You don’t need to know your meme – your meme is doing just fine without you.
Once born, your meme will continue to grow and mate with another meme (or many memes, because love is colder than death in the meme-world). And then your meme might die and become old news and after a period of hibernation, your meme will transmogrify into something else because some teenager “snap chatted” a pic of your meme for 10 seconds to 10, 000 of his friends, among them a young comic illustrator who remembered the photo only partially and was too lazy to hack the Snap Chat system and recover the “lost” picture of your meme. He reanimates your meme as an avatar in a dark, dark message board world you would never, ever enter into willingly. And the meme is a hit. Many more baby memes now because “your meme” is a Katzelmacher (which you hope is not a racist term anymore because you are talking about a meme, g-ddammit). You are taking a nap, meanwhile.
In other words, you will be walking the dog or pondering a new gray hair and your meme will be engaged in a fierce battle for the survival of the fittest meme. You may be a loser but your meme could be the winningest meme on earth. You may be a total whitey but your meme is all the rage down in the bar where the Arabic-speaking immigrants hang out. Sometimes, what you are doing and what your meme is doing will seem to have a kind of unified symmetry. For example: you will be breaking open a fortune cookie at the kosher Chinese place on Mott St. in NYC and your meme is off on a weekend of wife-swapping that ends with an uncomfortable game of Chinese Roulette. But you aren’t even sure you know how to play that game. Your meme does.
There will be many generations of your meme in a very short time. You will lose track of how many. Right now, even though you only started this whole internet thing a week ago, this may already be the third generation of your memes and now they are questioning the decisions and choices of the first and second generation. By the time autumn comes, this third generation of memes is very frustrated that there are no answers to the important questions they are asking their elders and they will start to act out. One of them will sleep with an American soldier but he will get killed in the end and it will be both maudlin and strange and beautiful. One of them will simply decide to run amok. Join up with one of those totally linked in people like George Takei, who is less than six degrees of separation from everybody else on social media, and blast himself all over the Tumblrsphere. Blow every other meme out of the water. That meme just wants everyone to love him, and him alone.
If you care to try to know your meme, you might wonder which of the two of you is, in fact, the simulacrum. You might grow more suspicious that you are in fact the weaker creature in this new Darwinian struggle between virtual and real worlds because everything important that happens in your life happens online, the world on a wire.
To take your mind off of all this, you decide to leave the house and take a walk. You walk and walk for an eternity (your meme can’t walk, so this one is ALL YOU). You get tired and decide to take the subway just in order to think in peace because the wireless reception is shitty on your smartphone there so you can have your private sphere back all to yourself. Time goes by, slowly. You get out at Alexanderplatz. How long have you been out? You look at your watch and it has been about fifteen hours! That’s okay, though, because you feel so much better after taking that break from your meme. With renewed energy, you decide to show your meme who is boss. You realize the only thing to do to stay alive is to keep producing producing producing more content. A blog might do the trick.