One of the things I struggle with—even though I haven’t worked in local TV news for a decade—is a constant desire to vacuum up information. Back then, I needed to pay attention to everything that happened everywhere because I had to fill a daily newscast with interesting stories. I also wanted to sound smart in pitch meetings. At first, finding information meant watching the news, reading newspapers, scanning blogs and (somewhat) rational message boards, observing the actual world around me, and constantly calling up folks who knew things. It was a somewhat healthy media diet. But over time, all of those things were surpassed by a constant scrolling of feeds. As I incessantly scanned the Internet for good stories, I also came across a lot of stuff that was not relevant to real life in any possible way. There’s a tiny bit of signal out there, and a lot of noise that consists of Simpsons screencaps, entire movies posted one clip at a time to Instagram Reels, and dril tweets.

When you’re constantly Hoovering up that much stuff, you gain the ability to speak Internet in a way that sounds like a foreign language to normal people. Hence, while I continue to be fluent in current events, I am also a de facto meme ambassador. This is why I continue to think that the greatest moment in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade history came when Rick Astley popped out of a float to sing “Never Gonna Give You Up.” I saw it live, got visibly giddy, and then had to explain to my family why it was a cultural milestone that Rick Rolling had broken contain. They still didn’t get it.

We all live in filter bubbles now, and I do my best to make sure that mine contains a diverse and useful amount of information. But we’ve seen how Facebook has changed our parents and grandparents, and how TikTok and Twitch are shaping the lives of the young’uns. This is why Halloween costumes are so niche now. There’s a very fine line between clever and confusing.

Anyway, I realize that this is a ton of setup for the gloriously stupid thing that I encountered over the weekend:

I want to say, first of all, that I took this picture after I flushed the urinal.

I encountered this bit of bathroom writing at Brown Truck Brewery in High Point (shoutout to Ian, who continues to make fantastic beer). I’d set my drink on a shelf, and was perusing the dumb jokes that people had written on it. I did not expect to see the entire Thom Brennaman apology spelled out in Sharpie for the benefit of dudes who are breaking the seal.

If you don’t get it, good for you. Back in 2020, Brennaman was calling a Cincinnati Reds game when he was caught on a hot mic using a homophobic slur. Within minutes, people started calling for him to be fired, and word filtered up to Brennaman’s bosses, who pulled him off the broadcast during the second game of a doubleheader. He later resigned. But before he signed off, he tried to apologize. Thing was, he did so while the actual game was happening, and in the middle of it, a Reds player named Nick Castellanos hit a home run. Here’s the relevant, bizarro portion of what Brennaman said:

Almost immediately, people started dropping Nick Castellanos home runs into the middle of seemingly important moments by copy-pasting that part of Brennaman’s apology/home run call into them. This is still going on, nearly five years later:

For what it’s worth, there’s another sub-genre of Internet that points out ill-timed Castellanos dingers. And yes, Nick Castellanos himself, who now plays for the Phillies, is aware of his role in modern Internet lore. His wife, though, asked the Internet to knock it off. SPOILER ALERT: It didn’t work!

Back to the urinal thing. I’d like to know if someone was able to do that from memory, or if they had to refer to the text on their phone. I’d like to know what inspired this. And how long did it take to write an entire paragraph, potentially while multi-tasking? Amazing that a man could have such clear handwriting while simultaneously taking a leak.

Writing on the bathroom wall was once its own unique form of expression. Then came Twitter, and the style became ubiquitous. Now, the line between meme and real life is fading. I used to think that I was keeping up with the world by constantly scanning a feed. Now I’m beginning to wonder if those who don’t get the joke are living a better life. After all, some guy wrote “LAME” right in the middle of that paragraph. He didn’t understand the meme. But maybe he’s the one who gets it.