Mean Tweets

Meditations on who we might have been or used to be before the Internet's public squares and immutable feasts and why I like us better now.

Just say it out loud just to see how it feels. — Ye

Before the void opened like a new ancient continent gender reveal, vengeance of the discarded myths, (before the Internet became what it is and networked us into a different liberation prison), many of us were tender exiles harboring our most healing and damaging opinions, sentiments and thought forms in silence. We were silenced by unspoken coercion; we were threats. In finding flaws in our environments we became enemies to the analog status quo, but there was no glimmering crevice through which we could suggest a new world, we were the old ways’ stolen inheritance. We were nowhere and forming mute armies of the unseen. We became musicians, painters and poets but we were still invisible voices or scatological debris from a collapsing tower of babel. Privacy, while wonderful, held us hostage in dystopian circumstances that speech acts weren’t allowed to name or decode.

Those closest to us experienced our subterfuge as true love, waiting.

I was rude to the infirm. Their outbursts were inconvenient and humiliating. I thought they were liars, performers, scandals. Many of them were, their madness the only behaviorism that compelled bystanders to touch and squeeze them into a warmer region, it became their romance and my nightmare. I would not give in to embracing somebody at the exact moment when they realized suffering could be exploited for affection. I would not join their chorus for lack of my own. My mother and my sister would not render me complicit with an aesthetics of pain in the pleasure principle. Fetal and feral with refusal, I rose above their grand hysterias to make my getaway, like a suspect does, like prey does— praying unsentimental prayers to the hushed and haunting thrill cresting my footsteps.

Later, I was ruthless toward the depraved, those who were near insanity but couldn’t quite reach it or relinquish it, and had to settle for being sociopaths until they found a psychiatrist to label them bi-polar. Have you seen what happens to the brains of men on lithium all those years? They become ulcerated stomachs hunched under maggots begging to be consumed. They transmute self-revulsion into seduction and women like me call them geniuses, and then eventually gypsies with no stumbling beads or routines, until finally, we call them daddy and that reminds us to leave. They exert Funkadelic spasms of yes and never again and for now and why not and goodbye. Perhaps I wasn’t ruthless enough, Ima keep trying. Ima keep chanting.

I was naive on purpose with the charming ones, I didn’t realize that in concealing their hysterias, all of that concerted smoothless that feels like vaseline on the teeth movies and loses its battle with shine, they were abiding their tantrums’ pressure to grow, a tantric reckoning was approaching and so premeditated it might be mistaken for passion upon arrival. Have you heard of the battle of O.J. Simpson, have you heard what happens to people who never cry aloud, and dream in color? They end up worse than the lachrymose, they end up begging you to hurt them, paying you to hurt them, sobbing in their own blood, charmed by their punishment.

Then finally, there was a place on the Internet where the em dash between hypothetical and real lives extended for eternties and if you could survive it, your favorite what ifs might become a reality, a mafia of virtual occurrences or one long summery-winter day orbiting the disaster earth as ruler of your own heart. It was the madness outside trapped inside, flickering like insects, aware it was performing, sharing and charging its self-awareness in bouts of virality and outrage that could be mistaken for poems if you had never lived in a poem. It felt like home once had, a familiar amalgam of performance and restraint, insanity and banality. We had to be there and had to leave in equal quotients. It was a poet’s duty to enter that drafted underground and also mangle it into pillars of salt, of looking too far back and forward, or being chased toward revelation when you simply wanted to get high and dissociate in style.

We are teaching oblivion to think like a reborn city and where else would we say these things, so frivolous they feel like recess in suspended adolescence, so serious they turn virtual leisure into a series of petit baptisms by fury, defeat, rebirth. The song playing on repeat is Stevie Wonder’s “They won’t go when I go.” We mistook the intifada for infidels obeying whims and only joined when atrocities against the intended other became so unbearable to watch from afar that our comforts felt like hallucinations and the victims of the distant murders followed bureaucrats to brunch and home to pay the maid and into the screen-glow to pay the onlyfans tab and back to the office to be paid for knowing what to say at dinner or how to manage the facile ironies of scorned workers. If the Internet survives genocide it can survive anything, the machines hiss, grunt, gather more data about massacres, the assassin, discount name-brand trash, the gentry, organic groceries, the 3-d printed steak, the low-stakes coups of states whose names will outlast and capsize the maps. We can’t go back to how it was before, when we were the ruins. I had forgotten my very own theory, that ruined things are the best survivors. We coveted the shambles which would finally outgrow symbolism and come alive as the masterminds of the next world.

And all the cruelty I had internalized as self-criticism, or being ‘hard on myself.’ (I never placate those who are too easy on themselves when they can help it, I find it obscene), but now I could name the offenses I was witnessing in the world, I could prove I was a reliable witness, and forgive myself retroactively for dismissing the madness and sycophantic determinism in the field, in real time, and in my feelings. We come together inside machines to storm gates and terrify the stodgy gatekeepers and if we dare become them by falling into the dumb trap of replicating everything we condemn, or now that many have, we interrogate and depose those versions of ourselves just as well. The song intervening is Burial’s “Shell of Light” I saw your light, now it burns forever, its antecedent lures, nearing too much shimmer. Only seeking involvement with what won’t allow me to hide from myself and shrink into the cache like a child on the wrong side of childhood, escaping the collective digital footprint feels like betrayal or retreat into the shame I’ve fought my way past. And remaining feels like a decision to offend God just enough to live in service to a version of that higher power, in the exact way I was intended to. My fantasies are about approaching what I’m expected to run from while it chases the decoy of my would-be hiding place and gets trapped there. Our avatars let us become decoys, despots, bots, bait, but also self-actualized myths of ourselves, legends of nowhere land. The flesh rots in pictures the avatar can scroll past like disclaimers.

High or in a stupor together, semi-fixated on the broken anguish of strangers, our affinities are much flimsier, we’ve confessed so many fake secrets we cannot remember, screams come in laughter, none of the news is accurate, none of the music is—I love it here because we are grinding illusions into dust, there are no more heroes and idols, none that will survive ‘transparency,’ and all we have to replace them with is more derelict machines hoping to replace us again. There’s no time to mourn the slow-burning melancholy we used to know, sitting in a room quietly clutching a diary, journal or cordless phone, and did it ever really appreciate we who obliged it with tact? I prefer a world wherein everyone has a speaking role, (which makes me tragically American), because it’s a very slick graveyard for the world I used to know, where honest speech was annexed to passive aggressive behaviorism or surly radio syndication and I was overflowing with testimony I thought I’d never give.