Metapause

• Do you worry that today could be “the day the irony died”?
• Do you experience anxiety, elevated blood-pressure or crying jags watching Reality Shows, The President or TV Commercials?
• Have you recently attempted to make a witticism about current events and been thwarted, mid-remark, by the fact that reality is already parody?
• In trying to explain your blathering, have you resorted to terms such as “popomo” or “post-everything”?
• Have you responded to sub-par manipulations of irony with furious subpar ironic remarks intended as parody of irony itself, such as “Oh is it 1994?” or “Holden Caulfield, well I never!”, only to have your response interpreted as “ironic”?
• Do you wonder if anything will ever be funny again?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you may be suffering from Metapause.

Metapause affects over a billion people per second.
Unlike mal du siècle, ennui or The Enlightenment, Metapause is not an autoimmune response to the philosophical inconsistency of modern life. It is a linguistic disorder not unlike autism. Confronted with a reality which seems to be nonsense, the metapausal individual will feel out of control, inarticulate, powerless to insult that which seems literally to insult itself and thereby stripped of the primary coping mechanism of our generation.

~ by davenewworld on March 26, 2006.