If you tallied up the times I’ve cried — discounting sprains and bike-flips and broken-bottle fights and such — Michael Jordan has been responsible for a lion-slayer’s share of them.

My use of present perfect here is intentional, mind you, because Michael Jordan will make me cry again. It’s as written as death and dreaded not much less. Like my demise, I know not when or how or why, only that it’s likely to involve some nexus of an empty whiskey, a full moon, and the New York Knicks.

For one to believe Crying Jordan is the single greatest meme ever created (and I think it is very much that), such history is by no means sufficient. But it is necessary. As I’d imagine having #teenproblem’d through the 70s is necessary to truly understand the genius of Dazed and Confused. Otherwise, you can love it, but hell if you’ll ever get it.

So whenever I see that tear-flooded death mask scrolling down my feed, I laugh like a fool. The kind of fool that spends 23 hours a day in a wooden cage, where eighth-century peasants pay handfuls of teeth to throw crabapples through grates while you smear yourself in your own s*it, and the other 60 minutes crawling circles in the dirt and screaming at your own reflection in a bucket of water.

That is to say, the kind of fool one becomes after a baker’s dozen years feeling Michael Jordan remove your heart with an industrial vacuum hose.

See the little boy knees gouged in a living-room beanbag chair, face near enough to screen to see rainbows in the tubes, crying. Beneath the gaudy Starter hat and almost-mullet, behind the glasses with steaming lenses the size and shape of microwaves, crying, again. Crying because his Knicks cannot beat His Bulls. Because Michael Jordan loses to Patrick Ewing how blue supergiants lose to cosmonaut corpses: in universes other than our own.

I hated Michael Jordan. Truth told, a supermajority of me still hates him, though I’ve come to laud him for the top-two talent he is (ask me sometime). And I respect him, in a way that any self-referencing, self-fancied “expert” should.

Pretenses shed, it’s the hatred that makes Crying Jordan sing, like a coalmine myna bird when drunken dynamite fights cork the shaft closed. But it’s not all that makes the magic what it is. Sufficiency demands other, more academic concerns. Including, but by no means limited to, the following:

Optics

Let’s not sh*t ourselves here. The thing is outrageously funny looking — an accidental masterpiece of lighting, timing, and angles. Start with the eyes, Gary Busey-red, yet pulled by some middle-distance dream. Pouty lips the cameras somehow caught mid-quiver. Stubble you’re not sure if it was ignored or simply sprouted on the cab ride over.

The tears, doe. You instinctively flail for a napkin, unsure if your screen just went full-on salt stigmata. Drop a canoe where the bottom eyelashes end and you could let the current carry you plum to New Orleans — double-time if you opt to paddle. Take a screen shot of a screen shot of a screen shot of a screen shot of a Samsung Galaxy photo of a Polaroid of a black-and-white printout from an Apple Dot Matrix printer and show it to a Peruvian abuela who’s never heard of Michael Jordan, and she’ll say, “Ese hombre de balencesto tiene una enfermedad del conducto lagrimal.”

This is, by any qualitative metric, the Mema Lisa of memes.

Irony

It’s a testament to the banal brilliance of the modern Internetsia that a man so festooned by triumph has become a principal vehicle for guffawing at its opposite. In other words: I may or may not understand the definition of irony.

Growing up, Michael Jordan posters hung inside half the neighborhood’s bedrooms. Parents included. There were Michael Jordan posters in school gyms, Michael Jordan posters on highway overpasses, Michael Jordan posters in bathrooms of Baptist churches, and Michael Jordan posters taped to broomsticks on top of Christmas trees. When I graduated from second grade, my diploma was a Michael Jordan Wheaties box. This was neither a face — nor an airborne dorsal-fin tongue — that suggested anything other than victory of the curb-stomp-your-soul variety.

Now, when a horse at some two-bit backwoods harness track pulls up lame on the home stretch, there’s Crying Jordan on a trio of hooves, trudging to his 22-gauge fate back at the stables.

Also: When, you know, “whatever happens.”

You laughed. I laughed. Until you remember they probably did this sort of s*it in Olden Tymes: Finger-placing the severed head of a coal thief, its teary eyes still twitching as the village friar stumbles up hooking his sloshing mead jug and boots it clear through a pair of parallel trees and into the droughted July river.

Versatility

This ties into the whole angle thing: not straight on, not fully side-cocked, but a protractor-precise 45 degrees of despair. Shift it ever so slightly in either direction, and the possible applications dwindle by the billions. Look at Crying Jordan straight on, you get more of a hypno-horrific Rorschach test than an actual human face.

Perhaps malleability’s a better word here. Consider:

There is virtually no subject, context, or orientation that wouldn’t work. Pornography screen caps, Renaissance cherub frescos, your six-year-old’s awful, disconcertingly violent stick drawings: slap that swollen sadness swamp on the neck (or the foot; or a nearby tree; or a bleached desert skeleton; or sideways on the ground, attached to nothing at all — literally anywhere), it’s f*cking magic.

Omnipresence

The versatility obviously makes the omnipresence possible, but so too does the disseminative desire of We The Tweeple. Anyone who follows more than a few hundred sporps-content accounts has doubtless borne witness to Crying Jordan’s evolution-of-man trajectory.

From text-only Australo-pic-ecus:

To the more-formidable-but-still-pretty-dumb Photo erectus:

To this, zeitgeist pinnacle of all memekind.

The flip side of this, of course, is that unchecked evolutionary prowess can quickly lead to overkill. Which is fair enough. It wouldn’t be the first time the internet ruined a perfectly good inside joke, and it sure as s*it won’t be the last.

Thing is, I’m not sure Crying Jordan can be ruined. Mind you, that’s not the same as saying there is no such thing as a bad Crying Jordan. The higher the bar becomes, the more terrible attempts there will be. But so long as sadness and heartbreak remain our reigning status quos, Crying Jordan will forever be there to replenish its own, bottomless well of woe.

There’s a certain phenomenon — and I don’t know what to call it other than an “inverse bell curve” — whereby something that’s incredibly funny the first time you see, after a while, tends to tail off. But then it keeps happening, over and over and over and over and over again, until it starts to pick up comedic steam for wholly different reasons. The audacity of its own refusal to fade away into that good internet night. Crying Jordan captures this phenomenon to an absurd, nary unprecedented degree.

I liken it to a gag one might have with their infant child. Maybe you zoom a stuffed elephant in and out of his face, or flip your eyelids inside out and speak in demonic tongues. For about 10 seconds, it’s the funniest thing the kid’s ever seen. Then they begin to grow bored and give you that look like, “Alright, clown man, I get it — have you sprouted na-nas, or are you gonna grab the milk wench?”

But it doesn’t take long before this helpless whelp’s critical willpower snaps. “The grunting man keeps flipping his eyelids and squealing and literally cannot stop, under any circumstances,” he thinks to himself. “This has to be funny. I must laugh until I vomit now.”

That, at its essence, is Crying Jordan: The thing that keeps our inner child laughing well past the point of knowing why it laughs at all.

“Stop it. It’s not funny,” you say? “This s*it was old a thousand terabytes ago,” you say?

You, the Crying Jordan-jaded, are more wrong than a fermented-shark sundae. More wrong than Wolf Blitzer on Jeopardy, mugging Salvation Army bell-ringers, or standing sex on the next gravestone over from a funeral. If I asked you to name the capital of France and you answered “Sacagawea deserved the Noble Tylenol Prize for his work in According to Jim,” that would be infinitely more correct than saying “Crying Jordan is bad. Stop it.”

No. No. No. You stop it.

If finally happened. Your wife convinced you to take in a Deep Meditation class at her yoga studio. She’s “been worried about you for a while now,” you see, and quite frankly you’re tired of the incessant nagging about “going to make coffee and stepping on glass shards” and “all these skull-sized holes in the wall.”

So there you are, seated Indian style in paint-stained shorts and a Coed Naked Basketball shirt, trying to decide which is the worse look: mismatched socks, or toenails the size and color of falcon talons. But you’re quickly put at ease by the gentle drone of guru Baba Hari Dass (given name Barry Bernstein) whisking you in deepening breath through the seven sacred chakras and into a state of inner being never broached.

Ohmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Colors, shapes, amorphous masses bleeding into evermore complex patterns of non-thinking thought.

Ohmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Time no longer dictates, and the mantras — once as foreign as fourth dimensions — suddenly seem to speak on cellular planes.

Ohmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

You whither within yourself, shrinking down to some grandiose grain.

Ohmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

*

Eyelids lift. Seated peers still in various bents of lotus, you rise as mist above a seldom-sunlit bog. Those aren’t feet beneath you so much as psychic stilts gaiting forward towards your guru. He acknowledges you.

“What is it, my spaceseed?” He says in bowing prayer.

“I am enlightened.”

The guru’s eyes widen. He reaches for his bell and hammer and frenziedly begins to gong it.

“EVERYBODY GET THE F*CK OUT! OUT! GET THE F*CK OUT OF MY STUDIO! ALL OF YOU FILTH-PITS, NOW! THAT MEANS YOU TOO, NANCY! GET YOUR LULULEMON FACE OUT OF MY SIGHT! OUT! ALL OF YOU!”

Your confused wife looks back at you from among the exodus, reaching out in futile despair as she disappears into the foyer. You do not notice her.

“Speak, my dustchild,” the guru whispers. “What did you see?”

“It’s difficult to describe,” you confide, having yet to blink. “Can I borrow your phone?”

“Sure,” the guru says as he hands you his ware. “The passcode is ‘Sting.’ Like the singer, Sting.”

A flurry of pushing thumbs. You turn to show him the screen.

The guru looks at his phone, then at you, then back at the phone. His lips curl a wry smile as tears buoy his eyes.

“Yes,” he says. “Indeed you have, my child. Indeed you have.”

“There are many who believe Crying Jordan is bad and dumb,” you offer.

The guru closes his eyes. For seconds he is silent still, until his now joy-flushed eyes unfurl once again.

“Rumi says, ‘Only the unwise are wise enough to bury their fish in still streams.”

You, the newly enlightened human, have no f*cking idea what this means.

“I have no f*cking idea what this means.”

“You know what? Neither do I,” the guru chuckles, swiping his phone alight once more. “Have you seen the one of Crying Jordan on the crucifix?”