online and learning useless terms and phrases that may never apply to my real life feels futile. There are other times when the hours of research and analysis pay off. This weekend, the universe aligned and all of the knowledge I accrued came together to tell the most delicious story I have ever heard. My years of internet vocabulary lessons to understand the modern world had finally paid off. This week I needed to know: Hinge, Spotify, Brooklyn, and most importantly… Maison Margiela Tabis.
This is the kind of story I can’t believe we heard straight from the source. It is the kind of gossip so good you almost don’t believe it, but all the details are too weird for it not to be true. A dating horror story that ends with everyone in the audience going “WHAT!” Rather than “I’m sorry that happened to you.”, we’re all sorry but in the end, the girl knows that she has something almost better than a pair of Maison Margiela Tabis. And to a certain kind of New York City fashion girlie, there’s nothing better than a pair of Tabis. That’s what makes this story so good. There’s no better modern MacGuffin.
The memes are not better than the story but they keep us talking about and thinking about the story of the Stolen Tabis, which is the best piece of gossip I’ve heard since High School. This gossip is so good that it feels like high school. The characters are familiar archetypes; even if we don’t know them, we know them. She feels like a friend of a friend who I met at a party, and he feels like the boyfriend of a friend of a friend. Not everyone online feels like a character in the extended universe of my own life, but these people certainly do. I want a story. I want hot goss. I want interpersonal social interaction and a violation of the social contract. So rarely does anyone deliver.
Lindyman
The Lindyman is a character online who is best left in the periphery. I don’t really care to investigate his whole thing, a sentiment shared by many online, including the people who deploy this meme. After years spent online, we get the gist. The Lindyman declares that things in the past were different and perhaps better. The Lindyman meme is a comedically lazy attempt to be the Lindyman, a job it seems anyone can do. Simply attach a picture of his icon and point out a tradition lost to time. Simple as. This meme feels like a kind of treat one can only enjoy after hours spent on the internet. It’s not as delicious as the Tabi’s story but it’s good to have a meme I feel like only some of us have earned. It’s only funny because of the experience of being slightly annoyed by him.
TikTok
I Asked Him What He Wanted To Learn In Kindergarten
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We can discourse the homeschool homesteaders to death but nothing is a better tool in our arsenal than making fun of them. It’s so amazing to watch someone throw stones at the idea of School from the glass house of Mommy Blogging. It’s great that the kid doesn’t have to go to regular school and can dictate his learning, but that’s because he has a job. He is the source of all of his mother’s content where she brags about how much he’s learning or not learning. Call me crazy and brainwashed but I have a hard time trusting a curriculum that comes from a link in bio. I trust it even less when that link is also trying to sell you the wide-brimmed Hats all those Christian homesteaders wear.
Wassup Gwayy
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September is a month of new beginnings, new friendships, new phases of life, new songs to set your lives to. This is ours for now. It does not matter if you like it or enjoy it, for the week of September 6th, and perhaps a little afterward, this is it. The soundtrack of our lives as TikTok users begins “Wassup Gwayy” and lasts about 6 seconds and there’s nothing we can do about it. Years from now, people will associate September 2023 with the words “My Honest Reaction” and “In the Club, with my Twin, we be vibin” and also Drake, but he’s always kind of lingering in all of our memories anyway.
Lol...that Tabi story was the best!