Putting The “A” in “Tweets”

The idea initially began to take hold when my own Web site refused to let me log into it and I had no way of letting people who read this rag know that I wasn’t dead… which, granted, would’ve been a nice bonus with my creditors had I not already told them I was dead. The idea seemed even better after I realized that the reason I had bought the flashy, data-enabled Google G1 Smartphone had gone obsolete once my employers asked me to stop downloading porn at work. Even in the bathroom. Or at least in the Ladies’ Room.

Twitter says that they exist to answer one question: “What are you doing?”, which is as ingeniously simple as it is grotesquely stupid. There are six billion people in the world, and the odds that any of them are doing anything interesting enough to warrant receiving a cell phone alert about it are so long they would only appeal to degenerate gamblers with enough money for a small bet and not enough saliva to earn enough for a big one.

We’ve created the greatest information engine in history, and Twitter wants us to use it to find out that little cousin Courtney is “On my way to English class!!!1!1! :(“. I’m sorry, but the only way to find redeeming value in the worldwide publication of that statement is if you let imagination take over and picture that she’s texting that message as a cover story while simultaneously hand-releasing some Senior in the band closet… and when that inevitably becomes some form of niche fetish porn, let’s remember who thought of it and owns all the rights.

But as I thought about it, I realized that just because Twitter wants me to use their service to send friendly updates about what I’m doing doesn’t mean I have to actually use it that way. It was a flash of William Gibsonesque, “The Street Finds It’s Own Uses For Things” inspiration: repurposing perfectly good objects for your own uses is part of what’s made this country great. After all, I guarantee you that the guy who invented beads on a string wasn’t even remotely considering the phrases “New Orleans”, “Mardi Grad” or “Anal”.

I have lots of ideas throughout the day that I think are funny, but which are isolated, one-off jokes that I can’t build out into a fully-formed piece, and therefore aren’t worth sitting down in front of a computer, battling with my Web interface, writing, formatting, and publishing… okay, you got me: usually I’m shitfaced in a bar and remember only that I said something that made my girl laugh hysterically, and when I ask her what I said that made her crack up she replies, “Let’s see: you went through three-quarters of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and whenever you stood your head orbited some purely theoretical point in space. I’m guessing you suggested we have sex.”

But sometimes it’s that other thing, too. For example: I’m fascinated by the whole E. coli peanut butter story, but I’ve only been able to think of one joke about it. Before Twitter, that joke would simply evaporate into the more boozy parts of my brain, but now? Whip open the cell phone and bam! Like the Indian, I waste no part of my brain… except the parts that I kill.

So if you check the sidebar, you’ll see a new section titled “Filthy One-Liners”. It gets updated four of five times an hour, so you can check back for new shit when you’re bored at work. If you’re on Twitter, you can “follow” me from here… but frankly, I’d recommend just checking in here. Nobody needs their cell phone to go off in a meeting with the CEO to see a message reading: “It said Ph’ngluiae R’lyeh mglw’naph Cthulhu wah’naghj fhtagnaph, and it wouldn’t die no matter how many times I flushed!”

[tags]Twitter, dark humor, satire[/tags]