Planking

Planking was the act of lying face-down, rigid as a board, in a location where lying face-down rigid as a board was not the expected behavior. Grocery aisles. Press conferences. Boardroom tables. Statues. That was the joke. The joke was exactly that long.

For a brief window it was the most photographed thing on Facebook. People planked on police cars. People planked at weddings. A man in Brisbane planked on a seventh-floor balcony railing and fell off, which is a sentence that should end a meme and, by the numbers, roughly did.

Planking died the way all of these die — not with a funeral but with a silent agreement. One morning nobody planked anymore. The same people who had planked on forklifts eight months prior now walked past forklifts like strangers. Owling tried to move in. Tebowing tried to move in. Nothing stuck the way planking stuck, because nothing else was that stupid in that exact shape.

It was, in the end, a game where the board was always you and you were always pretending to be a board. You could not win. You could only be photographed.

Survived by: every stock-footage library still quietly licensing planking footage to documentaries about "the 2010s internet." Preceded in death by: the dignity of a Brisbane balcony.

In lieu of flowers, lie down somewhere odd for a few seconds. Don't post it.