My mind is memes

Please send help.

The year is 2024. The month is July. The biggest online moment is not the recent UK and French elections, nor is it the latest presidential debate in the USA. It’s a girl sharing her knowledge of how to make a man ‘go crazy in bed’:

“You’ve gotta give them that HAWK TUAH….and spit on that thang”

That graphic, onomatopoeic phrase…hawk tuah. That visceral sound of someone spitting. Hawk tuah. The one phrase that has not left my mind in two weeks. Hawk tuah.

I’ll go as far to say Hailey Welch (the woman behind the hawk tuah phenomenon) IS pop culture right now. The phrase has made it’s way onto t shirts, people (including Conor Maynard) are writing songs about it and Hailey herself is now in talks to host her own TV show. Yep, that’s actually happening.

Between this and snippets of Charli XCX's music all over my timeline (anyone for a brat summer?), I have come to realise something. My mind is memes. No thoughts, just my brain replaying viral sounds over and over again. Sure, it might be ‘hawk tuah’ now, but I’m sure another catchphrase is about to be caught on camera, catapulted into stardom and seared into my neural pathways imminently. I’m ready for it.

I genuinely opened a blank word document, ready for the swathes of inspiration to rush over me, for all of those books that I’ve read over the past 12 months to help produce an interesting topic for my grand return to writing. Yet the only thing I could think about was…you guessed it…hawk tuah.

I shook my head, gave an amused “mhmm” and tried to think of anything else. Literally anything. I scoured previous articles on my website, looking for some small piece of inspiration and guess what? 300 words into this post and I think you can gather that I completely failed in that effort.

What I now want to know, is my brain rotting? Should I be concerned? Do I need to source a Nintendo DS and play Dr Kawashima's Brain Training as a matter of urgency? Because I used to think about actual things. Now I communicate via stickers and say ‘hawk tuah’ to myself 100 times per day.

Do I need to source a Nintendo DS and play Dr Kawashima's Brain Training as a matter of urgency?

I reminisce for three weeks ago, that peaceful transition period between once social sensation and the next. Girl dinner was just about out, the embers diminishing day by day, only to be stoked by a questionable picky tea. Life was good. I could handle that.

Now I fear the only solution is the one given to the common cold and a bad spell of rain - wait it out.

I could stay off my phone, but let’s be honest - I’m not going to. Those social media apps are quite literally designed to keep you addicted, so I’m not about to ruin someone’s hard work am I?! In fact, I’m about to give them a promotion - because in the course of writing this relatively short post, I’ve opened instagram about 19 times. You’re welcome, unnamed Meta employee!

For now, I have no choice but to bask in my (hopefully temporary) cognitive decline, read a book and hope for the best - wish me luck.