#HeIsRisen

I learned about it, as I learn most news nowadays,  via Twitter. Though at first I didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on.

The hashtag #HeIsRisen doesn’t give away a lot of information, after all. And when I did a search to see how it was being used, everyone seemed to studiously avoid giving anything away.

Some of the tweets, many of the tweets, were merest gibberish, not even words, as though everything but the hashtag had simply been typed at random. Others, though made up of English words, put them in no order as to even remotely resemble a sentence.

And what few sentences there were only cast more doubt as to what #HeIsRisen might mean.

“All mankind shall tremble as one before him #HeIsRisen”

“His eons sleep, over. Finally he awakens, to break his horrible fast #HeIsRisen”

“We who yet live, we are the truly damned #HeIsRisen”

Interesting, to be sure, but still no clue was given as to who “He” was, or what he’d risen from. Still, as the day progressed and I went about my business, I couldn’t help noticing as more and more of the people I follow succumbed to the ‘tag. They’d use the phrase, and the quality of their tweets would immediately descend into the depths of the unreadable.

Or at least the unfollowable.

It felt as though there were some game going on, some inside joke that I happened to be outside of. But were that the case, surely somebody on my Twitter would’ve responded to my direct messages with answers. Most of the people I follow are pretty cool, after all, and they’re generally happy to answer questions if I ask.

But no, there was nothing. Neither response to messages, nor any clue to be gleaned from the increasingly incoherent tweets rocketing back and forth regarding #HeIsRisen.

Which was distressing. If people were tweeting something fun I wanted to participate! Or at the very least, to get the joke. But there was nothing to be done about it until I got home from my grocery shopping and could Google the phrase. Hopefully that would provide a little more detail than Twitter seemed willing to.

The search was, apparently, a popular one, because the very first result was a YouTube video, titled “#HeIsRisen: Real Footage of his Rise” and then descending into the same sort of delirious raving I’d grown, from Twitter, to expect with regard to this hashtag in lieu of a description.

Finally, the answers I sought were available to me! Firsthand footage of whatever it was the mystery ‘tag referred to, available at the click of a link! I knew, once I got home and was no longer struggling through the internet via blackberry, that I’d be able to look it up easily enough, and the internet didn’t let me down.

Why would it? Everyone has a video camera nowadays, and so it’s a matter of merest seconds between event and video, plastered across YouTube, linked across Twitter, spread to the world. I lived in an age in which more information was at my fingertips than any generation in human history had access to, and if I wanted information about why people were excited, yet unwilling to describe, #HeIsRisen, it would take me seconds, not minutes, to find it.

And so, I clicked the link.

God have mercy on us all, I clicked that forsaken link.

I can feel my mind abandoning me, even now, the vision of that gibbous, tentacled thing emerging from beneath the sea and taking it’s first, slouching steps up onto land was too much for any mind to bear, don’t you see?

Madness was the only possible result of the hideous scene I witnessed, but I must hold my splintering sanity together. I must. For a few moments more, at the very least.

For this is a momentous occasion. He is risen. Truly, he is.

And I need to Tweet about it…