I'm a meme but there's more to me.

“I wasn’t going to write this week. I’ve had a rough 2020. I need a break but I’ll mentally abuse myself if I even think about taking a break. My mother was recently in a car accident, so I’m dealing with that. She’s going to be ok. The country is only half open. I just want to earn a living from writing, get a new couch, move to a nicer place and pay off half my debt. Oh and some stance socks. Today, I listened to classical music while Iwrote.  I played some selections by the London Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Carnival of Animals. It’s so refreshing. Let’s EAT.”

 Have you ever played the lottery? 

 Since turning 18, I’ve only played the lottery, I think, three times, maybe four. The fact that I won’t play the lottery drives my mother insane. I’ve told her several times, but she continues to ask why I won’t play the lottery. She normally hints at the idea that she wants me to buy a ticket by asking me if I already have my ticket when the jackpot has reached some ridiculously astronomical number that should be enough of a reason for me to betray my beliefs this one time. She says, “Are going to play the lotto?” I reply with, “No, Mom. I don’t play the lottery.” My mother responds as if she would feel ashamed if the word ever got out that I don’t play the lottery, especially when the amount of the jackpot is jaw dropping. After she deals with her self-generated shame of me not wanting to throw my money away, she gathers herself and begins to talk to me as if she’s trying to convince me to play, as well as understand why I don’t think playing the lottery is a good idea.

I refuse to entertain my mother’s repetitive farcical line of questioning with logical answers. I would rather watch Jordan Peele’s Us again just to make sure I wasn’t tripping when I left the movie theater thinking, “That was some bullshit.” I know me saying I didn’t care for Us puts a target on my back to receive criticism from people who are afraid to think for themselves, but I can’t worry myself with that. When I was younger and felt the need to be understood by people, who I later learned were not on the same level as me, I would waste my time trying to prove myself to them. I just don’t have time anymore. You believe what you believe, and I’ll do the same. 

 I don’t have the energy to argue with my mother about what she believes in. When it comes to her knowledge of me, she doesn’t really know me well enough to understand my line of thinking. She knows me as her son, but not as an adult. It’s just easier to let my mom believe in the lottery. There is a part of me that wants to tell her that I don’t plan on ever playing the lottery again, but I don’t have the heart to say that her idea of winning the lottery is one of the worst retirement plan options in the history of fucking retirement plans.

 Playing the lottery seems so illogical to me. I refuse to contribute to the world’s largest office pool that I have no chance of winning. I don’t want someone else to win any money that I have chipped in on. I had vowed to never play the lottery again, until I realized one day that I do play a version of a lottery. I’m a comedian and an actor. Since the explosion of the Internet, the blueprint for success has changed drastically. There was a time when you would take some photos and send them to an agency or casting office and cross your fingers that someone would pluck your name out the pile of hopefulness.

 Those days are long gone. Now you have to post any and everything if you want to receive any consideration at all. We’ve created our own episode of Black Mirror to live in. Posting your thoughts, feelings, and ideas and showing the world every move we make, while displaying your personality, is the new norm. If you’re lucky, after completely exposing yourself, you can go viral. Going viral is the new lottery. 

 I hate the lottery. I want to have a say in how my fortune is earned. I want to win, but I don’t want to have to play games. The purist in me hates posting anything that doesn’t allow me the ability to completely control the narrative. I’m protective over my ideas. They’re my babies.

 I was completely against posting online until I allowed a young creator named Will Hatcher to convince me to start posting sketches and rants back in 2008. The suggestion was echoed to me after the success of a video that Will and I released, where I deconstruct Puffy’s legacy. From there on, I made more videos. This is how I began playing the lotto.

 Going viral was new territory for everyone. Everyone wanted to go viral; the problem was that there wasn’t a definitive way to get there. Nobody could explain how it happened. Hollywood looked at going viral as a way of making their job easier; they no longer had to go out and search for talent, talent was coming to them. If I’m lucky, one of the one million ideas I decide to post will receive attention on a level that could change my life forever.

 The best way to describe going viral could be summed up in the words said to me by a manager who wanted to have a hand in the direction my career would go. He explained his strategy to make me famous by saying, “We’re going to throw some shit up against the wall and see what sticks.”

I should have moved back home the next day. 

 Instead, I stayed and started throwing shit up against the wall. I would come up with an idea, and if it didn’t go viral on the first or second attempt, I would abandon that idea and come up with another one. I really regret doing that. I had a lot of ideas that I cared about, but because no one else cared about them enough for me to go viral, I discredited them.

 In 2010, I came up with this concept of having a conversation with a brick wall. It was my way of imitating how you look when having pointless conversations with someone who simply has no common sense whatsoever. I did a total of four brick wall sketches that were spaced out over the course of three years. 

 After releasing what I thought was a brilliant idea, I moved on to my next creation. I didn’t think anything else of it until I was on the Internet one day, and someone sent me what I didn’t know was a meme at the time. This meme was a picture from one of the videos I made of me talking to the brick wall. I asked the person to tell me what it was, where they found it, and what it meant.

 The person explained to me what a meme was, and I began to see this image of me more and more online. I had quietly gone viral, but I wasn’t sure how to capitalize off of it. What was I supposed to do, make a video saying, “Hey, that’s me, Maronzio Vance, in the meme that’s going around of the black guy talking to the brick wall. Now book me for shows”?

 I feel like a loser using me being turned into a meme as a credit to get work in this business. 

 You would only know it’s me in the meme if you knew me. It really started to drive me crazy when I started seeing celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Zendaya using the meme to express how they were feeling. Snoop Dogg has 49 million followers, and Zendaya has an additional 75 million followers. That’s just their social net worth on Instagram. If one percent of each of their fan base followed me, it would change so many things in my life.

 It’s so frustrating to see my face plastered all over the Internet and no one knowing it’s me. My name is nowhere on the meme, and it’s a side profile picture as well, so it’s a little hard to sell the fact that it’s me in the photo without looking at the original video that the meme originates from.

Google guy talking to brick wall and watch me come up.

My meme has been used in at least five different languages that I’ve come across that I don’t speak, and it’s traveled the world more than anyone on my family tree has traveled a thousand times over. When I see the meme with text above it from someone in a country I would like to visit, I playfully say to myself, “I hope my meme is enjoying its time in Japan. Sure wish I could go.”

The pain of knowing nobody knows it’s me in the meme is maddening. It’s even more sickening when I think about how much I could make if I just received a dollar each time the meme was used. I could pay to go to some of the places my meme has already been.

I don’t want to be known as a meme. It feels cheap to me. There’s more to me than a meme but what am I to do when I come to the world asking to be accepted for my talents and people prefer a cut out of me?

 I even made a video about a lawyer who represents people who go viral and don’t receive compensation for it. It didn’t get the response I’d hoped for either. I guess I’ll see a meme of that character in ten years, if memes are even still around. I’m sure we will have moved on to something new. 

 I feel like a genie gave me three wishes, but I wasn’t specific enough about what I wanted, and so the genie tricked me by only giving me a portion of what I asked for. More people know me as a meme than they do for what I want to be known for best. The genie behind this is having a real laugh at me. I make nothing from my social globe success. Every time someone uses the brick wall meme, all I get is a residual tweet. I’m as famous as I am broke. My carbon footprint on the culture and my bank account don’t match up.

 Me being a meme is a sort of prison. The more I think about, I’m trapped in a Black Mirror episode. I live in a world where I am as famous as I would like to be but only as an image, nobody knows it’s me in the image. My image being viral and nobody knowing who I am feels as though I’m yelling for help as I’m trapped inside of something that people keep mistaking for actual art. I’m the art. 

I’m thinking of doing a comedy tour with the brick wall. I will name it the “Talking to the Brick Wall Tour.” I’ll face a brick wall while I tell jokes, and never once will I face the crowd. This seems like the most reasonable option right now.

 Fame is so funny. One time I had to point out to a woman that it was me in the meme she was using to show me that she felt like she was wasting her time trying to convince me why I should like Us. When I was done proving to her that I was the guy in the meme, she was more excited to know that than she was to know I was an actual comic. Which is the reason why I was making the video in the first place. I want to tell my mother that I did play the lottery and I still didn’t win. “Now what, Mother?”

 I’ll probably make another video of me talking to a brick wall about how I made a video of me talking to a brick wall and nobody knows it’s me, just to see if that will go viral.

- EAT

I write as a form of healing for myself and others. If you enjoyed what you read, “tip the writer” by donating to Venmo or zelle @maronziovance or Cashapp $Gift2MaronzioVance