Elegy for Twitter
because the end really is nigh (I'm pretty sure)
Well, now that people who want to spout bigotry only have to pay $8 a month to “legitimize” their “right” to do so, our digital public square + reason for consistent anxiety + all-too-reliable source for covert or if you’re me quite vocal sexual gratification is crumbling to ruin. Maybe this elegy will prove premature like every other end-of-twitter panic. But I doubt it. I think it’s really over. Grimes’s ex is driving us out. And so:
Twitter, most recently, was my lifeline when my mind and body was wracked with COVID. I’ve undergone a childhood surgery that had me in a body cast for 6 weeks with a 3-foot bar between my legs unable to live in any physical position but my back (and I’m a side sleeper) AND STILL I can honestly say that I have never experienced such intense purely-physical suffering as my personal bout with that virus offered me. I don’t know what kinds of steel you “after the first couple days it’s a cold” people are made out of but it ain’t molecules I share with you, I promise.
Still. Scores of people I deeply respect as friends and writers held me vitually and responded as my underwater brain made dense and inane observations about Ally McBeal while I escaped my physical toil through the pre-9/11 antics of Cage & Fish Associates, Boston. I flipped out about the intertextual mindfuck that was ALLY MCBEAL REFERENCES DAWSON’S CREEK, and a complete stranger responded with a polite request for an essay on the context, which my COVID-brain was essentially made to write, so I poured paragraphs in my Notes app and screencapped it to him and he asked me if I’d be interested in starting a Podcast together.
The point is not whether I embark on that venture. The point is: I’ve become unprecedentedly comfortable in my skin and get a lot of hope from my body these days and COVID TEMPORARILY REALLY RUINED THAT FOR ME so I owe more to the people who made that experience bearable, who helped me maintain hope in my mind, than they will ever know. All the well-wishes I got meant something. They really, really, really, really, really helped.
When I was still clinically depressed, people on twitter, often people I don’t even know, made me laugh. When I, not depressed, proposed marriage to legions of strangers because holy shit I could spend the rest of my life with a wit like yours and die happily I’m sure, they bore it with varying degrees of gratitude but no one ever treated me like I was nuts. (Maybe they didn’t know I was serious? I WAS SERIOUS.)
Most astonishingly, though, I’ve made close and life-altering friends I’m not sure how I could have met any other way. Addie and I were first brought together by Twitter and had never met before we agreed to spend a week in New Orleans together, nerding out in the Anne Rice archives and writing and…and everything else. That week, so far? Was the best one I’ve ever experienced, all (yet) told. And that fucking bird made it happen.
You’re probably aware by now that I’m on the verge of moving to Milledgeville, GA where I’ll be getting paid to write for 3 years, among people who include a mentor I kiiiiiiiinda feel I’ve been waiting most of my life to find/work with/discover is real. I wouldn’t have known about Georgia College’s extraordinary offerings if not for my dear friend (and sole fellow fan of the Savage Garden ballad “Santa Monica”) Mike McClelland, who got his MFA at the same institution and is quite somebody to know. I’ve already been asked, “So how do you know Mike?” in that impressed voice that indicates I must be even more fabulous than I seem if this is who I run with. (and rest assured that I seem pretty fabulous in regions of the US where I’m not fighting against stiffling notions of quiet-as-good just to exist.)
There are so many people who’ve supported my work and bolstered my mood over the years who I first met on twitter. I love you all! And I’d like to believe that we would have come together eventually without need of an online platform that began as a 140-character way for CEO’s to chat to strategize about shit I’m trying to burn down. But there was something weirdly magical about doing it this way. In a way that, for better and worst and everything branched off and in between, you never knew what you were going to get.
Sometimes, speaking, sigh, of marriage proposals, I would get messages like this:
He was not, for the curious, even remotely a man of means, but I had to ask, because at that time, I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my life or future. But it has come to pass that riiiiiight at the moment I’m about to have some exciting Writing announcements to make, everybody’s maligned-and-adored way of making them will no longer be. Oh well, such is the transient nature of existence, etc. Let the record also show that I’ve been propositioned by several people on Twitter who are legitimately hot. Ian knows that, so why shouldn’t you, especially as those are about to become queasy-fond memories of a thoroughly bygone era. It really was the best and worst of times, which! I’ve just learned! Is the start of a paragraph in which Dickens mocks the contradictory nature of the press’s coverage of the French Revolution.
That’s a fitting metaphor for all of this, somehow.