Bleating into the void: cutting away android circuitry in hope of finding flesh
Early thoughts on finally leaving Twitter
Artists, novelists, poets, filmmakers. Musicians, arithmeticians, booksellers, butterfly gardeners, even the ticket takers at the local independent cinema who scowl through the late shift on long winter weekends, a dogeared vintage paperback in their lap.
They’ve all known about this horrid reality. They’ve been telling us about it for decades, even longer. Not because it’s new but because it’s the opposite of that.
Clearly, explicitly, they’ve spoken. We’ve known because they have known and took the time to tell us.
Did we listen? Yes, definitely we listened. Did we act? Yes, sometimes. In whatever way that we could.
Is it working?
Yes, I think that it is. But slowly, inexorably.
The effect takes a long time to arrive in our lives and it arrives in all kinds of different shapes and it intersects in unusual ways with what we may have anticipated and what we can understand when most of our daily thinking is as superficial as the reflection of our eyes glancing across the screen of our tablet.
To be clear, I’m writing about time and the responsibility to listen to and act upon/with those around you who are communicating the truth about life in smart, empathetic ways that are not attached to a payment gateway.
Books, music, butterflies, late nights at the repertory theater.
Real tangible things that might just change you.
So I’m leaving Twitter.
Not because of the results of the Twitter poll that I conducted the other day asking whether I should leave but because I just can’t keep feeling the way that I do when I look at Twitter these days.
It’s not the thing that Twitter was and can still, occasionally, be. The evolving set of code that allows us to speak to each other in incredible ways.
Twitter, when it works, is great. It’s a smart, vital, energized place to interact with people and ideas that I cannot get from slipping on the sidewalk in the snow outside my apartment as Teslas silently struggle to find traction along Hemlock Street’s modest incline.
So many clever people showing me things that I didn’t know. Opening doors, humanizing stupid arguments, speaking truth to power.
Fucking great. Absolutely love it.
But, of course, that energy and intelligence is like a porch light left on at night in the depth of summer and it always bring with it a swarm of death moths in human form with their polyknit tracksuit personas to the party and throughly kills the vibe.
At least for me.
I find the place, in its current form, to be overrun by the insipid and the stupid; the vain and tawdry grifters who glorify banal evils as unavoidable truths.
Death moths have significantly dimmed the light.
You can’t argue them away. There’s too many to block and the stench of their presence is toxic to your blood stream and is administered through the eyes.
So I’m going to extract myself from it and try to reroute that active circuity of some of my behaviours to be less reliant on those types of interactions. Finds ways to connect with the creative, beautiful people that I know in other ways.
That’s it. No grandiose crescendo. Just a quick exit through the side door and into the alley.
Thanks for reading.
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This piece of writing was composed while listening to this: