Hi everyone!
First, to my new subscribers who came here when it seemed like Twitter’s implosion was imminent, I want to say this: thank you and welcome. I’m a bit embarrassed to have been caught up in the fervor of posting about the End Of Twitter, as it now seems unlikely that Twitter will cease to exist in the short term. Instead, it seems like it will slowly deteriorate into obsolescence as users decide it’s not worth their time. Clarity and certainty, as is often the case, are privileges denied to us. I’m sticking around on Twitter, but I wouldn’t be too shocked if in a year it starts feeling like latter day Facebook, populated only by those of us too stubborn and too attached to an imagined past. Let’s goooooooooo!
Some people have a difficult time conceptualizing the end of Twitter. I understand the hesitation. It’s been so all-encompassing that it’s felt like the de facto public square; governments made announcements there. But big institutions crumble all the time. The burning of the Library of Alexandria was sad but at least it gave us a powerful metaphor. Relationships end. HBOMax pulls its own shows from streaming. Across the world ancient farming traditions become untenable as the climate changes. Ways of life die out all the time.
There have always been frustrating things about Twitter, but I’ve always had very little patience for people who spend all their time on the platform bemoaning it. This is not an afterschool program your parents made you enroll in — you are free to leave leave! Or, if for professional reasons you feel like you can’t leave, then take the minimal effort to make your experience more pleasurable. Mute people that evoke negative emotion in you; populate your timeline with smart and funny people who make your day better! You are not required to suffer here; suffering isn’t cool, anyway.
I loved Twitter. I love it still, even though it’s beginning to feel less vital and culturally central. I learned so much, connected with people I would have never met otherwise, and found a fairly massive audience for my jokes and thinking, for which I feel truly grateful. I got very lucky, generally, but I also think I have an aptitude for pith. I love pith, which is the currency of Twitter: to use language in economical and surprising ways. What a prompt! I so prefer it as an outlet to TikTok, which prizes spoken affect, and where you have to create video content that doesn’t look like shit, which I don’t know how to do and feel incapable of learning. Still, in anticipation of its obsolescence, I have to invest in other outlets and forms: stand-up, newsletters, talking with your friend, short social media videos, TV scripts, and of course my podcast Exploration: LIVE!
Some ideas can take multiple forms; others are suited to just one. I am constantly trying to write TV pilots that are actually just dreams (a woman’s skin is always wet; a world that is normal except everyone’s keys are huge). I have a schema for the process of turning ideas into work. Because it’s a schema, it means it’s necessarily oversimplified, which also means that it’s way more fun. The schema is this: observations are the raw material, the ore, obtained from your time being in the world. Maybe it’s something about how you notice that you feel weirdly proud when you know the words to the songs at a party, or how a character in a TV show uses her hands in an unusual way. Once you’ve had the observation, there’s the second skill of shaping the ideas into digestible forms — Tweets, lines in a novel, comedy sketches, newsletters. This is the part that training and experience really help with — taking an idea and giving it form. It’s hard to get better at having more ideas (though there are things you can do, like putting yourself in novel situations, and building a process to write down the ideas you do have) but you can get better at putting ideas into form. You can get better at writing pilots, or writing books, or composing funny comedy songs.
All of which is to say: if Twitter really does winnow into obsolescence, I’ll spend more time here, writing punishingly long essays, just like you guys have always wanted. I’ll also be putting a lot of love and ideas and work into my podcast, Exploration: LIVE!, wherein each week, Natalie and I bring in our three best ideas (usually little quotidian observations) to discuss. It’s like Seinfeld but with me and Natalie. The ideas will stay the same, just finding different shapes, forms, and venues.
OTHER REQUESTS FOR YOUR ATTENTION
>I made a video called HA BIRTHDAY. You can watch it below. Even a short video like this is the result of so much effort from so many people. Special thank you to Alex Bliss, who directed and edited it, and Eternal Family, a really cool indie streaming service who gave me a little money to make it so I could pay all the people who helped.
>My podcast, Exploration: LIVE! What can I say? I love doing it so much, I think it’s great, if you haven’t listened, jump in wherever, treat it like it’s radio.
>And likewise: come to our live show December 21, 7:30pm at Union Hall.
>Walker Upper, the webseries pilot I made with my friend Caroline Doyle. New episode coming soon-ish.
>Some other shows I’m on:
-Saturday, December 17, 7:30pm, Union Hall - Gorg Night
-Sunday, December 18, 5:30pm, Union Hall – Something To Think About
-Tuesday, December 20, 7:30pm, Union Hall – Pretty Major
-Wednesday, December 21, 7:30pm, Union Hall - Exploration: LIVE!
-Thursday, Dec 22, 8pm, Littlefield – Hannukahstravaganza
-Friday, January 6, 8pm, Bell House – 50 First Jokes
-Thursday, January 12, 7:30pm, Union Hall – I Have To Do This (Richard Perez’ wildly brilliant new solo show, which I’m lucky enough to direct)
-Friday, January 20, 7:30pm, Union Hall – Exploration: LIVE!
-Friday, January 27, 7:30pm, Caveat – Headgum Happy Hour
-Monday, January 30, 8:00pm, Littlefield – Butterboy
Thanks Everyone
Like I said: thank you everyone.