Hey there! Sorry if this seems like TMI, but I believe in getting names, labels, and identities defined up front. I’m a longtime lurker, a first-time poster (yay!), a self-identified starspirit, and a boundless kundalini vessel with no de-contextualizable “name” or time-invariant “gender” that you’d be able to comprehend. My colleague and pedagogical dual, Kris, always teases that I’m equal parts whore, Lilith-warrior, and porcupine-spirit—plus 8 magic bits of just-for-fun data stored in a “platonic/nirvana/heavenly Nintendo NES console game cartridge,” which you should think of as my u(nique)(niversal) hermeneutic harmonic. I know that Kris is just teasing, which is a state of affairs that could be construed as humorous, but the dependent implications/insinuations are, frankly, offensive, if not outright horrifying, so I always consign them to my mental layaway, where they will remain carefully preserved unless/until I ever need to FIRE MY ROCKETS at Kris for what I HAVE PROOF he did at the so-called funeral home (as I always teach my students, the site should actually be thought of as that of a homegoing: i.e., the home is elsewhere, albeit unknown; semiotics intrude even into the grave, it seems), because Kris would definitely be arrested and subjected to mandatory surgery to remove both the heavy metals and the serial number. (I’ve got photos of Kris swallowing one of his mom’s dentures right before they dragged her bier away on a pine sledge, just like the kind her ancestors would’ve have used in Lithuania before they immigrated all those hundreds of heads ago to a series of intermediate countries before arriving in Levittown, New Jersey. It would upend Levittown forever if its high society saw the photos. There’s only one slot available for tenure, and the choice of Kris will be indefensible by hook or by crook. So fuck Kris in his dirty butt.)

There’s more to me, of course—I have chosen to incorporate some highly complex Pacific Northwest practices that would take too long to teach right now, if indeed possible at all—but the BIG IDEA of which I’m an evangelizer (as well as a creator and sustainer, including managing the listserv), holds that authenticity is recursively elicited from the “narrativistical marketpla(y)ce of ideaz” that is codependently involuted with the lattice of all signifiers (Sauceuf, LaGrondla, et al. 1987), etc. There are so many details we’ll discuss assuming you have calendared the expanded version of this talk, but the main point is that I don’t have a publicly visible Facebook page, so I will hand out my ProtonMail address at the end of the talk.

My name is Jan, but that is not contextually appropriate in quotidian situations. Two of my initials are “PP,” so that’s what many colleagues call me simply for purposes of administrative expediency. As a badge of pride, I tell everyone that my mother calls me Pxsptvswqx—and that’s because she had a series of powerful strokes that destroyed her “public” motor skills (i.e. actions she had habituated to performing in public) but left her essentially mentally intact, in a sort of Kafkaesque twilight state that raises all sorts of fascinating and complex questions about the signifiers and the signified impliedly necessitating higher dimensions of tensors relative to the “hidden variable” of permission. Merely to outline the issues—if I started calling my mother the “Jersey Greaseball,” then any executory potential—the physical action brought forth in response merely to sound, in a way that the Brahmins would recognize as they sustained the universe—would almost certainly never be rendered kinetic, even though the subject clearly heard the name invoked and responded with steady intraocular feedback. (In other words, she’s locked in and can’t say shit. This is just a thought experiment, of course, in material part, and the comically reductionist way of characterizing the data would be to posit that my mother hates the name Greaseball and would attempt to break the signifier-signified-permission matrix, but for the fact that she’s basically a coffin-sized vegetable.) Since her mental state is unverifiable (although posited by her doctors to be “normal, but bored”), once a week I load her into her Cadillac Escalade, which she never bothered to sell before she had her stroke and got sick, and I let her drive around the neighborhood, while I lean over from the passenger seat and gently—but never obtrusively—help guide the steering wheel as we make our joyful way “over hill and dale” (which is what I laughingly call the many flowerbeds and front lawns that we’ve zoomed across, never stopping, never ceasing). Pedestrian hunting, despicable as it is, has a certain kind of nobly-melancholic charm that I suspect informs my deeper belief that bounding over one fence, then another—be it on horseback or behind a V8—is indeed an activity for a Society, which we do in fact live in. Thus healing my mother is a transcendent eigenvalue of healing the wider world. The legitimacy of the brutual, non-judicial “virtual execution” of my mother’s legal personhood effected by the so-called “American(t?) legal system” is questionable but convenient.

And THAT, new friends, is me in a nutshell; hello! I’m pleased to meet you! Now let me scoot ahead to the topic at hand, which I know is dear to all of our hearts: Investing In The Meme Economy! Woot!

(Well … just … one more thing about me. I don’t want to tell you this, but my psychiatrist says I can no longer “deny patterns” and must seek to “weaken scripts”. Compulsion #492x wants you to know that I’m constantly thirsty for HOT lemonade and creamy chocolate cake. There, I said it, and the compulsion is banished to my pocket.)

Okay, so, back to memes. Yay! First off, I know the title says “The Best Part of Waking Up,” and I really didn’t mean to get all clickbaity by invoking that cliche Folger’s incest commercial, but in my mind, the REAL meme hotness for 2020 is about to be …. ta da: NOT Waking Up™.

I think I just heard you gasp! LOL, that’s because you’re one of the smart ones, the geniuses who are always five steps ahead … and I’m talking, like, ultraballer-dimension wise. Yeah, I know you everyone thinks they’re in the smart money, but they’re not; only you are. Everybody’ll be talking, and you’ll be able to join in the conversations too. How? Like this.

You can be like:

“Girl, I am struggling this morning. LOL! My … iPhone battery … alarm … died. Barely woke up …”

“Ooh girl, did you say your phone-battery died? That’s why you missed your alarm?”

“No, girl! LOL. You trippin’. I said I just survived an assault-and-battery over a rusted-out iPhone case while scavenging for leftover ‘Before Times’ food in the Duncan Hines cemetery and I’m extremely alarmed and in a fugue state ‘cause 17.3% of the population has died and I barely woke up due to the collapse of society.”

“Oh LOL, I was so confused. OK, so if your phone was workin’, no offense—and don’t take this wrong way or roll your eyes, but … “

“But what?”

“In the sight of the Treefathers I invoke the Damnation Protocol Binding Society in the New Dispensation. You failed to unconditionally respect your iPhone alarm as I previously instructed in my blood-ink order dated Augtober 53, 2020b … “

“… what the fuck? …”

“… with the aforesaid order implementing the Temporal and Spiritual Command of the NeoMarquess-v2.2 of this Square Milejx. Therefore, the True and Fearsome Small Council of the Neverdamned Survivors of the Ancient-and-Starship-Gods’-Scourge-in-the-Wilderness-of-the-Scrapersky-Officetemple hereby confiscates your Most Esteemed Tinned Meat Rations for the rest of your survival (heretofore erroneously styled ‘life’ and now corrected with retroactive effect) and further orders that you be exiled among the glowbeasts and their undying brethren in the heaps among the Irradiated Places.”

“Um. Um, OK, Miss ‘I’m a feudal mage-princess now’ von Thang von Sashay. I guess didn’t hear the iPhone alarm because it is a scrap of rusty metal, and cell service is now a historical term. And since I guess you are Miss Enforcer too, do you have any Kleenex or Chapstick that you can borrow me? I would not want to offend anyone with my chapped lips that look like Brenda’s from homeroom. Although I think she got ate by a glowwolf tho.”

AND STOP! I need to snap you back to reality here; sorry, that scene is over. I know, I know—it’s hard to leave such an engrossing story. But it’s only the beginning So, just between you and me—our secret… have I sold you yet? Ha! Playing hardball, I see. Well, if that conversation isn’t your style, here’s another option:

[Template] Just be like “Blah blah blah, <something else>, I just sipped on about five gallons of dumb-bitch juice and this is what I think about <some dumb shit>.” Or “<honestly just say whatever, because it really won’t matter>”. [Template]

See what I mean? In the next few months, only the sky will be the literal limit (due to the anticipated ritual destruction of all human-built flying machines and a blood taboo concerning any future mention thereof), but there’s no figurative limit! Think about THAT for just a moment. Your mind will be able to journey anywhere, notwithstanding the boundaries deemed thought-crime by the electromagical committee of clan safety. Other than that, “imagivoyage” to your heart’s content (just don’t get bogged down in bullshit details about “Meme EBITDAfuq” and lose sight of the forest because you’re staring at the harmonic poisontrees).

Whew! Are you tired yet? I know I am, and I don’t even have any noteworthy pulmonary scarring. Let’s recap: the main point—the big picture—the takeaway is… invest TODAY! Like right now! I’m not “preventing” you from leaving, as you can clearly see and as I’m sure is clearly visible to the camcorder as well, but I do know there are some dOOdz in the parking lot who have baby-shitloads of coke and pseudobooze7. So what? Heh. A little bird with a fucked-up wing told me they’re looking for any way to get back on the inside and could debilitate a roomful of investors in exchange for a couple of halfhearted blowjobs, which obviously cost NOTHING except disciplined time management.

THEREFORE, may I SUGGEST that all of you just go ahead and invest, and then maybe I’ll have time to step outside and politely to speak to those guys in their shipping container? Thx, line forms to the left, cash only, STFU while in line, K?

** Please note, the preceding hypothetical dialogue is a forward-looking statement and is in no way intended to imply that any stranger-to-stranger interactions in the New Dispensation will permit any non-fatal outcome, including any transaction other than a zero-sum reordering of arcanely-quaint property or contractual rights, or any rights formerly styled as fundamental, including but not limited to ‘life’ or ‘privilege against stool-tasting re: NeoThargard’s skeleton-mistress’s bedridden father.’ The company reserves the right to redeem your shares by tendering either seashells or cursed NeoRunes. **

If you read all of this, you’re dumb as fuck.