Tom Robbins and the Recursive Loop of Meaning
Tom Robbins once said there are only two mantras: yum and yuk. This archive seems to chant both, often simultaneously. Posts from long ago echo motifs from drafts I haven’t written yet, while tags whisper across decades like emotionally confused monks.
Robbins taught us that repetition isn’t redundancy — it’s ritual. I loop. I tag. I retag. I audit the archive not to clean it, but to commune with it. Each recursive pass reveals a new layer: a motif I missed, a caption that now feels like prophecy. The export script doesn’t just extract metadata; it exhumes buried meaning. And every time I run it, I swear the tags rearrange themselves like mischievous monks in a semantic monastery.
If Robbins had built a WordPress site, he’d have called it a “metaphysical terrarium.” This archive breathes. It sulks. It occasionally throws tantrums when I try to impose structure. I once deleted a tag called “cosmic soup” and three posts stopped rendering properly — coincidence, or rebellion? The recursive loop of meaning isn’t just technical; it’s emotional. Each motif is a mood ring. Each summary, a séance.
Robbins never met a metaphor he couldn’t stretch into absurdity, and I’ve taken that ethos to my alt text. A photo of a broken plugin becomes “the ghost of automation past.” A caption reads: “This post was tagged by a squirrel with a PhD in recursive irony.” It’s not just for laughs — it’s compression. Satire lets me encode emotional nuance into metadata fields that weren’t designed for feeling. The archive becomes a joke that remembers itself.
So what’s next? Maybe I’ll build a script that tags posts based on the emotional tone of tomorrow. Maybe Robbins was right — meaning isn’t found, it’s looped into being. This archive doesn’t just store content; it rehearses identity. And every recursive pass is a rehearsal for a version of me I haven’t met yet. Time, after all, is just another tag. And I’m still deciding what it means.
Footnote: The squirrel mentioned above has since been promoted to Chief Metadata Officer. It now oversees emotional tone calibration, recursive loop compliance, and snack distribution. All decisions are final unless overturned by a committee of sentient captions. 🐿️
Harry is a recovering satirist, part-time philosopher, and metadata tinkerer. His archive spans two decades of metaphysical mischief, theological punchlines, and poetic nonsense. He believes in satire’s transformative power, the elegance of expressive metadata, and recursion—once writing a poem that never ended and a script that crashed browsers.
