Irony Is Dead and God Is an Absurdist: The Post-Reality Manifesto

As I am writing this, the 2017 summer eclipse season has begun. Eclipses come in pairs: A lunar eclipse on the full moon and a solar eclipse on the new moon, one after the other. Or the other after the other. Astrologically, eclipse season is half a moon cycle on either side of the pair of eclipses, and is said to be a time the world is spinning around, the world is upside-down.

I know, I know, how are we supposed to distinguish that from life in general these days? Every day brings a fresh new breakdown in everything we thought was real and true, sometimes candy-flavored, sometimes shit-flavored. As a wise man once said in a meme, Everything Is on Fire Forever.

I am that wise man. And so are you. Or wise woman. Or wise person of some other gender. There are infinite genders. I told one of my best friends that, based on astrology, their gender looked to be, on one hand, tomboy drag queen, and on the other hand, healer. They appreciated the insight.

What was I saying?

Oh right. Everything Is on Fire Forever.

It certainly feels that way, doesn’t it? But therein lies the magic. Everything we knew is currently busy vomiting its guts up over the edge of the cruise ship into the void, until there will be nothing left of it but a Buy American sticker made in Nepal, and then even that will have an existential crisis and cease to exist as anything but a post-meme shared on Facebook to an insular social bubble. And when everything we knew has ceased to exist, what will be left?

Anything. Anything at all.

A pony fighting for its right to design salad dressings. Leftists infighting on Facebook to prove their moral superiority to a ham sandwich. Tap-dancing legions of the dead. The most delicious strawberry you have ever tasted, a religious experience unlike anything most people ever touch, lasting until the diner closes and you’re asked to pay your tab. Grant Morrison’s manga adaptation of King Lear. A thousand apocalypses being conceived and aborted every 12.5 nanoseconds. Memes.

We are living in a post-reality era, and it’s time we embraced the absurdity like I embrace my friends, and let me tell you fine folks, I’m the best damn hugger this side of gentrified Brooklyn.

Embrace affection too.

Embrace love as an excruciatingly painful and radically uplifting force of nature. Embrace humor as a weapon to wield against our own egos and those who would hold us back and warn us not to find the crumbling empires funny. Embrace your friends, unless they don’t like to be touched, but if they do like to be touched, be conscious of their boundaries around affection by having a goddamn communication about it. Embrace the terror of having communication about your embracing of things. Embrace the infinitine splenitude of glitchified fractalline multi-reality as it co-collapses in on themselves. Embrace made-up words like most of the previous sentence.

Embrace the feeling like it’s all made up.

Because it is! It’s all made up! We’re all making it all up as we go along, all the time, every time, and it’s high time we took the time to acknowledge that. Nothing seems to make sense anymore because nothing ever made sense in the first place, we just got so used to it that we convinced ourselves that it did, because it was “normal,” whatever the Lemur that’s supposed to mean.

“Normal” never existed in the first place.

I don’t exist. You are hallucinating this entire essay. I am you, and you don’t exist either. “Existence” doesn’t exist. Everything you ever thought was real is a joke told by an idiot to itself in a crowded room full of other itselves who would rather be raiding the snack bar but they have to watch their figures but they don’t know the figures because they forgot how to do basic math.

We Are the Ones They Warned Us About.

We are the lunatics at the switch, and I’m ready to instigate the collectivization of the asylum. We are the nonsense-peddlers, the madmen, the lucid loose women, the queer things that happened one day. We are the ones yelling “FREEBIRD!” at the dubstep concert. We are the ones sampling potato salad recipes in our DJ sets. We are the heroic harlequins, the heart-heaving harlot heralds, the heavy hitters of honest hopefulness, the half-held ideas in the lost minds of the gods.

We are the outcasts outrageously outfitted on the outskirts, and the new world is the world we always knew would come, so here we come, ready to make it our own.

In conclusion, this is barely the beginning. We have entered the Post-Reality era. We are the Post-Realitists. So buckle up, Alice, ‘cause this tea party is gonna get lit af.

Signed,

Arthur Lipp-Bonewits

aka Gluten Stormbeard

aka Hardly Golightly

aka Infinitine Splenitude

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Arthur Lipp-Bonewits

Arthur Lipp-Bonewits does not exist. When he does exist, he lives in an apartment in Brooklyn with over a dozen archangels as his roommates. He works as a professional psychic and meme-maker when he isn’t studying psychology. You can buy things with the memes he has made on RedBubble. You can find him on Instagram at @readingsbyarthur and Twitter at @lipandbone. You can think dainty ideograms about him and he will appreciate it.

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