You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Twitter.
Just as Twitter is reportedly losing some of its social luster, I am learning to like Twitter.
I am starting to hash tag and ret-weet and direct message.
I have 67 followers. I follow 3 times that many.
I am very conscious about my followers. I like to know who they are. Do they represent blogs or come from sports backgrounds or do they tweet about book reviews.
It’s a slow motion sense of gratification when more people follow you.
A month ago I had 30 followers.
A month ago, I didn’t care.
Now?
For some reason I do.
I’m following 227 people.
Who are they? Celebrities and athletes and famous novelists.
I know a few people. Most of the others are generic nobodies, like shiny pebbles you see in the sand when the waves crash on the shore. They look nice and if you reach down quickly, you can pick one up and put it in your pocket. But if you don’t act quickly, it’s gone, only to be replaced by a million new shiny pebbles.
And that is Twitter.
A company that connects the world 140 characters at a time. It’s a company that has great social power. It’s a company that builds nothing, whose stock is falling like sky lab out of a decaying orbit.
It figures this is my new infatuation.
I’m a dinosaur coming to Twitter around the time that it’s user base is plateauing. It’s like developing an affinity for a new Chinese restaurant that burns down a week later.
Compared to most Twitter enthusiasts, I’m the technological equivalent of rust.
Will Twitter one day go the way of the am/fm radio?
Probably. But until the asteroid turns the lights out, Twitter will be around and I plan to take more advantage of it.
Like the rest of you, I find myself tweeting in small increments. Twitter loves Breveloquence.
Twitter loves self promotion.I think what I love the most is Twitter is a golden nugget time capsule.
I have more than a 1000 Tweets which are all preserved in a Twitter rol-o-dex.
140 characters chronicled on my page, tweet by tweet.
I love the fact that I can go back in the Twittosphere and read something I wrote.
I went back to earlier tweets that probably meant something then, but out of context, they are just interesting.
On April 4th I tweeted: Somewhere Jimmy Page is sawing off his right hand with a cheese grater.
I don’t remember why I wrote this, but I love it. I love how it stands alone like a bar stool with one gigantic leg. The sentence wobbles a little, but it’s so much fun to sit on. It’s a solitary moment that evokes a mental image that viscerally bursts through the imagination like a saber slicing open a Beer wench’s tight fitting blouse.
On March 6th I tweet: My nose. It’s a trumpet. It’s a vortex. It’s a tornado siren. I am blowing it incessantly. children cry. Boats steer away from the shore.
That was a tweet about my sinuses, burning my insides like lemon juice squirt in the eye.
Here’s a wacky Tweet: Did it fall out in the parking lot? Did the conveyor belt fairy steal my pork chop?
I was mad that something I purchased at the store didn’t make it into my shopping bag.
They can remember to ask me if I want paper or plastic, but put a pork chop in the receptacle of my choice? That’s obviously an acquired skill.
March 27th I tweet: My technological passport is dead. Where’ s Grandma’s rotary phone? The I.T. people are running like garden weasels
I don’t know what this means. Without a beer, I am not sure I will ever know exactly what this one means. But as I re-read it, I think it’s freaking profound. I know that I am a biased audience of 1, but when I read this stupid Tweet, it makes me smile.
Some people write a sentence that just bores my soul. Some tweets are ordinary like a gray flannel suit with a white shirt and navy tie. They are respectable tweets but they don’t stand out, or command attention. They fire across the internet ultimately fizzing like the end of a pyrotechnic display in the day time.
As I stare at my sentences, preserved in a petri dish of verbage, I think loud thoughts that explode. I want my Tweets to hit you in the head like you had coffee with Confucius. I want my tweets to one day be kept at the Smithsonian Institute of stellar sentences.
When I tweet, I want to illuminate the abyss, like the woman in the red dress walking down that gray flannel boulevard in the Matrix.
So many Tweets are wasted energy expelled into the universe like carbon monoxide choking the atmosphere.
So many tweets of non spectacular origin. Why bother? Most Tweets are a waste, a carbon copy of pedestrian cerebral interaction.
To tweet with anything but alacrity should be grounds for dismissal. If you can’t communicate without yawning, then go home and take a nap.
I’ve now tweeted more than a 1000 tweets. When I write a sentence, I want it to last forever, like the sustained piano cord from A Day in the life, the final song on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Album. I want my sentence to sear the heavens. I want God to read my sentence and say, with a smile, “I made that guy.” I want to write with rainbows, my words fueled by a child’s enthusiasm.
I want my tweets to be finger paintings for the mind, a milkshake for the soul, a respite from the trivial repetitiveness of life.
Why Tweet a sentence that crosses the street against the light and is hit by a bus when you can throw a paper airplane off the observation platform of the Empire state building?
Watch it soar forever on an updraft, imagine where it will finally land.
Words are like music. Depending on the rhythm, the timing, the composition, it can sound like noise, or it can sound like a fuel injected symphony bringing the audience to an eight-cylinder crescendo.
The creative abyss?
How will you enter?
Will you tweet a spit wad of who cares?
Or will you fire a cannon ball from a pirate ship that doubles as a disco for foul-smelling sea urchins with wooden legs?
When you Tweet, tweet with passion. Paint your sentence with something that makes you glad to be alive.
Tweet the sun is setting over a meandering ocean that has no tangible point of origin. The ocean just simply is. It goes on forever until the sky reaches down like it’s mother and says, OK Ocean, that’s far enough.
It’s a thought. Like Twitter. It’s Self contained. 140 characters that Illicit, conjure, communicate.
Sometimes your tweet wears gray flannel and is indistinguishable from a million other senseless hash tags.
Sometimes a Tweet can inspire, so beautiful, it should be framed and hung on a wall that faces the setting sun.
Twitter for dinosaurs?
It’s really just words accelerated at the speed of light.
Most people think that’s the trick to the medium.
They don’t understand that the words themselves are the cargo that must be cherished, at any speed.
Life’s Crazy™
https://twitter.com/WhineyBones