I come to you this week, the week of Halloween, bearing a terrible warning. Heed it. Do not make the same mistake as me, lest you become a meme and destroy your fragile credibility forever. I’m the deputy editor here at PEDESTRIAN.TV, but I am also – in unrelated way, I promise – a subject of great ridicule. Allow me to elaborate.
Last year, I was in the United States for three months, bumming around and spending my meagre cash reserves on cheap beer and very little else. It was a good time. On the last day, I did what I believed was a natural thing to do: a semi-ironic YEAH THE BOYS shaka selfie on Venice Beach, just to let the people back home that I was en route back to Sydney. How wrong I was. And obviously wrong, too – you don’t get away with a photo like that. Karma always finds you.
I made another fatal mistake, too: I set that photo as my avatar on Twitter. Because everyone online are bad people with toilets for brains, I immediately copped a well-deserved roasting:
— Kill Southers (@shoerust) October 5, 2015
(scene: beachside pub, @jrhennessy enters barefoot)
JR: g’day sheila, buy ya a pot of VB?
*sound of velcro Rip Curl wallet tearing open*— Andy Cam from hell (@andycam_) October 5, 2015
— ¿¡Fakeed!? (@fakeedbutler) October 5, 2015
heard hennessy is gonna open a CityBeach
— Bec Shaw (@Brocklesnitch) October 5, 2015
@edzitron @jrhennessy lol it looks like you’re counting out the number of times this month that you haven’t been freeballing it on the bus
— Big Scary Jeb Lund (@Mobute) October 5, 2015
I thought, somewhat foolishly, that I had seen the end of it. Crucially, I didn’t change my avatar to anything else, which might have been my downfall. That decision will probably replay endlessly in my mind while I’m on my deathbed saying goodbye to my kin after a lifetime of sin and regret.
What transpired next may have crossed your social feeds at some point towards the end of last year. You may even still be seeing it. I received an invitation to a Halloween party. Unbeknownst to me, a parallel Facebook event was set up to that party – minus myself – organising the true roast the picture so richly deserved. I showed up kinda late to the party, having come from another shindig. Here’s what greeted me:
This was truly the worst Halloween yet pic.twitter.com/sges2uY55O
— j.r. hennessy (@jrhennessy) October 31, 2015
As you can probably see, the original pic has over 10,000 retweets. Like every meme, it got churned out on Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook in a billion different forms within like ten seconds. Sites like BuzzFeed, Metro, Elite Daily and The Lad Bible immediately turned it into content.
Pedestrian didn’t, funnily enough. Missed opportunity, guys. Wouldn’t have happened if I was editor back then. C’maaahn.
There was even a ClickHole skit which to this day I maintain was based on this meme. I have zero evidence to support this claim.
I have no idea why people found this pic so funny, to be honest. Maybe people are just happy to find a Halloween story which doesn’t involve someone showing up to a party in blackface. Maybe I just looked like a massive dickhead in the original pic (Fact check: TRUE).
It’s weird, though. Suddenly, everyone on the internet knows your head for reasons other than the fact it’s huge and munted. You need to explain to your family and employer what a meme is. You have to see the disappointment on your parent’s face as they struggle to comprehend what ‘being a meme’ means, but somehow know it is bad. Teens suddenly know who you are. People turn the original meme into weird other memes which you don’t understand and have no intention of ever seeking to understand.
is this some anime thing?????
Because, annoyingly, this meme has my Twitter handle in the picture, every time it get reposted on Reddit or Insta, my inbox gets flooded with further roasts. I will presumably never live it down.
yes mate
It does give you a weird insight into how deeply deranged internet culture is, though, and how it’s probably only going to get wilder. There are much worse reasons for going viral than looking like a complete boofhead – I could have gone the Justine Sacco route and made a vaguely racist AIDS joke juuuust before boarding an international flight, for example – but it’s definitely an odd feeling. It’s like you’ve handed your rep over to FuckJerry and they can do with it what they please.
All of a sudden you have no control over anything about yourself: pictures of are being shared, reshared, memed, comments are being made and all you can do is just watch it. You can see how, if it were something a little bit more intense and not just extremely stupid, you would feel very, very overwhelmed by it. You’re not a person anymore, you’re a pixellated .jpeg. It’s lucky I don’t have anything particularly ill-advised in my internet history – a lá Ken Bone – or that’d be it. There are, to my knowledge, no comments I’ve left on pregnancy porn subreddits, so do your worst.
I’m fully resigned to the fact this pic is a tasty piece of Halloween content and will be churned out on Instagram meme accounts each and every year until the Earth is a burnt-out nuclear husk. I guess there’s a moral to this story: don’t post dumbass photos of yourself on Twitter if you’ve got shithead mates.
It’s a specific warning, but you must, must heed it. Do not become like me.
