My Favorite Early Pandemic Meme

To celebrate One Year of the Pandemic I will be writing about my favorite meme from the early days.

One year ago Thursday, I was fired from a vegan frozen yogurt shop in Silverlake. It took me many months to put together that this was not my fault but actually a result of the pandemic. I thought it was purely coincidence that I lost my job at the same time everyone else was losing theirs. It took me a while to mourn the life I was going to have. I was going to have a steady income. I was going to get a car. I was going to pay off my credit card debt. Instead I was sitting in my bedroom looking at twitter and trying not to max out my credit card. 

Everyone on twitter was talking about the coronavirus and New York shutting down and everyone losing their restaurant jobs explicitly because of the ongoing pandemic. I did not relate to these people because I am a moron. Los Angeles was slow to put a shelter in place order and we were confused about what we were supposed to do. Of all the information I was supposed to retain from that period, one meme from that time stays with me. I know it has become passe to say you think about something a lot but I do. I think about this meme all the time. 

The meme was widely shared and reached meme status the way an instagram meme would. An image, unchanged, shared over and over. The image was this, an Oreo with 10 bars of Xanax in the creme. The text says “day 5 of isolation. Gonna do a pro gamer move and fast travel to day 8” 

It was short sighted. By naming the days of quarantine they were fast traveling to, they limited the use of the meme. If it had said “gonna fast travel to the next three days of quarantine.” We would have seen it constantly. Every couple of weeks or so it would have made the rounds on Instagram. But it dated itself.

In some ways that was the brilliance of the meme. It captured a moment. It was a meme for mid March 2020. While everyone was handing platitudes for how to behave over the next couple weeks (lol) or how hard the coming days would be. One person, one genius had the foresight to have a sense of humor. Memes have power. I, and many others remember this meme a year after the pandemic started. I don’t remember any advice people who were not health experts were giving. 

Obviously you shouldn’t put four Xanax bars in an oreo and try to sleep through the next three days, but there is a release that comes from seeing someone admit to the despair and frustration you are also feeling, and joking about it with extremes. Sometimes reading bad advice and laughing is more helpful than doom scrolling and trying to parse good advice from bad. This was advice you could recognize as bad but it seemed like the only advice worth taking. It’s nice to see someone know their limitations. Is it recommended by doctors? No. However it is a Pro Gamer move. 

In times of disaster, people feel the need to be helpful and are, more often than not, useless. They feel the need to spread positivity to keep spirits up. The divide between positivity and humor is a big one. Jokes elicit genuine laughter and happiness. Endorphin release as a product of a smile that was not forced. Positivity is often an attempt to force yourself to smile. To make yourself happy because you feel guilty for being sad, to banish negativity from your mind by pretending it isn’t there. 

Sometimes we are bogged down by seriousness. If we had kept the pearl clutching seriousness the way we were online in the early days of the pandemic we would have never made it through. We have to laugh to keep from crying. We have to take a deep breath from our seriously furrowed brows and chill the fuck out occasionally. We have to do a pro gamer move.