In the same week my Twitter account was permanently suspended, “non-human biologics” were discussed in a Congress hearing about supposedly crashed UFO. I had never seen the word “biologics” used. I tried to think of when I would have as I read it and re-read it. It felt wrong to me. Uncanny and vile. A military “whistleblower” with apparent credibility seemed certain that the US government has made clandestine morgue runs for the deceased pilots of these downed crafts. Flashes of alien body parts strewn about a shallow crater in some desert where a UAP or UFO or interstellar hot air balloon was shot down. What would they look like? I kept trying to picture an alien wrist, and then thought of an alien that looks like a swivel office chair and immediately prayed that the image could be burned from my brain with one of those flame guns pastry chefs use to finish crème brûlée. My brain, caramelized and glossy and unable to imagine non-human biologics. The dream. This freak show of a hearing came and went with no real answers, no proof, and no real reflection on this ostensibly huge public inquiry. No one cares about dead aliens. Everyone is busy.
I am busy, too. Busy not being on Twitter. For so long I fantasized about deleting my profile myself— the same account I started in 2009 and obsessed over for the last 15 years. Twitter had given me a lot of my identity, not just as a writer, but also as Some Gay. I sought queerness on it and sat in awe of others I envied and wanted so badly to emulate—not just creatively. I streamlined my own faggotry into it, my rage and humor, and cruelty—arbitrary and pointed. It brought me friendship and jobs and porn, and it brought me jealousy and paranoia. It demented my sense of significance, my sense of the world, and made me more impulsive. I saw everything through Twitter, through my timeline, and worse, through myself. It was a child I raised, sometimes wonderful, mostly awful, and never full. And it’s all gone now. It ate itself.
A week ago I tweeted this: “If you’re not in Italy right now you should just k*ll yourself.” It’s not even a smart joke. Just a dumb, loud thing I thought of after being bomb cycloned by countless Insta stories of acquaintances abroad right now. I’m more relieved than resentful that people can still go places and shake their dicks and ass. But I’m still a bitter pig. I’m on strike and perpetually sunburned. I felt like being a cunt. They’ll hear me in Palermo! In Bari and Portofino! As they cheers their rosé glaring in easy dusk and jump into the blue sea, they’ll hear this hissing fag all the way from Los Angeles. Then I remembered they won’t, because no one who’s not on Twitter, which is most of the world, doesn’t think about Twitter and its monstrously gorgeous spiderweb of irony and confounding earnestness. I spat into the tweet and threw it onto the ceiling, watching it calcify until I couldn’t see it anymore. I nearly forgot about it until I woke up the next day and received an email that I was banned from Twitter forever.
I spent the next few hours in mourning. I sent an appeal to the new powers that be, asking them to understand that this “violent speech” violation was sarcastic. I pointed out how Elon Musk has legitimized a cesspool of bigotry and misogyny and conspiracy (as if Twitter hadn’t already been that for its entire existence). The only difference now is people just pay for it. I felt singled out. Targeted for something. I wasn’t sure what about, but I knew I was targeted. I was a gay martyr of late stage capitalism. I had the agony and ecstasy of a medieval French saint. Twitter Support would made an exemption.
When they did finally write back saying they wouldn’t change their decision, I knew that Twitter had won. I was humiliated by my own sense of significance, how I groveled and tried to reason. Of course I couldn’t reason. I was never going to be reinstated. They don’t care about what I said or what anyone says. What I tweeted wasn’t serious, but that is not the point. Most likely some person who had no feeling or knowledge about me saw the tweet and thought it was an annoying and reported it. They probably didn’t think about it after that, the same way I didn’t think about what I had tweeted. They were busy, just like everyone else. An algorithm sorting through reports found terms it was programmed to flag, and eliminated me. I don’t pay for it the app (thank god!). I am not of value. Twitter is a machine, non-human and sublimely impersonal.
But even then, I stood over the mangled remains of this beautiful, wretched thing I had birthed and watched die in an instant and then cradled its corpse in my arms; its glorious, non-human biologics.
Twitter! Where I fell in love with your voice and where I have become a ghost these past heinous Twitter years. Carey! Your voice Carries (phone autocapitalized it, felt right so keeping it) beyond that now sad scourge of a platform (aaaand here comes my dismissal any moment now). You don’t need it. Fuck em❤️❤️❤️❤️
RIP to one of the realest 🤘