I Meme Mine

The digital afterlife of a washed-up writer

Originally published on Hinged on Dec. 22, 2022

“I’m a meme machine!” Claudio D’Andrea announced. “A me me mine meme-generating machine-gun-them-all-down motherfuckers machine!”

The Spectre — faceless, cloaked and clutching the handle of a gleaming scythe — stayed silent.

“I’m a word-star. Only nobody knows I’m the writer who came up with these meme masterpieces.”

Claudio slogged away through The Meme Mine, handcuffed in front and bearing the weight of chains behind him.

“I am Jacob Marley and you are the Ghost of Christmas Future,” he said. “You know I once wrote a short story that was inspired by Dickens’s A Christmas Carol I called it “Carol’s Last Christmas.”

The Spectre pointed a long bony finger down to the undiscovered treasure trove of memes that Claudio was expected to dig up.

“I had a modest readership with “Carol’s Last Christmas” and I seemed to move some people with the message of my story. But it mostly disappeared into the dustbin along with most of my literary output. Much like my name disappeared before I ended up here.”

Silence, accept for the rattling of Claudio’s chains.

“Y’know, as a living writer, I never would have expected it. The trick to reaching so many people, so many ‘readers’, was in making memes. Or mining memes, if you will. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Just take an image or video of someone, especially a celebrity, add something pithy or punny or just plain goofy, and send it out into the world. It goes viral and before you know it everyone’s sharing it, commenting on it, ‘repurposing’ it to make their own memes. Crazy.”

No response.

“Man, you remind me of my wife. You and these chains.”

The Spectre turned his back to Claudio and pulled a cellphone out of his cloak to check on the status of the latest memes his slaves created.

“Now you really remind me of her!” Claudio said. “You look just like her too from behind.”

He had a hard time working with words in this afterlife with his chains, especially the handcuffs. They were heavy, they hurt (if you could say that about yourself once you were dead) and wore him out (ditto). They also made him one of the monsters of meme mining.

The handcuffs inspired his very first meme — I Meme Mine — which became such a successful series. They were all memes about George Harrison and with Claudio’s help, they turned the ‘quiet’ Beatle into the loudest of successes among the Fab Four in his own afterlife.

As memes go, that first one wasn’t Claudio’s best work. But it still worked, proof that like the more popular and rich writers he despised in life, you don’t have to be super-talented to be a superstar writer. He used a photo of George holding up his arms, casting off cartoony looking manacles with the phrase: “G.I. George.” After the “I” he inserted the words, “this meme is mine.”

At the time, he thought it was a stretch to get people to make the connection between the “I” in the GI George part and “meme mine.” Or, for that matter, to get people to connect G.I. George to the action doll G.I. Joe, so popular when he was a kid growing up.

But I Meme Mine became a sensation as too many people with too much time on their hands took it and started to spread it around the virtual world. Claudio, who knew a good marketing opportunity when he saw one, decided to turn it into its own — his own — meme theme. He started mining more George Harrison memes and became a literary sensation down in the underground where he slaved away for the meme overlords.

There was his meme of George and Olivia Harrison with the superstar reaching out his arms toward their son Dhani. “O look Olivia! Here comes the son.”

His meme of long-haired George saying, “My sweet Lord! Look at all my hair-y hair-y” was one of his most popular, especially during Movember. The one of him as the only fat Beatle with the words, “George Harrison when he was flab” did well too.

He once created a meme of a pensive George, pen in hand, with the thought bubble: “I need another hit. I know there’s Something there somewhere. I believe it and how.”

“Hey, when are we going to get some more meme miners down here?” Claudio asked Spectre. “It’s been a long time. I can’t have been the last washed-up writer to be sent down here in this content mill hellhole.”

The Spectre turned around, jumped up in excitement and held out his cellphone, showing Claudio the latest audience analytics from I Meme Mine memes. They were, as they say, blowing up social media.

Claudio had to admit the memes weren’t always stale. Some of them were challenging and served to satisfy his creative urges. He even ventured into videos, inspired by the wildly popular “Oogachaka Baby,” considered one of the first internet memes made way back in 1996. (God, Claudio felt so old.)

One of them was of George doing a weird waltz dance to “I Me Mine.” Claudio always loved the waltz and wrote about it once in “Carol’s Last Christmas.” In that story, the widowed Carol recalls how his wife Bella tried to get him to dance in three-four time, saying, “It’s like a metaphor for life, the waltz. One-two-three, one-two-three… Two people but it’s as though there’s always a third person or force that tries to interfere or that you have to deal with. You have to dance with that third person and stay connected as a couple.”

Claudio remembered once reading George describe “I Me Mine” as “a heavy waltz.” The Beatle was inspired to write the song when he was on LSD and realized a truth about himself and ego. He was trying to answer the question ‘Who am I?’ and saw it as an attempt to reconcile the ego problem, of duality and the ego; the little ‘i’ of one individual and the complete whole.

All of that was too much to embed in a meme so Claudio just stuck with tall thin George waltzing and singing, “I Meme Mine, I Meme Mine, I Meme Mine.” It was a sensation and surpassed the views of Oogachaka Baby, especially after The Beatles: Get Back documentary was released in 2021.

But the thrill of videos was wearing off too and Claudio wanted to write something serious. Hell could be such a creativity-stifling place.

He wanted to delve into the dark areas of the human psyche but George Harrison didn’t let him do that. His music was too cheery (“Here Comes the Sun”), romantic (“Something”), sad and soulful (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”), spiritual “(My Sweet Lord”) or psychedelic (“I Me Mine”). Claudio wanted to write killer copy to feed his own killer ego.

That killer ego was plotted in his Poesque “Passatempo,” about a writer who tries to kill a more popular rival — the “Mozart to my Salieri” as he put it. The narrator in that story wasn’t just jealous about his rival’s success but bitter about an artist who failed to show a responsibility to other creatives, as he put it. “No man is an island,” the narrator wrote, “and no artist creates anything on his own.” The writer said an artist needs something — input, an opinion, even a response! — from a fellow artist when he creates something. It was a lesson that Claudio took to heart, having lived without any fanfare and with fellow creatives ignoring his work.

No, by George, Harrison’s work just didn’t scratch that dark itch deep within Claudio’s creative soul. Not like an Alice Cooper who inspired one of his stories about how the shock rocker got his revenge against Julie Andrews. Not like his story about a killer computer server or impending death inside an elevator room or a worm who falls into a worm hole through a computer screen.

Claudio needed redemption and it would not come in the form of a meme. All those stories he wrote, many with themes (loosely or heavily influenced by music), formed his only book, a collection of short fiction he called Stories in the Key of Song which was largely forgotten and critically unclaimed.

No, damn the Spectre! Damn Phil Spector too before him and his wall of sound on “I Me Mine” that inspired the meme monster that Claudio was shackled to for evermore! Damn George Harrison. Damn them all to hell!

He needed to create real words out of real life. He was about to shout out to the Spectre and tell him so but the dark overlord merely tapped a long bony finger impatiently in thin air, pointing to an unclaimed meme on the ground.

It was a photo of The Traveling Wilburys with George Harrison looking at the rest of the band.

Without thinking, Claudio penned the phrase: “I’ve got my meme set on you.”

Come hell or highwater, when it came to wordsmithing, he still had it.