I spend most of my nights in the darker corners of the internet. Numbers stations, unsolved fires, sounds that haunt small towns in New Mexico. So when a roundup like AOL's collection of 97 animal memes crosses my desk, I notice something the casual scroller might not: this is folklore. Genuinely. Folklore with worse spelling.

Think about what a meme actually is at the structural level. A captured moment of animal behavior, usually mid-catastrophe, paired with human text that reframes it. A cat staring into the middle distance becomes an allegory for Monday. A dog who has clearly done something becomes a confession. We have been doing this for thousands of years, we just used to call them fables and put the animals in forests instead of kitchens.

And the animals don't care. That's the part I can't get over. The dog who ate something it should not have eaten and now wears the expression of a man who has seen the end of all things... that dog has no idea it's famous. Somewhere out there is a cat whose face launched a million shares, or ten million, or however many we want to imagine, and it spent that same afternoon trying to fight its own reflection. The gap between the animal's experience and our interpretation of it is where the whole thing lives. These are my examples, to be clear. I haven't itemized all ninety-seven. Don't need to. The format is the format.

What keeps me reading these isn't the laughs, though the laughs are real, and AOL's promise that the collection will make your day "way brighter and better" is the kind of claim I'd normally interrogate. It's that animal memes are one of the last places online where the joke is never at a person's expense. Nobody gets hurt. No context collapses. The hamster stuffs its face because that is simply what hamsters do, and has done for millions of years, and will do long after our platforms have turned to dust. There's comfort in that. The memes are temporary but the behavior is deep-time. Somewhere in the Pleistocene a wolf's ancestor did something profoundly stupid and another wolf watched, and the essential energy of the meme predates language itself.

Ninety-seven of them is a lot. AOL went long. But that's the nature of the archive, it only grows, and the animals only keep supplying material, because they have no idea they're performing and they will never stop.

If you need me I'll be back in the dark corners by midnight. But for now, ninety-seven of the good ones.