I lie on the floor with the light off. It's not entirely dark — the surroundings are pixelated, akin to the low-quality blackness in a Youtube video. My forehead and nose touch the laminate, which is neither hygienic nor comfortable. Yet recalling how I ended up in this position is still too challenging for my brain. For now, it may be safer to just stay where I am.
As my eyelids, succulent and flushed like rotting fruit, slowly fall back over my eyeballs, the dark pixels mutate into multi-colored sticks which remind me of the bacteria Bacillus subtilis (commonly found in soil and the gastrointestinal tract of ruminants, humans, and marine sponges), or my friend JP’s phosphene paintings. He rubs his eyes when seeking inspiration, stimulating the cells in the retina to create new patterns behind his eyelids which he later transposes onto canvas. As a birthday gift, JP gave me a painting of orange sticks in a purple vacuum. He mentioned catching conjunctivitis while working on it, which added another layer of sophistication to the artwork.
I’m melting. There is a growing puddle under my face. It’s warm and comforting. Inside my suspiciously numb body, thoughts of death emerge. However, it’s not my own death I’m thinking of, but the demise of Cheems, the orange dog from memes. The fate of celebrity housepets is similar to that of autocratic tyrants who deceive people into believing they will live forever. Yet, unlike autocratic tyrants, we low-key wish for internet pets to be immortal. Now that Cheems is gone, where did his little orange soul depart to?
An elderly lady from my neighborhood once told me that she believed in a place beyond the rainbow where deceased dogs wait for their owners to join them. She promised to share more information about this place, but never did. Nevertheless, I have some insights into Cheems' journey into the afterlife.
It begins on an operating table in a Kowloon veterinary clinic, where our housepet hero is “needled into sleep within the space capsule of his own body, set adrift on a trajectory which will take him towards the singularity of a massive DMT surge in which everything accordions into a Menger sponge of memories and apparitions, vaporwave greed corridors that intersect to form a mirror maze of other dogs that look exactly like him but weirdly have no buttholes — have no buttholes to speak of, and thus no real smell.”
The scentless, somewhat dystopian limbo of Shiba City is where the meme hero finds himself after his physical departure in Maggot Mush's story 'Funeral Arcade of Doges.' Joining a parade led by the dog-things, Cheems’ uncanny doppelgangers, our protagonist goes past call centers, the offices of gut-health pyramid schemes, and billboards promoting high-quality Doge merchandise in ALL-CAPS COMIC SANS. Unyielding capitalist hyperrealism makes this Shiba purgatory feel oddly like home. Cheems, a good boi, remains blissfully unaware of his own image, having 'never passed the mirror test,' and doesn't realize that he is the one being honored in the funeral procession. Somewhat confused but optimistic, he follows the pack of buttholeless dog-entities to the place where his astral destiny will be determined.
'Funeral Arcade of Doges' is anthropological science fiction that reveals the thick layer of existentialism behind the deliberately unserious culture of internet memes. The burial procession for Cheems echoes the tradition of Ji-Ling, the 49-day Taoist mourning period aimed at protecting and guiding the deceased on their journey into the next life. Will Cheems’ soul be digitized when he is turned into a full-scaled abstraction? Is there life after the internet? Is there death after the internet?
In the quest to find an alternative to traditional denouements, Cheems throws down a challenge to the false binary of a system that merely presents an illusion of choice. “Bright and cold or warm and dark? The underworld or outer space?” He senses that there should be a third path that would fully embrace the idea of spectrality — an unplace for abstractions like himself, albeit a smelly one.
The puddle under my face is growing colder, pleasantly refreshing my left cheek. I lift my eyelids and let my gaze penetrate the dense visual rush of expanding pixels. The blurry light stain is my white leather armchair. Within it is my dog, a dark silhouette with flapping ears, observing me from an upward perspective, enjoying our role reversal. I have fainted, and landed face-first. The puddle beneath me is iron-flavored. I run my tongue along the upper row of teeth to check if I'm missing any. The teeth are where they should be, but my nose seems dangerously melded with the floor, as if I’d been attempting to smell Cheems’ butt through the dimensions of the living and the dead.
For a brief moment, as my mind drifted afloat in the turbulent waters of unconsciousness and the fragile form of my physical body was pinned to the floor by gravity, I met him—my favorite meme. I could bid a farewell to him and everything not supposed to transcend the temporal boundaries of 2023.
Bye bye fren!
“Your image was a container for a multitude of human experiences and affects: you were a meme and a public figure and a mirror and a comfort object in the digital space, and all of this was unknown to you and will go on.”