When I used to visit NYC, I’d always meet lots of people from Texas. Almost without fail, they had a tattooed outline of the state on them somewhere. I joked “if you were really a Texan, you wouldn’t have left”. Yet here I am, living out of state, not even in a state at all. What is a district anyway? I surrendered my TX driver’s license for a DC dl and I feel conflicted about it. While now I am able to drive legally, it still feels like I’ve somehow betrayed my loyalty to the greatest state. The irony is I hardly drive here at all, and I certainly do not miss arriving to work in a blind rage over traffic patterns.

It came as a great shock that moving across the country after 30 years wasn’t really a shock at all. There’s BBQ here, though very little brisket (which sucks), but the pizza and sandwiches are so good that I barely miss Tex-Mex (admittedly blasphemous). The bread in DC is clearly better, though I haven’t seen anything remotely resembling a tortilla since I left. My quality of life is tied heavily to dining options so I am delighted to find out DC is a thriving food town.

I had this assumption that Texans, and Houstonians in particular are friendlier than the rest of the country. Desperately looking to confirm my own bias, I honed in on the worst behaviors of strangers, namely bad holding-the-door etiquette. I was wrong though, and there’s about the same level of general courtesy, if not more. Chalk it up to spending more time outside, but I find myself having way more conversations with people I do not know. It reminds me a lot of being in Austin, a city largely comprised of transients. Very few people are from DC, and if they are, they are the first to tell you that it “didn’t used to be like this, at all”.

Downsizing seemed like it would be painful. A man of many hobbies, I have a lot of crap. I jettisoned a great deal, and instead of missing things, I am much happier with what I kept. It’s easy to be fooled into the consumerist lie, but the adage is true, what you own will eventually own you. I took great pride in owning a home, but it is refreshing to assume 0% responsibility for maintenance expenses. The toilet in my new apartment was running, but someone came to fix it within 30 minutes for free. I would have spent an entire weekend going to the hardware store and cursing my futile existence before eventually shelling out for a professional.

In the process of looking at a house full of stuff and helplessly wondering “how am I going to do this?”, eventually you just do it.

I’ve wasted enough money on slot machines to know that I have no business being near them. The spinning reels and lights lull me into a euphoric sense of false hope right before punching me repeatedly in the stomach. I’ve gambled until the sun comes up, which is fine if you are playing poker and enjoying company, but slots are a solitary, sad scene. I like the term “one arm bandit”, it perfectly describes these infernal machines.

Instagram is a slot machine, the one arm in this case is my own arm, and its being robbed of its duties in dog walking and driving and a million other important things other than gathering completely useless information. Just as you pull a lever, a swipe of the finger stimulates your brain with millions of colors and sounds. This is the payoff. A person will usually get up from a slot machine after they run out of money. The game has ended and its time to lick wounds and hit the buffet. Instagram on the other hand, there are no credits and the game never ends. A slot machine occasionally will pay out, but social media does not. The best you can hope to achieve is to buy shoes from a brand of which you’ve never heard.

We’ve all found ourself at one point or another staring into our phone, wondering why did I pick this thing up in the first place. When there are emails to be read, the process ends when I mark all as read. When I am checking weather, the process ends when I see that it’s rainy today. When I open instagram, I’m bombarded with 100s of disparate images, with very little context. For a moment, I feel like I am catching up with friends, except that most of the people that I follow are casual acquaintances I met 10 years ago and haven’t seen in person since. Twitter, despite its myriad of flaws, provides me with news, humor, and a place to fire off one-liners to one of the 3 people that like my tweets. Instagram is a bottomless pit. There is no end game. I scroll until I feel like I’ve been hypnotized, walking around dazed before mindlessly pulling my phone out to share a photo of latte foam to a bunch of people I no longer know.

The stories feature is interesting, in that it is completely plagiarised from Snapchat, missing IMO the best feature (face swapping). Using Stories is like flipping through the channels on cable, only there are no Simpsons reruns or Twilight Zone marathons to find. The worst casualty of all, is that they’ve convinced us that shooting vertical video is NOW correct, after years of “hey moron, turn your phone sidways (the right way) before you start filming a street fight”. Not being able to use the app or watch video in landscape mode is failure of their own design. Being fully enveloped by a video would only distract us from pulling the lever again. I even second guess myself when shooting stills because I’m worried that a landscape won’t have enough detail on a 2” screen. I didn’t start taking photos to get validation from strangers, and I simply can’t continue to do so.

Following the success of the Fyre Festival documentary, particularly the @fuckjerry produced Netflix version, it’s come to my attention that people spend a great deal of time talking about memes and don’t really seem to know what they are. Your tweet is not a meme. An image with a caption is NOT a meme! Those are posts, and they are as common as they are singular. A single idea cannot be a meme. The backlash around unfollowing the desperately unfunny @fuckjerry rejects this shameless thievery as “meme aggregation”. A screenshot of a joke stolen from a professional comedian’s twitter and posted on instagram, this is going to shock you, is NOT a meme. This is not true for all of his posts, and there are certainly memes (albeit stolen ones) to be found in his feed.

I once made a mocking Spongebob post (note: this IS a meme) on a branded twitter account, but one woman took great offense to it. I had used a #RIP hashtag to honor recently deceased creator Stephen Hillenburg, to which this person conflated as using Hillenburg’s death to promote a product. This was clearly not my intention. I should also point out she referred to him as R. Hillenburg, so the outrage seemed somewhat manufactured in my opinion. She obviously doesn’t understand the meme, and more likely, probably doesn’t understand how memes work.

So what the hell is a MEME? What makes this an egg, and this egg a meme? A meme is a punchline to a joke that no one told. It’s the modern day equivalent of walking into a room and hearing “So I says to him ‘THAT AIN’T MY LEG!’” The image is the punchline. The caption provides context. There doesn’t necessarily need to be context, which is a joke unto itself. “They did surgery on a grape” as a comment on a random ESPN post is as much a meme as the screencap of the actual grape surgery. A fake screencap of a famous person’s tweet is a meme. A meme requires something recognizable, which is why memes morph through countless photoshop adaptations. Envisioning every context in which a single punchline can be presented is part of the challenge. It’s a cultural thought exercise. It shows us who is paying attention, it shows who is in on the joke.

In a strange turn of events, I’m moving to our Nation’s Capital. I was looking forward to visiting some Smithsonian museums while I was there last week, but then our Government shut down entirely. Trash piled up on the National Mall, and TSA agents started calling in sick for fear of working without guaranteed back pay. Let me speak on behalf of the American people when I say: “NEVER COME BACK TO WORK, K THX.”

Statistics show that TSA agents are only capable of stopping 5% of weapons from getting on board. If you bought birth control with a 5% success rate, that would be grounds for a massive class action lawsuit. But since this incompetence is at the Federal level, we are supposed to accept this ineptitude as the status quo. We similarly don’t expect any level of customer service at the DMV. For all the calls to abolish ICE, its interesting that rarely do I hear anyone on TV rallying against the TSA.

We spend more money for these inept agents to waste our precious two weeks of American vacation than we do on a Starbucks coffee. Look next time you buy a ticket in the fine print, its right there “9/11 Security Fee”. Somehow we’ve been tricked into thinking $6 per leg of a flight will prevent terrorism within our borders. Do you ever notice how the TSA rules seem to change day by day, airport by airport? Some laptops stay in the bag, sometimes iPads aren’t laptops. There is no rhyme or reason to this logic, it’s just an arbitrary decision made by someone wielding the power to waste everyone’s time.

Once before a flight to Denver, my wife was stopped by a TSA agent who was very angry that she was trying to sneak a cat shaped keychain onto a flight, which he had deemed was a brass knuckles type weapon (it wasn’t). He made us wait for forty minutes while he filled out some paperwork, and assured that we’d get some kind of citation in the mail. We barely made the flight, and my wife was happy to give up the keychain in exchange for our ability to leave. The vacation ended, months went by, but no citation EVER arrived. The TSA isn’t capable of catching 95% of what’s smuggled on to flights, apparently they are also too incompetent to even follow up with citations. The monumental undertaking of running this agency only amounts to, yet again, a complete waste of time.

On another flight from Nashville, one agent decided my wife was hiding something in her bra, despite no reaction from the bazillion dollar x ray machine. They proceeded to perform an eighth grade style “over the clothes” pat down, which in any workplace would be grounds for sexual harassment. They found nothing of course, and offered no apology for completely violating one’s right to not be searched unjustly.

While I feel for those being stiffed by the Government for their paycheck, I encourage you to look elsewhere for employment. Never work for free and never work against freedom.