And other answers to unsolicited questions.

“I see this person on the bus almost every day and it makes me feel wonderful. They are so adorable. I can tell they like me, too. But I am shy. What should I do?” — Shy Guy on Bus

Nothing, Shy Guy. You should never do anything about it. Enjoy it while it lasts in this stage, spotting each other across a crowded bus. Feeling warm and alive just at the sight of them. Fumbling, stammering, sweating along palms, butterflies unfurling wings in your stomach: you’ve got it made. This is the only thing that has ever truly made me feel alive and happy. The excitement we feel when being attracted to strangers, possibly hopelessly, is wonderful. It almost counterbalances out the disappointment we feel in finding out anything more about any human being ever.

Do you know how astronomical the chances that you will actually like this cute person? Nevermind like. Do you know how astronomical the chances that you will be able to stand this other person’s presence for more than 5 minutes at a time across public transit? Like super astronomical. There is no way you will like the movies this person likes. It’s impossible that they will like the same Netflix shows as you. What chance is there that they think “Orange is the New Black” would be 50% better if Piper Chapman was abruptly let out of prison this instant, never again to be seen on this show? There is no way they feel this way.

Strangers are alluring, real people are boring. And reality is incredibly predictable and monotonous: you will meet someone, it will be fun for a while, you will fall in love with them, they will fall in love with you, something terrible will happen, possibly you will get pregnant or married, they will cheat on you, you will be angry with them, you will think you cannot forgive them, but you will and then they will eventually cheat on you again, you will not be able to forgive them, you will have to split up your stuff with this person, you will forever be interested in who else they are dating and why didn’t they love you enough. And this is, as Louis CK might say, the best-case scenario.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Just no, shy guy. Anyone is going to disappoint us after all this bus back and forth. I don’t even wear my glasses on the subway or trains or buses anymore because I don’t want to be tempted into crushes with adorable, seemingly loveable people. Like in Pokemon Go, we should never be satisfied with what we actually have. We should always be searching for more. You have this cute bus person. It is like seeing a wonderful Psyduck in the park. But don’t you want to find the Shaymin?

Shy guy, you ought to luxuriate in the magic of this stranger on the bus. So few things are magical about living in the world, and this is one dandelion you ought to never, ever, ever pluck out of the cold ground. Let it grow until it is five feet tall. Crushes are better than real love because in crushes you get to play both parts. Never find out anything about anyone! Make up your own fun universe as you go along!

“There are so many different kinds of mustards! Which kind would you recommend for hot dogs?” — Desperately Seeking Condiments

For my money, mustard is the greatest of all sauces. Ketchup is pretty good. Salsa is also tasty. Soy sauce is great! Mayonnaise I am not big on. But mustard is magnificent. So yellow. And so mustardy. I once dated someone who didn’t like mustard. I found this insane. I used to tease her about it. She did not appreciate the teasing. She married someone else. She was otherwise entirely perfect, someone you could marry and spend a life happily with. Also I was not Jewish. But the mustard thing I could not understand. Not liking mustard is like not liking oxygen or orgasms or something. I probably blew it with her on this mustard hang-up I have.

And just like I don’t have a favorite kind of orgasm, I cannot chose a mustard I think is best. I love them all equally. Nathan’s, Gulden’s, Heinz, French’s, Kosciuszko, Krasdale. Spicy mustards, honey mustards, horseradish mustards. They are all delicious. My refrigerator is 50% half-used mustard bottles. I never remember if I have finished the mustard, so I always get more. It is cheap! And always delicious. On french fries, hot dogs, burgers, onion rings, chicken, whatever. Burritos, probably. Skittles, right?

Asking me to choose one mustard is just impossible, it’s like asking the one person you’d fuck if you were stuck on the Island on “Lost.” I mean, Ethan. Jack and Sawyer, obviously. Charlie. Hurley. Desmond. Sun and Jin. Ben. Kate. Juliet. Rose and Bernard. The guy with the glue-on beard. The smoke monster. The polar bear. A coconut tree. Ana-Lucia, obviously. But mostly Hurley. I can’t choose and shouldn’t have to and neither should you. No one should have to commit to one kind of mustard their whole lives, ignoring all others.

It’s a myth that we can only take one all the time. That makes no sense! It’s not human to chose one and forsake all others! It’s ridiculous! I simply cannot choose just one! Who said we have to only like one kind of mustard, smell one kind of flower? We’re not built for fidelity, we should just want to try one of everything. Fill your fridges with all these tiny little yellow bottles.

And to the lady who did not love mustard. I loved you and should have given up mustard forever for you. I was a fool for mustard! And not a day goes by that I don’t think of you while eating mustard. I am glad you are happy! I am happy with mustard! I would have been happier with you and mustard! Damn you, mustard! Such a little seed! Such a long life of unending regret! With yellow goodness spread all over it!

Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City, NJ and works in a bookstore.

A plethora of polyrhythms

Good morning. Are you ready for some polyrhythms? This one is hashtagged polyrhythms, so you know it has got to be crammed full of polyrhythms. There are so many polyrhythms up in this piece you may never want to hear a monorhythm again. “Polyrhythms, polyrhythms, polyrhythms” you will say absently to yourself as you listen, “my life is now lived to the pace of the polyrhythms.” The polyrhythms are strong in this one. Polyrhythms: they’re everywhere! Enjoy!

★★★★ The ripples sliding along the surface of the reflecting pool at Lincoln Center induced a little relative-motion vertigo. The rooftop artificial lawn had been chained off after the rain, for its own protection. The air was thick and soft, filled with the thrumming of machinery and a passing helicopter. The afternoon sky was a jumble of grays, broken and showing blue here and there. A silver shine fell on the river. The view looked cool and promising enough to stretch a hand out the window, where it met a few slow fat raindrops. The people gathered on the roof deck seemed unbothered, and eventually the four-year-old let himself be argued into going down to the forecourt. Now and again the sun came on stronger; now and again a breeze kicked up. After dinner, the chaos of the sky had settled into an a brightly mottled pattern, and the temperature was irresistible. The children took to the playground swings, the eight-year-old going steadily, the four-year-old demanding to be pushed as high and fast as he could go. A pigeon dropped from a tree like an accident. Even the subdued clouds were going away. A man on Broadway pointed a camera up at the light-soaked Beaux-Arts upper reaches of the Dorilton. As the children headed for home with frozen desserts in hand, a quick and fleeting burst of rain blew down out of the bright and nearly clear evening sky.

It’s not about being proud of your career, it’s about winning the afternoon.

Pokemon Go! It’s the new phenomenon everyone’s talking about. And we do mean everyone! In fact, SEO technologists predict that by 5PM Eastern Standard Time each possible permutation of Pokemon Go pageview grab will have already been posted and socialed out on all popular platforms. Will you manage to file yours in time? Here’s what’s left. Hurry up before they’re gone! You’ve gotta post them all!

“After Pokemon Go Nothing Will Ever Be The Same”

‘How Pokemon Go Explains Brexit”

“Pokemon Go Threatens Our Most Endangered Species”

“Does This Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Show The Earliest Version Of Pokemon Go?”

“What Does Pokemon Go Mean For The Next Generation of iPhones?”

“Pokemon Go Gave Me Herpes”

“Will The G.O.P. Add A Plank Condemning Pokemon Go To Its Platform?”

“Pokemon Go Is Everything That Is Wrong With Late Capitalism”

“Why Can’t We Make A Pokemon Go For Literature?”

“I Found Jesus Playing Pokemon Go”

“Pokemon Go Is The ‘Hamilton’ Of Augmented Reality Games”

“Pokemon Go Is Making Your Kids Stupid”

“Pokemon Go And The Jewish Problem”

“Taylor, Tom and Pokemon Go”

‘Pokemon Go Is Making Your Kids Smarter” (NB: Slate only)

“How Pokemon Go Made Me Do Incest With My Dad”

“Pokemon Whoa”

The only thing worse than the Olympics is people who tell you they love the Olympics.

You know how soccer is the favorite game of intellectuals who wouldn’t be caught dead praising a popular American professional sport but need to make you aware of just how deeply they are able to appreciate the beauty of European kickball? The Olympics is kind of a version of that except it’s for people who don’t like professional sports at all but do love pageantry and shiny prizes and terrible music and stories of adversity overcome, and who will tolerate watching the world’s most boring athletic events just so they can feel like they are part of the spectacle. The Olympics suck, and we all know this, and yet every four years (sorry, nobody bothers to pretend to enjoy the winter Olympics) we have to put up with the kind of horrible jingoistic bullshit we would rightfully laugh at in any other context. Anyway, we are less than a month away from this year’s edition. You may have forgotten what with the whole fucking world falling apart all around us at the moment, so I just wanted to remind you: There is something even more annoying than Pokemon and politics coming your way. If you cut the cord and delete all the apps on your phone right now you might be okay, but don’t count on it.

What happens when a Facebook meme group takes itself seriously?

The Marxist purge began about two weeks ago. First, there was the coup: twenty elected leaders were overthrown and replaced by a single, all-powerful administrator. Thousands were eliminated at the mercy of an unstoppable automated script. The population dropped from 45,000 to 10,000 in a matter of days. They banned all comments. Then, they came for the memes.

Post Aesthetics was a secret Facebook meme group populated mostly by students at elite colleges. In the cultural universe of Weird Facebook, it was a heavy hitter — a little danker than Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash, and a little cooler than Cool Freaks. It made some things that attracted mainstream attention, like a full-length Jeb!-themed Hamilton parody and a debate over the identity politics behind “dat boi.”

At its height, members of Post Aesthetics submitted hundreds of memes per hour to the group. These ranged from your typical text-over-image macros to absurdist personal narratives and screenshots of social media oddities. A small army of moderators, or “mods,” sorted through the deluge of content to remove offensive posts and quell arguments in the comments. The mods also served as gatekeepers: they had to approve each potential joiner and could ban any offender.

Soon after its founding in late 2014, Post Aesthetics grew exponentially. When a mod added me to the group last summer, I knew virtually none of the other members. By winter, almost half of my Facebook friends had joined, drawing both from my over-connected college in New York City and my hometown in rural Maine. Content from the group soon blanketed my social media feeds, and group texts with college friends turned into strings of Post Aesthetics memes. It became a real online community: that type of organic, unique, shareable place that every media company and social app aspires to create.

Like the memes it contained, though, as Post Aesthetics snowballed in popularity, it spun off innumerable derivatives. Members who ended up on the wrong side of the mods went and founded other groups. Post Post Aesthetics gave way to Post Post Post Aesthetics Aesthetics Aesthetics. Shitpost Aesthetics celebrated the sort of low-effort, low-quality content that would have been bannable in P.A. proper. Aesthetic Content Holdings, LLC brought corporate structure to meme production. East Coast Aesthetics took it regional. And so on.

One splinter group was different: the Chicago Long March Reenactment Society. Founded in January 2015 by another UChicago student, Ashley Li, this group didn’t host memes at all. Instead, members wrote essays about internet culture, all couched in a sort of quasi-ironic hyper-academic neo-Marxism. The first three posts in the group were a Chinese-language summary of the actual historical Long March, a piece entitled “Semiotics/Influence of Revolution, Part 1: Brogrammers of Silicon Valley” and this:

Even though the Chicago Long March Reenactment Society was much smaller than Post Aesthetics — a few hundred members versus tens of thousands — in the world of Weird Facebook, it had some real influence. Its leaders, including Li, were some of the earliest active participants in the original group. But as Post Aesthetics grew, new moderators had taken over, and old ones were pushed out.

Li admitted that the Chicago Long March Reenactment Society began like the other niche groups in exile from Post Aesthetics. At its creation, the group was intended to be ironic: “CLMRS was really just a shitposting group that edited Marxist literature with meme-related terms,” Li said. But it slowly got serious. The Long Marchers abandoned the Chinese Communist cover; posts started citing real cultural theorists like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and György Lukács.

“CLMRS only turned explicitly Marxist,” Li said, “as I realized that the circlejerk [of Post Aesthetics] could be reformulated along the lines of that theory.” A series of essays published in the group later in 2015 proposed a complete “theory of counterculture” and a “scientific analysis of contemporary irony.” The transition of CLMRS from communistic copypasta to cultural criticism was complete. And so emerged the Marxist faction for the oncoming Weird Facebook civil war.

Meanwhile, back in Post Aesthetics, the group’s massive growth had made things chaotic. Thousands of meme creators were competing for group-wide attention, seeking the critical mass of likes and comments necessary for Facebook’s algorithms to push posts to the top of members’ newsfeeds. In search of content, some copied directly from subreddits like r/me_irl or Weird Twitter accounts like @dril. In an attempt to preserve the group’s originality, the mods began temporary prohibitions on certain kinds of memes: an image ban, a Tinder screenshot ban, and so on. Posts that did become popular often ignited debates about oppression and identity, like the aforementioned scuffle over appropriation and racism in “dat boi.”

During a particularly bad fight earlier this summer, a division emerged between old and new mods. The older members felt they had a unique ability to understand the kind of content that made the group successful. Corey Blackburn, a longtime creator in Post Aesthetics and a member of the Chicago Long March Reenactment Society, was one of them. “The group had grown stale, content-wise,” Blackburn said. “There were times when phenomenal original content would be drowned out or overlooked by people posting ‘the week’s hit meme’ exclusively to acquire digital capital.”

The newer mods argued for their relevance and originality. They’d been given power because their contributions had helped the group evolve and grow. They were more representative, too: as debates over identity politics influenced the selection of the newer mods, more diverse members gained power to police the group. These new members argued that there can never be one universally agreed idea of what makes a piece of internet content worthwhile. “The concept of ‘good content’ is subjective,” wrote Ena Da, one of the leading newer mods. Anyone who would claim “ownership of the concept,” Da argued, would be “acting more out of elitism and entitlement” than care for the Post Aesthetics community.

In time, the division deepened from an internal squabble into a flame war. Some members began doxxing others, digging up personal information that could be used against them offline. Older mods began to call for Post Aesthetics to be dissolved, and gained the support of the group’s creator. In what Blackburn euphemistically described as a “semi-democratic decision,” the older mods banned all of the newer mods and replaced them — with some of the members of the Chicago Long March Reenactment Society. The remaining mods appointed a single all-powerful “administrator.” This administrator promptly initiated a script that would automatically delete each of the forty thousand members of the group — as well as all the content and community they’d created.

“I do not want to punish the 40,000 members of Post Aesthetics for having been in the so-called out-group,” Ashely Li wrote as the script slowly worked away. “Precisely the contrary: I want them to recognize the contradictory character of their own group, their potential for self-overcoming, and to join me in building something new from the ruins of the old counterculture.” The memetic Marxists had won, the coup was complete, and Post Aesthetics was no more.

It’s hard to take the decline and fall of a meme empire very seriously. But you know that social media — despite its purported mission to help people connect — just as often leads to isolation, jealousy, resentment. The improbably real community of Post Aesthetics fought against that. Its spirit continues in various places, including in a large, successful splinter group founded by the writers of the Jeb!/Hamilton musical. Still, the inability of 40,000 bright kids to figure out a way to govern themselves doesn’t bode particularly well. As this election season has proven, social media and memes can be powerful political forces, made even more powerful when they’re uncritically overused.

But here’s the thing: Post Aesthetics was critical about online content. Entire groups emerged just to critique it! All of the members recognized they’d made a community that was actually worth preserving in some reasonable way, and fought hard, though unsuccessfully, to see their visions through. I asked Corey Blackburn if he thought it was ultimately possible to govern an online community as large and dynamic as Post Aesthetics. “Absolutely,” he said, “but governing it with explicitly democratic ideals and maintaining an open-ended environment and maintaining safe space policies and not pissing off weirdos who would want to harass you in ways that might affect your real life? Not possible.”

“But,” he added, “I don’t know if I’d want to be in a group where it is.”

Don’t worry about a thing.

I have a hard time remembering a period where the mixture of tragedy and banality was so evenly matched. When you consider the level of ludicrousness on display over the last few days, who would have been shocked to see a photo of DeRay Mckesson’s arrest in Baton Rouge overlaid with an image of whatever Pokemons (Pokemen?) putative adults spent their weekend walking around trying to capture? As it is, this seems like the logical culmination of our American absurdity project:

Chewbacca Mom sings Michael Jackson song in response to police being shot in Dallas in new online video.http://apne.ws/29IXxFz

 — @ap

And we haven’t gotten to the conventions yet! Cleveland is a week away! As stupid and senseless as everything seems at this very moment, you cannot even imagine how much worse things will be, because we now live in an age where reality outstrips our ability to prophesize farce and horror. I will share some new music in a moment but this morning a classic seems considerably more appropriate:

Okay, well, let’s get on with it. Who knows what the next five days will bring? Only an idiot would dare to predict them. Here’s some blippy bloopy stuff from French producer Arandel that will hopefully take your mind off things for a few minutes. Enjoy.

★ The effort of shaking the bedclothes flat in the air-conditioned bedroom was enough to raise a sweat. The hallway was hot and the elevator was hotter. The sky was a whitewashed blue, so full of glare that the eyes had to adjust before they could pick out the shapes of clouds against it. A strong but indifferent breeze came up Broadway. Gambling on a train change at Times Square was a mistake; standing on the N/Q/R platform was worse than walking two long crosstown blocks would have been. A man pumped the front of his tucked-in polo shirt as he escaped the platform into the chilled interior of the R. From inside the various pockets of climate control, it was difficult to grasp what was happening outside. The afternoon darkened for a while and one or two umbrellas came out but the heat never broke and nothing really fell. A column of marchers came up Fifth Avenue under a sky that was turning grim once more, their chants reverberating. Uptown, on the way out of the subway, a hard shower was almost over, a choking miasma rising before the rain had even stopped coming down.

This week you weren’t a stranger at all because you happily told me your name — Irene — while you weighed each vegetable on your scales as tenderly as if it were our own newborn. We’d stepped out the car and all the cliches had come tumbling out our mouths, fat and shameless as peaches. (It’s so good to be in nature! You don’t realize how badly you need to get out of the city until you leave! Ugh I feel like I can breathe properly!) And then we’d descended on your farm stall like escapees from a penal colony. The penal colony being north Brooklyn, where a new “upstate” themed cafe had just opened in our neighborhood. I’d bought a cold brew there before we left, silently eyeing all the “artisanal” upstate things, packaged in the kinds of receptacles that had weathered decades of unremarkable utilitarianism before suddenly being thrust into the realm of the aspirational.

The jars of the “upstate” cafe reminded me of a party years ago, where the host served cocktails in jam jars and I was dumbfounded. Couldn’t he afford glasses? They were like, one dollar each from Ikea! Clearly, I was the only person who found it hysterical and embarrassing and even vaguely scandalous — as if we were all gamely struggling through rural privations, instead of gathering in this Williamsburg loft to watch a Japanese kitsch-horror classic. (It had taken me months to realize that I was the unsophisticated one.) And now, nearly a decade on, “Brooklyn” the brand has reached such a saturation point that Brooklyn the place is branding itself “upstate.” Here we were, upstate, escaping Brooklyn for the place Brooklyn was now aping.

Which, in our eager-to-be-enchanted eyes, was aping nothing, just being its bountiful, guileless self on a long and lazy July weekend. You beamed as you piled up our box with tomatoes and corn and zucchini and radishes and boxes of strawberries the size of dimes, and your warmth did not waver one iota when we realized, with shame and dismay, that in all our excitement we hadn’t actually checked our wallets and now we were twelve dollars short and this place was, naturally, cash only.

You had large eyes and what novelists like to call a “generous mouth” (I’d been reading James Salter). If your face had a sound it would be a C major chord, struck gently, sounding out ease and plenty. You told us we could just come back later and it was no problem and that we shouldn’t rush. We rushed like the FBI was after us. It took time to find an ATM and I felt pained by the possibility of you even wondering for a second about us not coming back. Finally, here I was, jogging out the car with dollars in my fist for you. A young woman tending trays of tomatoes spotted me. “Irene!” she sang, “Your peeps are here!” I was your peeps! I had a few moments to savor this before you turned around to the faintly stupefied grin I could now feel on my face. “Oh you didn’t have to rush back!” you said warmly. We’d been about an hour, by my estimate.

As we drove off with our car full of vegetables we discussed your extraordinary niceness, Irene. A couple of onions escaped the box and rolled around on the backseat. Shall we just move here, let’s just move here, we said to each other, knowing that we wouldn’t.

It’s okay to stay silent when you don’t have anything of meaning to say.

Ben Chatwin’s Heat & Entropy is out July 29th.