Twitter

Canadian Soapbox has echoed my feelings so perfectly today that I thought I'd say a wrd r 2 abt Twitter myself.

Yesterday my stepdaughter asked me if I'd heard of this new thingie, and I admitted that I had, but that I didn't know much about it and really didn't want to.

To tell you the truth, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. Facebook has already managed to make me feel perpetually guilty and incompetent. Everybody's doing something, all the time, and yet finding more time to tell all the rest of us about it. They put up pictures, they send cyber-gifts, they write on my Wall, they ask me to join hundreds of groups, they invite me to parties in Dawson City and Kapuskasing and Alert and Delisle. (Well, maybe not Delisle.)

And I sit there like a lump, unresponsive, the cyber-party pooper of all time, the grump in the corner who never says anything. I'm no fun. But people wouldn't think of leaving me out, because my feelings might be hurt.

Dare I say that it's not merely my anti-social cybernature. I just can't figure it out. I don't know how to add networks or form groups or any of that. I just wait for messages and once in a while I scribble on somebody's Wall or confirm when someone wants to be my friend. Good grief.

Writing about living is part of living as is writing about writing about living. Suppose all we did in life was write about it. What is the "it," then? More text, I guess. (Oh oh, I feel a recursion coming on.) Like the rat with his paw on the pleasure-centre stimulator, I could starve to death. Blogging is bad enough: it eats up my time like a saltwater crocodile. Now Twitter.

I think the cybergods invented this one to sport with us. "Twitter," indeed. Is that what we've come to: what Martin Heidegger called "chatter," as opposed to authentic utterance? Not conversation, God forbid, but twittering, in a companionable, comfortable, meaningless way--serving as each other's elevator music? And then the ironically minatory heading on the Twitter page: "What are you doing?" Indeed.

I shall have to learn text-speak, which reminds me in a way of archy, the cockroach with the soul of a poet, creation of the immortal Don Marquis. archy typed by jumping and landing on typewriter keys with his head--bloggers know what I'm getting at here--but he couldn't move the shift key to make capital letters.

boss the other day
i heard an
ant conversing
with a flea
small talk i said
disgustedly
and went away
from there

Well, quite. No mere twittering for him.

But wotthehell. If you want to tweet, I'm at DrDawg on Twitter. Yeah, I'm with it, as we used to say back in the day. Or down with that. Whatever. (What do folks say now? Give me a tweet.) Just don't expect to hear back unless I have nothing better to do. Which might just turn out to be more often than I'd wish, alas. I tend to look for excuses for putting things off anyway, and thanks to the Internet new ones flood in every week. archy: "procrastination is the/art of keeping/up with yesterday." Damn, I wish I had time for that.