Marathe & Steeply on the temple: 'Herrrrrre we go'

Marathe's signature needle, and the anthology's cleanest specimen of the U.S. ironic reflex. Every time Marathe states a conviction without protective quotation marks — attachments as one's temple, the seriousness of what one chooses to love — Steeply answers not with a counter-argument but with the bored gesture of having-heard-it-before: "Oh Jesus now here we go again," "Herrrrrre we go." It is pre-emptive weariness, the posture that treats sincerity itself as a tired genre, and it works precisely by refusing to engage on the level of meaning. The reflex needs no content; it only has to signal that meaning something plainly is embarrassing.